Creative Image-Bearers and the AI Horizon: Interdisciplinary Engagement from Christian Ethics and Engineering

trends and perspectives of our day or well-intentioned efforts to make our message relevant and culturally sensitive. It is intentionally walking with others in a way that acknowledges their views and values without allowing them to tarnish our own.

Theologically, this willingness to walk with others honors the Imago Dei image imprinted on the DNA of each man’s soul, because those who do share our views or resemble our likeness are still image bearers of the King. To embrace them is not only to embrace God’s imprint on their lives but also the hope of what they can ultimately become in Him.

Practical Application

The classroom is full of diverse students with different backgrounds and beliefs. So, we realize that not everyone will choose the path to salvation. Yet, we must treat our students with the same kindness and grace that has Christ showed us. As educators, this kindness and grace will take different shapes and forms. But, we would like to suggest that it must begin by loving our students with our actions, not simply our words.

It’s not enough to know the Bible and recite Scripture. The New Testament reminds us to love as we have been loved, to feed the sheep in our fold, to withhold judgment from the one whose vision is impaired, and to meet the needs of those on our path. We must, therefore, lead our students with the approachable love of Jesus if we hope to open doors, build bridges, and walk paths to readied hearts. As professors, we have the unique opportunity to listen to our students’ stories and guide them along in their disciplines while seeking to be the hands and feet of Jesus. For many, this may be the first time they experience such courtesy. Our encouragement to fellow educators is therefore to co-journey with students in practical ways. Just as Dr. Speakes might position herself beside a flight student to offer presence and direction as they soar to new heights, or a music professor comes alongside students to concert together as they practice new scales and scores, or an engineering professor collaborates on the design of new systems or product concepts, so we too can position ourselves in strategic ways to serve, support, and accompany our students as they journey spiritually.

This may involve meeting a student for coffee, offering prayer and support, serving as a mentor, or inviting a student to join you and your family for church or an event. But the strategy is simple: Display an interest in the lives of your students, create strategic touch-points to connect, and then find practical ways to invest in their lives — even if they do not embody the beliefs or values that are inherent to your faith. It is our hope that, in time, the seeds we plant will generate growth that lasts long after our season of co-journeying comes to an end, and — if we dare to dream — that one day our students will become the hands and feet of Jesus as they walk the road of life with others.

1 M. Seiler, “Three Journeys.” St. Matthews. Sermon, September 9, 2010. http://www.stmatthews.com/sermons/Archive/MSeilerMar292009.pdf (Accessed 11/20/2020).

2 Edward T Welch, Side By Side: Walking With Others in Wisdom and Love (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015).

3 Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a PostChristian Nation (New York, NY: Sentinel, Penguin Random House LLC, 2018).

4 Timothy Keller, “Cultural Dis(Engagement),” Redeemer.com, January 2018, https://www.redeemer.com/redeemer-report/article/ cultural_dis_ engagement

INTERDISCIPLINARY ESSAYS Creative Image-Bearers and the AI Horizon: Interdisciplinary

Engagement from Christian Ethics and Engineering

Jason Glen, Instructor of Ethics and Interdisciplinary Studies, College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University Hector Medina, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering, Liberty University

The concept of endowing machines with intelligence has been around for almost three quarters of a century; however, only in the last two decades has this technology significantly impacted our society. John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, and Nathaniel Rochester first coined the words artificial intelligence (AI) in the mid 1950s in a proposal to conduct summer research at Dartmouth College. There are different ways of defining AI. Perhaps, an acceptable definition could be summarized in the following question: Can machines learn to think, reason, feel, or sympathize in a comparable way (or even better than) humans?

As AI advances, some fear that machines will eventually be able to subdue humans and usurp human control. Surely this has been made a popular thesis in movies, books, and other forms of entertainment. Yet, these stories reflect a fear that artificial superintelligence is, in fact, achievable and if left unleashed could lead to the extinction of humankind. Others disagree and believe that AI cannot surpass human control, regardless of how much it develops. However, there seems to be a more optimistic consensus that AI can help solve some important current and future challenges facing the world, such as disaster prediction, energy sustainability, and ecological challenges, among others. On the flip side of the human-technological relationship spectrum is the idea that technology can be integrated into human bodies or even the idea that humanity can be integrated into robots, i.e., biomechatronics. We find this notion in a Popular Science article written in 2012, which explained,

At the recent Global Future 2045 International Congress held in Moscow, 31-year-old media mogul Dmitry Itskov told attendees how he plans to create exactly that kind of immortality, first by creating a robot controlled by the human brain, then by actually transplanting a human brain into a humanoid robot, and then by replacing the surgical transplant with a method for simply uploading a person's consciousness into a surrogate 'bot.1

Although we have not yet achieved Itskov’s goal, scientists and engineers have made progress since this 2012 article, having engineered mindcontrolled prosthetic limbs that also have the ability to communicate a sense of touch to the brain. But what are the benefits and dangers of connecting our minds and bodies to robotics and computers? Will the calculus result in gain or loss?

Societal views on AI and biomechatronics are so divergent that even the founders of AI, McCarthy and Minsky, have split since co-founding the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Ultimately, the idea of what it means to be human looms large in the background of these conversations. Differences stem from various factors including, but not limited to, education, ethical convictions, and religious views, all of which are involved in exploring the ethical implications for this horizon of engineering. In this article, we’ll briefly address these technological possibilities through the lens of theological anthropology and Christian ethical theory.

Humanity and Creation

Much of the complexity concerning proposed boundaries and expectations for AI and biomechatronics revolves around disagreements over what a human is and should be. Atheistic worldviews do not share the same convictions as Christians concerning the created intentions for humanity nor the proper telos for human flourishing. As Christians, we believe we are not simply mind-body dualities, or a combination of a material host for an expressive individual. In his book Created in God’s Image, Anthony Hoekema is clear that “man must be understood as a unitary being. He has a physical side and a mental or spiritual side, but we must

not separate these two. The human person must be understood as an embodied soul or a 'besouled' body. He or she must be seen in his or her totality, not as a composite of different ‘parts.’”2 Hoekema goes on to say that his preferred word for this unity of two aspects is a “psychosomatic unity.”3 Although Scripture doesn’t give us a neatly packaged systematic theology concerning the composition of the human person, we do get a glimpse of this unity referred to by Hoekema in passages like Genesis 2:7, where God is said to have “breathed” life into a man that He formed from the earth. Job 32:8 further explains the nature of this life, saying that “it is a spirit that is in mankind, and the breath of the Almighty gives them understanding.”

Just as important as what we are is what we have been made to do, and how we do it. For Christians, Genesis 1:28 gives direction for our relationship with the material world; we are to “subdue” and “rule over” it. We are to nurture it like a gardener nurtures a garden and to do so as one who will answer for its fitting fruitfulness. Whereas Christians create and build in order to partner with God in displaying His glory, those outside of Christ often create in order to seek meaning and fulfillment in the power of their will. We see a clear example of what God does not intend for our creativity in the story of the Tower of Babel: “And the Lord said, 'Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they have started to do, and now nothing which they plan to do will be impossible for them'” (Genesis 11:6). In that particular historical narrative, God put an end to humanity’s unified technological initiatives because their motivations and telos were no longer aligned with His. Just because humanity can collaborate to do something profound doesn’t mean that they should.

Ethically Engaging Technology as Image Bearers

In April of 2016, Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired Magazine, presented at a conference on the advancement of AI and how Christians could approach this technological advancement. Kevin reminded everyone attending that AI already existed and that it would only get more and more complex and capable in the coming years. A statement of his stood out as theologically and morally speculative. He suggested that because we image the creative capacity of our Creator, we are also destined to produce creatures with the same capacity as us. He ended his discussion by proposing that Christians needed to disciple AI with Christian values. The takeaway was that if Christians didn’t frame the future of AI,

someone else would. While Mr. Kelly’s observations should definitely cause us to reexamine how Christians engage AI programing and the tech industry in general, it should not be assumed that his prophesies are correct or his theology well-informed. This sort of prognostication is akin to saying that Christians should help empower healthy same-sex marriages because homosexual marriages are a reality whether we think them natural or not.

Biblical Christianity has a specific anthropology that must be held as a foundation for our ethical thinking on all human endeavors. Notre Dame law professor Carter Snead recently wrote a book on bioethics that also relates to the need in the technological engineering field for an ethical telos that sees humans rightly. He says, “What is needed, therefore, is an ‘anthropological’ corrective to … integrate into public bioethics fitting goods, practices, and virtues suitable to governing a polity of embodied human beings.”4 Just replace “bioethics” with “engineering technology,” and this statement still rings true. The proposal that Kelly raised should provoke within us a curiosity for how our biblical and ethical convictions can approach technological advancements in a God-honoring way, a way in which we avoid building our ultimate hope around our own creative power. Our relationships with our creations will no more equal our relationships with each other than God’s relationship with us equals His relationship with Himself. There will always be an ethical gap between how we treat fellow humans over against how we treat technologies that we have engineered to mimic our qualities and capacities. We know that we have relational responsibilities to God and our neighbors, and there is no doubt that our creative capacities in replacing limbs for amputees and making industries less wasteful with advances in AI are in line with our role as stewards of God’s creation. But the temptation to keep pressing the innovative envelope must be held in check by our telos of loving God and neighbor according to God’s standards. Governments and corporations often default to utilitarianism in seeking to guide their policies and production, but Christians should not simply base their decisions on what makes the most people happy. We seek to apply God’s general and specific revelation to the myriad of responsibilities and roles inherent to our existence before Him and within Him. This revelationally and relationally driven ethical system must guide our use of technology and frame the goals we seek to achieve.