c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ For thousands of years mythical robots have been used to explore the question of what makes humans human.

In the Middle Ages, Jewish cabalists spun myths about golems, clay creatures animated by the secret name of God. The ancient Greeks sought to create homunculus, a tiny proto-person servant. More recently, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” creature and the android “Star Trek” crew member Commander Data have raised the question: “Can man-made creatures have souls?”

Anne Foerst’s calling is to ask that question, but not about mythical creatures. As resident theologian at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Foerst has spent the last four years pondering how increasingly smart machines may impact our sense of humanity.

“I think that computer science, and especially artificial intelligence, is THE field for religious inquiry,” says Foerst, a German research scientist who has served as an ordained minister and holds a doctorate in theology as well as degrees in computer science and philosophy.

In biology or astronomy, the questions theologians ask deal with God as a distant and powerful being. But in the field of artificial intelligence, the theological issues are more “personal,” addressing God’s relationship to an individual being.

A human being asks, “Who am I? What am I doing here? What’s the meaning of my life?” Foerst says. “Humans have a very strong sense of specialness, and these machines challenge that specialness in extremely profound ways.”

Lab director Rodney Brooks invited Foerst to work as theological adviser for a new generation of smart robots that learn by doing, just like humans.

One of these is Brooks’ brainchild, Cog, a robot built in roughly human form except that he carries his “brain” on his back in a laptop computer. Cog is designed to discover and adapt to the world much the same way a human baby does.

Traditionally, artificial intelligences _ such as the chess-playing IBM computer Deep Blue _ are software applications primed with vast amounts of data and then given complex rules for how to make decisions and for how to learn to make other decisions. But such a disembodied intelligence, Brooks argues, cannot possibly experience the world as humans do. Only through experience as a physical being can smart robots develop emotions, which he argues are prerequisite for a truly intelligent being. So the aim is for Cog to become conscious of his body, his surroundings and, hopefully, someday his “self.”

When that happens, asks Foerst, then what?

“At some point, Cog-like robots will be part of our community,” she says. If these robots look like us, act like us, and are aware, then shouldn’t we welcome them into the community of mankind? Should we baptize them? she asks.

The way theologians answer that question may shed more light on how humans treat each other than how they treat smart robots, Foerst says.

“We’re pretty strict about how we define humanity,” she says. “We often actually exclude humans from the human community by saying, `You are just a Jew or just an African.”’

Foerst says, “Isn’t it better to widen up the criteria of what it means to be human to include chimps and some smart robots, so then we avoid the danger of excluding some people?”

When she isn’t asking big questions about human identity in a technological age, Foerst also acts as the lab’s gadfly, a role she clearly relishes. “I make people aware of their assumptions about artificial intelligence,” she says, noting that computer scientists often fail to recognize their own mythological or religious biases and end up calling them science.

Some scientists “talk about downloading their brain contents into a machine and then downloading it to the Web in order to live forever, and they’re not even aware that those things are faith statements,” Foerst says. “I don’t want to deny that it might be possible at some point to do that. But I wouldn’t say it’s the universal answer for death, either.”

Religious examination isn’t always embraced by the scientific field, and in the super-rational world of artificial intelligence, Foerst’s work is especially controversial. Many scientists in this field fear that, at best, theology muddies students’ thinking. At worst, it denies that re-creating the spark of human intelligence is at all possible.

In 1997, she created the “God and Computers” project, a credit course and lecture series that explores the links between religion and artificial intelligence. It was attacked as “evangelical” by none other than Marvin L. Minsky, the MIT professor who founded the Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1959. Minsky, like others at the school, thinks studying theology is incompatible with computer science. “The act of appearing to take such a subject seriously makes it look as though our community regards it as a respectable contender among serious theories,” Minsky comments by e-mail. “Like creationism and other faith-based doctrines, I suspect it is bad for young students.”

But Brooks, who describes himself as a scientific rationalist and “strong atheist,” says he can understand how faith can coexist with science. “From a scientific point of view, my kids are bags of skin full of molecules interacting, but that’s not how I treat them. I love them. I operate on two completely different levels, and I manage to live with these two different levels.”

Brooks reasons, “I suspect the same can be said of religious scientists.”

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As computer science bumps against the limits of rationality, more of its practitioners are feeling freer to explore their faith. Leading computer scientist Donald Knuth recently wrote a book called “3:16” in which he examined the third chapter and 16th verse of every book of the Christian Bible.

“I thought at first I would be ridiculed; I had this feeling like I was coming out of the closet or something,” says Knuth, professor emeritus for the art of computer programming at Stanford University. “I hesitantly admitted to a few people that I was working on this book on weekends, but got an unexpectedly warm reaction.”

Knuth says he found that “a lot of computer scientists have a God-shaped hole in their hearts.”

This fall, Knuth will present a series of lectures about his own faith titled “Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About” as part of Foerst’s annual “God and Computers” forum at MIT.

Foerst says Minsky is right to be suspicious.

“Some theologians are very anti-technology,” she says. “The first reaction they always have is fear: `These robots are different from us. Humans were created in the image of God.’ They are not even willing to consider those questions. They are themselves stuck in the myth of human specialness.”

As part of her work, Foerst tries to educate ministers and theologians about the science of artificial intelligence.

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Brooks says his “ultimate megalomaniacal goal” is to build a robot “that is indistinguishable from a human _ which I won’t do before I die. I admit that.”

But some milestones are already past.

Today, deaf people can hear again with electronic cochlear implants that tap directly into a nerve in the ear. Silicon corneas are in the works. And these two examples are just the beginning.

“As we start to connect silicon to biological material, in living humans, where is the boundary between personhood and machinehood?” Brooks says.

“My kids, if they were so inclined, would rebel by getting one of those little metal things in their tongues,” he says. “Maybe their kids will rebel against them by getting a wireless Internet implant right into their brains. When do humans cease to have souls based on technology?

“Having Anne around was my little attempt at getting some consciousness up about some of these issues.”

DEA END WYLIE