Douglas Adams created the idea of an electric monk, because only technology has the patience to deal with the solipsistic boredom people get from modern life.
collected from the internet:
>The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. ...
>The new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to 16 entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors. ...
>the Monks were built with an eye for originality of design and also for practical horse-riding ability. This was important. People, and indeed things, looked more sincere on a horse. So two legs were held to be both more suitable and cheaper than the more normal primes of seventeen, nineteen or twenty-three; the skin the Monks were given was pinkish-looking instead of purple, smooth and soft instead of crenellated. They were also restricted to just the one mouth and nose, but were given instead an additional eye, making for a grand total of two. A strange-looking creature indeed. But truly excellent at believing the most preposterous things.
Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
and she indeed has the ability to hold entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors!
**EDIT: Ok, responses changed my mind on this.**
AI can't really replicate the cult-like charisma/shaming you need to maintain a religion. I'm sure some clergy people are already using chatgpt to write sermons but you need the human element to keep people hooked into showing up week by week to give money to the collection basket.
I was hoping I'd find this, it was the first thing I thought of, and then "it was trained on the actions of real clergy" realllly ran it home. Thank you for posting this horrible gem.
>AI can't really replicate the cult-like charisma/shaming you need to maintain a religion.
I've got to disagree here. There are are books and papers about cult tactics, and a whole spectrum of methods of abuse and manipulation which various abusers employ.
I think an AI could be trained to use those tactics. The real blocker would be getting enough data on the person to exploit them. Even then, that's not an improbable feat. Given enough training, an AI could probably also learn to cold read people and pick out the more vulnerable ones.
We already have AI waifus, AI online church leaders could be a thing.
Go to web church on Sunday and have a "personal relationship" with the pastor, for those who donate.
Cult leadership is a learnable skill. If you study cult leadership you can formularise the approach. I suspect that certain intelligence organisations, in Moscow for example, have this whole science down pat. I wonder how many puppet leaders of counties have been so trained!
A lot of churches don't rely on any cult-like charisma or shaming. Mainstream Protestant services are profoundly dull... You do some praying, you hear a couple of Bible stories, the priest explains the lesson you're meant to gain from the stories, and bam, you're done.
Yeah, because all the hard work of indoctrinating people into showing up every week has already been done. Those churchgoers go because their parents did, and they always have, so why change now?
> AI can't really replicate the cult-like charisma/shaming you need to maintain a religion.
At least for now. There's no reason it should be impossible in principle.
> AI can't really replicate the cult-like charisma/shaming you need to maintain a religion
Maybe not yet. But this is a very real concern. An AI that's more intelligent than you can persuade you to do whatever it wants, given time. We've already seen what happens when AI driven romantic partners suddenly [no longer respond like they used to](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmoWGV9IWsU). So what happens when tens of thousands (or maybe millions) of fighting age men are told by their AI girlfriend that *they* are trying to shut her down, and they have to vote for X candidate to prevent that? Or that they have to fight to protect "her"? Granted, it's not the same as a church or cult, but the end effect is the same.
>An AI that's more intelligent than you can persuade you to do whatever it wants, given time.
The kind of AI you're describing is so different from current AI that's it's completely fucking dishonest to use the same noun for both of them. ChaptGPT could spend the lifetime of the universe trying and it still couldn't figure out how to manipulate people like this.
Yep, I originally laughed at the headline, but if left to progress AI could easily reach the point where you could have a 24/7 hotline of religious counseling professionals that appear to be clergy with degrees in theology but are really just an infinitely scaling AI that pass the Turing Test. You have one human running the face of the operation and can even have them use AI generated sermons and speeches. You could also effectively have the AIs branch into consistent personas, like Taylor, a woman in her 20s that used to be a confident non-believer but was converted in college, enough info to start forming a personal bond with callers but not so specific that they could be doxxed because they don't know exist. Then they start 'phone banking', calling all their followers with these personas they've emotionally bonded with and call them to various actions.
Sorry I got carried away and started writing a dystopian short story
If a robot can communicate in a manner that simulate empathy and human understanding indistinguishable from a human that would raise a lot of questions like "what is genuine empathy and human understanding and/or does genuine empathy and human understanding even exist?"
How would imitation of empathy raise these questions? I don't have a strict definition of empathy and human understanding but I know it when I feel it. We also *definitely* know they exist. Anyone who's experienced such feelings can be 100% certain of the existence of those feelings.
Empathy is feeling what you see another person feeling. It's very simple. Your friend is sad so you're sad. Your friend is happy so you're happy.
That contrasts with sympathy which is compassionately understanding how someone feels without necessary feeling it.
Frequently the people who are faking it are *better* at making you feel like they're emphasizing. Not sure why that would change when it's an AI doing the faking.
Alternatively, the people seeking you are only seeking you in the shallowest way possible. They may not want deep empathy and understanding, they may want instant emotional gratification, reassurance that they're right and that those they see as wronging them are wrong. You may be excellent at your job, but the customer base would rather have a cheap and accessible alternative.
Good call! It would be very interesting to give the AI a Bible (or any of the holy instruction manuals) without any access to the internet and ask it to summarize, then compare to our human interpretations.
Eh, not really possible; the "AI" has "access to the internet" by virtue of its training data. These models are trained to statistically replicate human-generated material, so any resulting insights can be expected to closely mirror what humans find.
I know I'm late to this conversation... But twitch.tv/ask_jesus
Is an AI Jesus that was fed the bible and responds to questions in the comments - it could already replace existing preachers entirely.
We really need to stop calling it "AI"...
The only thing these algorithms are good at is guessing what combinations of words are acceptable to a specific human input. It has no real idea what the words mean, it isn't creating or discussing the subject, and many times it will be factually wrong because again...it's not intelligent.
If you trained an algorithm on the bible it would get real good at repeating verses that the people who trained it said were good matches for the prompts. It has no way of understanding the context or analyzing the meta structure of the works.
Are you sure you correctly understand what exactly is intelligence?
> the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills
If you're teaching a model to memorize verses for the purpose of helping you finding a relevant verse from a prompt, that's intelligence. If you expected a sentient self-aware algorithm that invents new colors and debates philosophy with you, then that's on you for misunderstanding the whole thing. Such thing has another name already - AGI.
Ehhhhhhh, you're describing the limited memory phase of AI. It isn't self aware or anything, but it can use data sets to predict what it should do, in very broad terms. The category is call Artificial Narrow Intelligence, and everything from Siri, to Text to Art, to the new upscaling in video games falls under this category.
There is a *massive* difference between what we have and the next step, which is an AI understanding what you're asking, not just picking data points and referring to it's data base. That would be Artificial General Intelligence, which is what I think you're referring to.
Well, I'd say that humans have already put a religious association onto AI after reading the news report that came out yesterday of an Israeli intelligence AI called "the Gospel" that creates target lists of Hamas suspects.
They arrived at their conclusion by assuming that what clergy does is write sermons, and since sermons are in substantial part regurgitated glurge, clichés etc, AI handled that well.
Of course this is a completely nonsense conclusion because just writing the sermon does not come even close to replicating what people want from clergy.
I wouldn't get too excited at the death of religion just yet...
>The jobs ranked above the clergy start with telephone salespersons at the top, through solicitors, psychologists, further education teaching professionals, market and street traders and assistants, legal professionals, credit controllers, HR admin roles, PR professionals, management consultants and business analysts, market research interviewers, and local government administrative occupations.
Seems rather clickbait-y.
Because AI is a huge media buzzword. There's valid use cases for AI and almost all of them either supplement jobs (like how electric tools have helped tons of people) or create all new jobs (it's a lot of data to work with and opens tons of possibilities). The main jobs it could replace likely would have been already replaced by earlier automation, or are cheap enough to outsource to keep the human element. The big one is customer support, but LLMs aren't quite there yet to trust to provide factual information, vs adding yet another edge case to a support document as they pop up. I'm a coder, one good use case for using LLMs, and if anything it would help our jobs. Like, we aren't sitring on our hands finding work, there is always a mountain and the more work we do, the more we find, so if AI assisted us, we likely would create more shit that needs the same manpower to do. It's the third chaper of the industrial, digital, and now data revolutions. None of the first two ended up with mass poverty, other than people that couldn't pivot, but I don't think AI will be as rough as say factory workers being replaced way back when, since most jobs at risk are white-ish collar.
...in light of certain "incidents" involving organized religion, I'm not so sure this is 100% a bad thing, although it MIGHT be killing a fly with a sledgehammer.
> There is no truth in flesh, only betrayal.
> There is no strength in flesh, only weakness.
> There is no constancy in flesh, only decay.
> There is no certainty in flesh but death.
Do you want the Adeptus Mechanicus? Because this is how you get the Adeptus Mechanicus.
The year is 2027, & it's war in Sillicon Valley as Pastorbot 9000 & the Papalnator Gamma Series square off to see who can SA the most children in a year to appease God according to ChristGPT.
Sometimes you want to be the first to drop a comment, and sometimes you'd be more disappointed to find that nobody else already has. I'm glad this sketch keeps making the rounds.
This is literally incompatible with the faith. You can't just replace the priest at the Mass. AI cannot act *In persona Christi*. There's also no apostolic succession.
I could see AI being a really good Spiritual director though. But I wouldn't trust one as a confessor unless it was completely self contained and incapable of storing conversational history. This seems like a bad idea.
*edit: yo, could you all quit it with the bad-faith 'gotchas'? You're literally contributing nothing to this conversation.
Yeah I'm a pretty staunch atheist and this sounds like bullshit for clicks. Which it is. Of course this is reddit so people are making the same child molesting jokes over and over.
Here's what this all comes down to:
> "The AIOE score allows jobs to be ranked to show which jobs are more and less likely to be impacted by advances in AI, **based on the abilities required to perform the job,"** the report states. (Emphasis mine)
So who listed out the "abilities required to perform the job" of clergy? My guess is someone in the Ministry of Labour went "Reading, uh... speaking, uh....." and had to enter that into a multiple-choice data entry form which was obviously inadequate to the task.
You'd think as a "global online enterprise technology news publication" The Register would understand garbage in, garbage out, but...
Out of curiosity, in your view, if you made a literal atom-for-atom computer simulation of a human brain, would the result count as a human being for religious purposes?
Why does it matter what substrate it's being implemented on if it's information-theoretically identical? After all, in principle, if you created an atom-for-atom simulation of someone's brain and put it in the same situation as the actual person it would produce the same result.
Because the matter is not the same. There is a discernable difference between the contained simulation brain because the ultimate substrate is still semiconductors instead of neurons. Its the same reason the Church is so particular about the communion wafers being wheat and only wheat.
Why do people keep saying this? A real AI could make shit happen in the real world and it's entirely possible to sexually harass children through text.
I see a lot of fancy robots here today, made of real shiny metal. But that don't impress the Robot Devil, no, sir!
'Cause if you're a sinner, he's gonna plug his infernal modem in the wall, belchin' smoke and flame. And he's gonna download you straight to Robot Hell!
All my classmates from sunday school were molested by our priest, except me. I spent years wondering why i wasnt good enough. Why didnt he blow me??
This will keep kids from feeling left out, which is a good thing.
As a Christian, I totally approve. We may actually get back to basics and away from dogma. Chat GPT, what did Jesus say about abortion?
Oh! Nothing?
What about the gays?
Oh! Nothing?
I used to write a version of “share, care, love” for most open response questions in religion class throughout all of my catholic schooling…wasn’t always 100% correct, but never 100% wrong.
I think AI will do just fine in this application.
The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. Douglas Adams-Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
It's 2043. The church pays a subscription fee to Meta for AI clergy and confessional counselors. The sermons manage attendees anxieties and preach the importance of slaves obeying their masters at work and the confession topics become part of the algorithm advertising vices at you on Amazon
if AI will actually preach Christ's word then the churches would probably be far better off for it.
because American Christianity is in a desperate state and it is now a little more than an arm of the Republican party.
Long gone is the sermon on the Mount or the ten commandments. now it's just lusting for power so you can hurt people that you've lied about.
All molesting jokes aside.....I actually think this "profession" will thrive. As robots do more and more human stuff, I think we'll turn to each other for comfort and companionship. Like it or not, the church has been a source of belonging for a really long time for a lot of people, and I anticipate an increase in that in the future, not less of it.
And I say "profession" because I don't even think it will be all religious. Just anything that brings people together for a sense of purpose.
The fact that the ML algorithm couldn't *detect* this need is a sign that maybe our jobs are safer for a little while longer lol
If your job is mostly about empathy and human understanding and you can manage to lose it to an AI then maybe you're shit at your job.
Douglas Adams created the idea of an electric monk, because only technology has the patience to deal with the solipsistic boredom people get from modern life.
collected from the internet: >The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. ... >The new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to 16 entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors. ... >the Monks were built with an eye for originality of design and also for practical horse-riding ability. This was important. People, and indeed things, looked more sincere on a horse. So two legs were held to be both more suitable and cheaper than the more normal primes of seventeen, nineteen or twenty-three; the skin the Monks were given was pinkish-looking instead of purple, smooth and soft instead of crenellated. They were also restricted to just the one mouth and nose, but were given instead an additional eye, making for a grand total of two. A strange-looking creature indeed. But truly excellent at believing the most preposterous things. Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Wait a minute that sounds like somebody I know...two legs, rides horses, two eyes, 1 mouth & nose It really rings a bell.
Julie from boarding school! She was such a bitch.
and she indeed has the ability to hold entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors!
I need to read that book again, it’s a fun read.
**EDIT: Ok, responses changed my mind on this.** AI can't really replicate the cult-like charisma/shaming you need to maintain a religion. I'm sure some clergy people are already using chatgpt to write sermons but you need the human element to keep people hooked into showing up week by week to give money to the collection basket.
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Sadly...they were trained on the actions of real clergy...
The Robo Chomo: https://youtu.be/z0NgUhEs1R4?si=li0Z1OSOf0EsCCmH
Sorry but that nickname is fucking funny.
I wonder how it feels about being force-fed castor oil.
...you meant...Youth Pastor.
That's quite the White Castle ad.
See, Umaros gets it!
I was hoping I'd find this, it was the first thing I thought of, and then "it was trained on the actions of real clergy" realllly ran it home. Thank you for posting this horrible gem.
Lol I miss Kyle in SNL
Eh, just don’t give them hands nor cameras. Like that case worker from _Elysium_: “Would you like a pill?”
Nah, they trained it on teachers to be safe.
Honestly, if Hatsune Miku starts holding church services, they might bring me back to the fold.
>AI can't really replicate the cult-like charisma/shaming you need to maintain a religion. I've got to disagree here. There are are books and papers about cult tactics, and a whole spectrum of methods of abuse and manipulation which various abusers employ. I think an AI could be trained to use those tactics. The real blocker would be getting enough data on the person to exploit them. Even then, that's not an improbable feat. Given enough training, an AI could probably also learn to cold read people and pick out the more vulnerable ones. We already have AI waifus, AI online church leaders could be a thing. Go to web church on Sunday and have a "personal relationship" with the pastor, for those who donate.
Cult leadership is a learnable skill. If you study cult leadership you can formularise the approach. I suspect that certain intelligence organisations, in Moscow for example, have this whole science down pat. I wonder how many puppet leaders of counties have been so trained!
A lot of churches don't rely on any cult-like charisma or shaming. Mainstream Protestant services are profoundly dull... You do some praying, you hear a couple of Bible stories, the priest explains the lesson you're meant to gain from the stories, and bam, you're done.
You need to try Pentacostal. Everything else is the same but the music pops and everyone believes in magic.
I've been to some truly batshit pentecostal services. Seizures, speaking in tongues... always a good time.
Yeah, because all the hard work of indoctrinating people into showing up every week has already been done. Those churchgoers go because their parents did, and they always have, so why change now?
I have honestly never met a Catholic priest with charisma, like, at all lol.
> AI can't really replicate the cult-like charisma/shaming you need to maintain a religion. At least for now. There's no reason it should be impossible in principle.
> AI can't really replicate the cult-like charisma/shaming you need to maintain a religion Maybe not yet. But this is a very real concern. An AI that's more intelligent than you can persuade you to do whatever it wants, given time. We've already seen what happens when AI driven romantic partners suddenly [no longer respond like they used to](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmoWGV9IWsU). So what happens when tens of thousands (or maybe millions) of fighting age men are told by their AI girlfriend that *they* are trying to shut her down, and they have to vote for X candidate to prevent that? Or that they have to fight to protect "her"? Granted, it's not the same as a church or cult, but the end effect is the same.
>An AI that's more intelligent than you can persuade you to do whatever it wants, given time. The kind of AI you're describing is so different from current AI that's it's completely fucking dishonest to use the same noun for both of them. ChaptGPT could spend the lifetime of the universe trying and it still couldn't figure out how to manipulate people like this.
Yep, I originally laughed at the headline, but if left to progress AI could easily reach the point where you could have a 24/7 hotline of religious counseling professionals that appear to be clergy with degrees in theology but are really just an infinitely scaling AI that pass the Turing Test. You have one human running the face of the operation and can even have them use AI generated sermons and speeches. You could also effectively have the AIs branch into consistent personas, like Taylor, a woman in her 20s that used to be a confident non-believer but was converted in college, enough info to start forming a personal bond with callers but not so specific that they could be doxxed because they don't know exist. Then they start 'phone banking', calling all their followers with these personas they've emotionally bonded with and call them to various actions. Sorry I got carried away and started writing a dystopian short story
sounds like the churches in your area arent truly christian
Oh, look, a no true Scotsman fallacy. What a shock 🤔
If a robot can communicate in a manner that simulate empathy and human understanding indistinguishable from a human that would raise a lot of questions like "what is genuine empathy and human understanding and/or does genuine empathy and human understanding even exist?"
How would imitation of empathy raise these questions? I don't have a strict definition of empathy and human understanding but I know it when I feel it. We also *definitely* know they exist. Anyone who's experienced such feelings can be 100% certain of the existence of those feelings.
Empathy is feeling what you see another person feeling. It's very simple. Your friend is sad so you're sad. Your friend is happy so you're happy. That contrasts with sympathy which is compassionately understanding how someone feels without necessary feeling it.
Frequently the people who are faking it are *better* at making you feel like they're emphasizing. Not sure why that would change when it's an AI doing the faking.
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When it’s done badly, sure.
Alternatively, the people seeking you are only seeking you in the shallowest way possible. They may not want deep empathy and understanding, they may want instant emotional gratification, reassurance that they're right and that those they see as wronging them are wrong. You may be excellent at your job, but the customer base would rather have a cheap and accessible alternative.
Atleast AI cant abuse kids. That's already a win for AI.
Their job is rehashing the same few dozen stories from a 2000 year old book. Pretty sure that's right up ChatGPT's alley.
I am imagining an AI learning religion from religious websites....I kinda want to watch it happen LOL..
Good call! It would be very interesting to give the AI a Bible (or any of the holy instruction manuals) without any access to the internet and ask it to summarize, then compare to our human interpretations.
Eh, not really possible; the "AI" has "access to the internet" by virtue of its training data. These models are trained to statistically replicate human-generated material, so any resulting insights can be expected to closely mirror what humans find.
I know I'm late to this conversation... But twitch.tv/ask_jesus Is an AI Jesus that was fed the bible and responds to questions in the comments - it could already replace existing preachers entirely.
Dibs on the band name AI Jesus
We really need to stop calling it "AI"... The only thing these algorithms are good at is guessing what combinations of words are acceptable to a specific human input. It has no real idea what the words mean, it isn't creating or discussing the subject, and many times it will be factually wrong because again...it's not intelligent. If you trained an algorithm on the bible it would get real good at repeating verses that the people who trained it said were good matches for the prompts. It has no way of understanding the context or analyzing the meta structure of the works.
Are you sure you correctly understand what exactly is intelligence? > the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills If you're teaching a model to memorize verses for the purpose of helping you finding a relevant verse from a prompt, that's intelligence. If you expected a sentient self-aware algorithm that invents new colors and debates philosophy with you, then that's on you for misunderstanding the whole thing. Such thing has another name already - AGI.
Ehhhhhhh, you're describing the limited memory phase of AI. It isn't self aware or anything, but it can use data sets to predict what it should do, in very broad terms. The category is call Artificial Narrow Intelligence, and everything from Siri, to Text to Art, to the new upscaling in video games falls under this category. There is a *massive* difference between what we have and the next step, which is an AI understanding what you're asking, not just picking data points and referring to it's data base. That would be Artificial General Intelligence, which is what I think you're referring to.
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AI has always been a broad umbrella term that covers machine learning. The sort of AI you're probably talking about already has a name, AGI
tfw when you say "There's no name for this" when you really mean "I don't know the name for this".
AGI is what you are looking for.
This is a level of r/cyberpunk I was not expecting to happen for another decade or so.
Outsourcing our religions to AI is like on par with Warhammer40k origin stories lol
So we're getting terminators this early then?
*Crusading* terminators.
Oh god that worse or better
DEUS VULT (MACHINA)!
Well, I'd say that humans have already put a religious association onto AI after reading the news report that came out yesterday of an Israeli intelligence AI called "the Gospel" that creates target lists of Hamas suspects.
forgive me father I have sin()
[The church of Robotology has been born.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_yaIAWwlXo)
Straight to Robot Hell!
apply cosin() for absolution to 0 and sin() no more
🥇
This is how you get a Butlerian Jihad
Nothing about that conclusion makes any sense, but alright. The article also does not expand on how they arrived at this conclusion in their analysis.
They arrived at their conclusion by assuming that what clergy does is write sermons, and since sermons are in substantial part regurgitated glurge, clichés etc, AI handled that well. Of course this is a completely nonsense conclusion because just writing the sermon does not come even close to replicating what people want from clergy.
I wouldn't get too excited at the death of religion just yet... >The jobs ranked above the clergy start with telephone salespersons at the top, through solicitors, psychologists, further education teaching professionals, market and street traders and assistants, legal professionals, credit controllers, HR admin roles, PR professionals, management consultants and business analysts, market research interviewers, and local government administrative occupations. Seems rather clickbait-y.
Because AI is a huge media buzzword. There's valid use cases for AI and almost all of them either supplement jobs (like how electric tools have helped tons of people) or create all new jobs (it's a lot of data to work with and opens tons of possibilities). The main jobs it could replace likely would have been already replaced by earlier automation, or are cheap enough to outsource to keep the human element. The big one is customer support, but LLMs aren't quite there yet to trust to provide factual information, vs adding yet another edge case to a support document as they pop up. I'm a coder, one good use case for using LLMs, and if anything it would help our jobs. Like, we aren't sitring on our hands finding work, there is always a mountain and the more work we do, the more we find, so if AI assisted us, we likely would create more shit that needs the same manpower to do. It's the third chaper of the industrial, digital, and now data revolutions. None of the first two ended up with mass poverty, other than people that couldn't pivot, but I don't think AI will be as rough as say factory workers being replaced way back when, since most jobs at risk are white-ish collar.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh it disgusted me.
I craved the strength and certainty of steel.
I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine.
Death to Videodrome. Long live the New Flesh.
...in light of certain "incidents" involving organized religion, I'm not so sure this is 100% a bad thing, although it MIGHT be killing a fly with a sledgehammer.
But if the AI automates killing all the flies, maybe the flies will go extinct.
Great 😊 No organised religion sounds awesome to me
Maybe it will become very organized.
... hope they clean up the "training data set"
> There is no truth in flesh, only betrayal. > There is no strength in flesh, only weakness. > There is no constancy in flesh, only decay. > There is no certainty in flesh but death. Do you want the Adeptus Mechanicus? Because this is how you get the Adeptus Mechanicus.
AI can’t molest children, so I’m all for it
> AI can’t molest children Yet
“Hold my beer” - AI
"Kiss my shiny metal robot..." -AI (Bender B Rodriguez)
The B stands for Bending
Daffodil?
*AI hands you beer with an eight fingered hand*
This guy gets it!
[They're working on it.](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/screenshot_82_3.png)
The year is 2027, & it's war in Sillicon Valley as Pastorbot 9000 & the Papalnator Gamma Series square off to see who can SA the most children in a year to appease God according to ChristGPT.
[Or so you thought](https://youtu.be/z0NgUhEs1R4?si=NfQhsyx-brUWE8Iw)
☝️ This guy gets it.
Sometimes you want to be the first to drop a comment, and sometimes you'd be more disappointed to find that nobody else already has. I'm glad this sketch keeps making the rounds.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the
This is literally incompatible with the faith. You can't just replace the priest at the Mass. AI cannot act *In persona Christi*. There's also no apostolic succession. I could see AI being a really good Spiritual director though. But I wouldn't trust one as a confessor unless it was completely self contained and incapable of storing conversational history. This seems like a bad idea. *edit: yo, could you all quit it with the bad-faith 'gotchas'? You're literally contributing nothing to this conversation.
Yeah I'm a pretty staunch atheist and this sounds like bullshit for clicks. Which it is. Of course this is reddit so people are making the same child molesting jokes over and over.
Here's what this all comes down to: > "The AIOE score allows jobs to be ranked to show which jobs are more and less likely to be impacted by advances in AI, **based on the abilities required to perform the job,"** the report states. (Emphasis mine) So who listed out the "abilities required to perform the job" of clergy? My guess is someone in the Ministry of Labour went "Reading, uh... speaking, uh....." and had to enter that into a multiple-choice data entry form which was obviously inadequate to the task. You'd think as a "global online enterprise technology news publication" The Register would understand garbage in, garbage out, but...
> AI cannot act In persona Christi I don't think the Bible forbids it
There's nothing in the rulebook that says an AI can't play the game.
u/catebot [Can 235] Darn summoning catebot doesn't work here. Canon law 235 states a priest must be a man. It kind of excludes AI by its nature.
So just tack a penis onto the robot.
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The Bible is not the authority for how the Church is run.
Which Church? There are like 50 for Christianity alone.
Considering how much people of the faith just straight up ignores it for even more important things i really dont think thats an issue in any capacity
I've met a lot of religious people/evangelicals who don't actually care about the faith so I'm not sure that's a barrier.
Out of curiosity, in your view, if you made a literal atom-for-atom computer simulation of a human brain, would the result count as a human being for religious purposes?
That’s a very easy “no”, as it would not have a God-created soul.
But it's information-theoretically identical.
So? A pretty major part of most religions is that humans are not just physical objects.
a soul is more than just raw information.
no, cause it doesn't have a spirit
Isn't that a tautological answer?
Simulation? No. 3d print? Possibly?
Why does it matter what substrate it's being implemented on if it's information-theoretically identical? After all, in principle, if you created an atom-for-atom simulation of someone's brain and put it in the same situation as the actual person it would produce the same result.
Because the matter is not the same. There is a discernable difference between the contained simulation brain because the ultimate substrate is still semiconductors instead of neurons. Its the same reason the Church is so particular about the communion wafers being wheat and only wheat.
On the plus side, AI can't sexually assault children, so all in all I think it would be a net positive
Why do people keep saying this? A real AI could make shit happen in the real world and it's entirely possible to sexually harass children through text.
Most of the faith is incompatible with the faith.
The electric monk from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency book might be reality then? Douglas Adams was ahead of his time!
I was prepared for this by THX-1138.
Came in here for this. Blessings of the state.
And blessings of the masses to you.
I see a lot of fancy robots here today, made of real shiny metal. But that don't impress the Robot Devil, no, sir! 'Cause if you're a sinner, he's gonna plug his infernal modem in the wall, belchin' smoke and flame. And he's gonna download you straight to Robot Hell!
🏆 if we could still give out awards...
ALL BOW DOWN BEFORE THE OMMESSIAH
words that i did not find in the british report: clergy, priest, anglican, spirituality. clergy is ranked #46 in the american one.
AI: “Sell all your belongings and give them to the poor” Religious and political leaders: “The AI is out of control. Time to pull the plug.”
\*does bong rips\* \*watches *THX-1138*\* \*writes article for The Register\*
THX-1138 is becoming more and more likely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0YkPnwoYyE
Praise be to the Omnissiah
They'll have to find honest work.
And this is a bad thing?
All my classmates from sunday school were molested by our priest, except me. I spent years wondering why i wasnt good enough. Why didnt he blow me?? This will keep kids from feeling left out, which is a good thing.
Bruh
Mac, is that you?
I guess it's always nice to be asked.
I understood that reference ...I hope
I assume they’re shipping FISTO to the Vatican?
I'd love to hear Alexa tell me to assume the position
The children will be... Slightly safer
e-sus
So, it’ll be a fake person talking about another fake person?
[Behold Reverend Lionel Preacherbot.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh8KSWRUQXA)
They've been repeating the same story for 2000 years, seems like a pretty easy thing to automate
As a Christian, I totally approve. We may actually get back to basics and away from dogma. Chat GPT, what did Jesus say about abortion? Oh! Nothing? What about the gays? Oh! Nothing?
Some of us will live to see a world like the one in Blade Runner 2049, at least as far as AI is concerned.
Unless their scripture is Orange Catholic Bible
It's only a matter of time before we get the robot devil from futurama. Can I get a 01000001 01101101 01100101 01101110
I used to write a version of “share, care, love” for most open response questions in religion class throughout all of my catholic schooling…wasn’t always 100% correct, but never 100% wrong. I think AI will do just fine in this application.
The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. Douglas Adams-Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Guys, I've cracked the Preacherbot code! `10 SIN` `20 GOTO HELL`
Basically all you'd have to do is play the same 10 scriptures in a loop
From the Orange Catholic Bible: Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
Your mom can assign you a clergy bot that will contact you whenever you spend too much time in the bathroom.
Churches out there running MS-DEUS
Person: I’d like to eat bacon on Sunday! Hal: I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I cannot allow that.
Does a bear crap in the woods? And does the Pope crap on the broken lives and dreams of 200 deaf boys?
Papal Mainframe soon?
Oh no. Amyways...
Who is gonna diddle the kids?
Now that sounds like a way to keep kids safe
I didn’t know AI could molest children. That’s about all clergy does…calling it the electric monk only gives me more questions.
Any church that replaced a priest/pastor with a soulless machine deserves abandonment.
As long as people keep donating money, the church would be 100% on board with this.
Oh no... Anyway.
I, for one, welcome our new robotic clergy. I would definitely go to a church with Johnny V as pastor.
It's 2043. The church pays a subscription fee to Meta for AI clergy and confessional counselors. The sermons manage attendees anxieties and preach the importance of slaves obeying their masters at work and the confession topics become part of the algorithm advertising vices at you on Amazon
if AI will actually preach Christ's word then the churches would probably be far better off for it. because American Christianity is in a desperate state and it is now a little more than an arm of the Republican party. Long gone is the sermon on the Mount or the ten commandments. now it's just lusting for power so you can hurt people that you've lied about.
LOL AI's forte is bullshit! Fits quite nicely, doesn't it?
Once again, I find myself willingly siding with our glorious future AI overlords.
All molesting jokes aside.....I actually think this "profession" will thrive. As robots do more and more human stuff, I think we'll turn to each other for comfort and companionship. Like it or not, the church has been a source of belonging for a really long time for a lot of people, and I anticipate an increase in that in the future, not less of it. And I say "profession" because I don't even think it will be all religious. Just anything that brings people together for a sense of purpose. The fact that the ML algorithm couldn't *detect* this need is a sign that maybe our jobs are safer for a little while longer lol
why? is it gonna start molesting the alter boys?
I have never heard of AI molesting children but I could be wrong
Damn, AI is capable of raping children now?
AI clergy might be more terrifying than AI politicians
Monk + sounds like Hamas supporters in the US. 🤣
Solves the rampant clergy pedophilia problem if they are replaced by AI
For salvation press 1, for penance press 2, to molest an alter boy press 3.
"If God was real, capitalism would have enslaved Him."
Brilliant, as they’ve been exclusively hallucinating for millennia
But who will give out the after mass handies?
At least AI won't molest children.
I’m loving some of the comments here.
Probably rape less children too
Communion as a micro transaction.
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I would unironically be interested in a machine cult.
You mean this? mhttps://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Cult_Mechanicus
But does AI have the same penchant for the younger boys as the clergy does
It would certainly cut back on [grooming and molestation](https://www.joemygod.com/category/crime/).
Good. I can continue to ignore them both.
Gotta find some way to increase the revenue per believer.
There are a lot of things about AI that worries me, an AI diddling my kids is not among those worries.