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We are survival machines robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

Ancient Greeks imagined their gods to be capable of building robots. Hundreds of years have passed since the collapse of the greatest civilization, yet the human pursuit of developing something in their own image continues unabated. Thanks to the advances in AI, we now have the means to create human-like robots.

In his book, Human Natures: Genes Cultures and the Human Prospect, Paul Ehrlich said the concept of religion first appeared when humans developed brains large enough for abstract thought. On the other hand, artificial intelligence is brand new but pervasive.

Science and religion rarely see eye to eye, except for occasional outliers like the artificial intelligence church. Even though the church is closed now, it does pose a critical question, how will religion react to a sentient machine with free will?

Interestingly, some cultures are more open to technology than others. For example, a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan, called Kodaji caught the public imagination last year when it announced a new clergy member, a robot priest that performs sermons. Called Mindar, the USD 1 million robot was designed to look like Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy. The idea behind the priest robot was to rekindle peoples faith. Meanwhile, SoftBanks humanoid robot Pepper is available for hire as a Buddhist priest for funerals.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2018, Pope Francis said AI, robotics, and other innovations should be used to serve humanity and protect our common home.

These are examples of religion leveraging modern-day technology. But, what happens when AI hits singularity, or we achieve AGI? What happens when we create something in our own image?

What happens when an AI robot with the same intellectual ability as a human makes its own decisions? Should this machine be considered a human? Does it have a soul?

Religion argues that God has a plan for everybody. Religion also tells people how they should lead their life. So, where does this AI robot fit in? Herein lies the rub: Technology has the power to shake the foundations of religion.

In his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing, the founding father of AI, said: Thinking is a function of mans immortal soul. God has given an immortal soul to every man and woman, but not to any other animal or machines. Hence no animal or machine can think. Plato believed that the soul was both the source of life and the mind.

Different faiths react differently to technology. For example, last year, a top religious body in Indonesia forbade cryptocurrencies under Islamic law. Also, it can be argued that faith is very personal, so individuals will respond differently to AI.

AGI is the north star of companies like OpenAI, DeepMind and AI2. While OpenAIs mission is to be the first to build a machine with human-like reasoning abilities, DeepMinds motto is to solve intelligence.

DeepMinds AlphaGo is one of the biggest success stories in AI. In a six-day challenge in 2016, the computer programme defeated the worlds greatest Go player Lee Sedol. DeepMinds latest model, Gato, is a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist agent. Googles 2021 model, GLaM, can perform tasks like open domain question answering, common-sense reading, in-context reading comprehension, the SuperGLUE tasks and natural language inference.

OpenAIs DALL.E2 blew minds just a few months ago with imaginative renderings based on text inputs. Yet, all these achievements are pale compared to the intelligence of the human child.

However, people from the AI/ML community believe that AGI is achievable. Recently, Elon Musk, who has invested a lot in AI over the years, tweeted that he would be surprised if we do not achieve AGI by 2029.

Meanwhile, a popular critic of deep learning and AGI Gary Marcus said current AI is illiterate in an interview. It can fake its way through, but it doesnt understand what it reads. So the idea that all of those things will change on one day and on that magical day, machines will be smarter than peopleis a gross oversimplification, he said.

When Anthony Levandowski established the first church of artificial intelligence, called Way of the Future, it raised a few eyebrows.

If we achieve AGI in the coming years, it will change many things. When technology becomes far superior, and these artificial beings can do things beyond a human being, there are chances that people will associate them with a higher power. For example, AI in its current form is already aiding scientists in drug discovery. Humans are always on the lookout for God, even if on a personal level.

But one of the worst possible outcomes would be that AI emerges as a polarising factor. Hence, it warrants a greater discussion in this context. There is also an increasing need for the larger participation of religious groups in deliberating the ethical implications of AI development.

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The role of 'God' in the 'Matrix' - Analytics India Magazine