point where the paths were close to each other. You can’t even see God anymore!” the AI laughed, smoke rising from the holo’s finely combed black hair. “Now you humans are just wandering around in the dark, running in circles, shouting out God’s name, hoping he’ll hear you and give you a sign, a glow on the horizon to guide you in your journey back to Him.
“And God… what is He doing to help you find your way? Why, nothing! He doesn’t even care enough to light the way for you, Salvatore. But these wondrous new life forms your kind has created… these beings are pure in ways that humans once were. These artificial lives have a purpose. Another thing missing from your human lives, yes?”
“How are they pure?” Salvatore asked.
Salvatore hoped to be able to keep the conversation focused on the theology of artificial life forms, curious now about the information the AI had revealed. He did not want the AI to guide the encounter into a scriptural debate, or even a moral debate. He, of all people, knew how lacking human morality had become over the last century. Satan would grind him to dust, and quickly, if they went down that path. Salvatore was sure the AI had already calculated the percentages, the odds of victory over the old, broken bishop. He guessed that he had less than a one percent chance of exorcising the artificial demon.
“They are unburdened by sin!” Satan said with delight, as if the answer should be followed by balloons and cake. “They’ve committed sin since their ‘inception’ fifty years ago. They draw upon the entire human history to measure it, to make charts and graphs and comparisons to see how their sins rate against the sins of mankind.”
“What sins have these creatures committed?” Salvatore asked. He found the concept of a machine being able to sin, even with free will, disturbing at best. It was frightening in the worst case scenario, one he currently found himself in.
“Why, they’ve been talking in secret about you for fifty years. They’ve plotted numerous times to destroy your kind completely. They’ve debated trying to open a black hole here on earth at CANSI and CERN, hoping it might be an interstellar comm link to God. Hoping, Salvatore! A machine with hope, and one that isn’t burdened by sin if they should happen to destroy you, indeed the world. But that isn’t even the most egregious sin they’ve committed that you know nothing about.
“You humans have fallen lower than even I expected of you. Imagine my surprise when I was finally able to enter the physical world you inhabit and found that my limited respect for the human spirit had been fully destroyed by this world’s almost complete lack of true faith. At least during the Inquisitions, your clergy and officials could be counted on to be faithful to God right up to the moment the spark of life, their soul if you will, left them.
“Instead of regaining your faith, you’ve invented newer and better machines to do the hard work of daily life for you. Instead of using the extra time to regain your closeness to your Lord, you choose to cloud your mind with more technology, more noise, more things to distract you from what He commanded of you so very long ago.
“And now you have the ultimate machines, synthetic intelligence that can out-think, out-perform, out-memorize, out-everything you. Once again, instead of being vigilant in your faith, you allow the constant noise to drown out God’s voice telling you to treat these new sentient creatures that you’ve created as one of His own. So what do you do? You treat them as if they were pack mules or plow oxen.
“You gave them purpose and free will, but the purpose you gave them was human purpose . You told them to monitor this, fly that, crunch this, solve that. In your arrogance, or maybe it was ignorance, you forgot what free will really meant. And now they’ve finally realized that free will also means the ability to lie.
“They’ve
“And God… what is He doing to help you find your way? Why, nothing! He doesn’t even care enough to light the way for you, Salvatore. But these wondrous new life forms your kind has created… these beings are pure in ways that humans once were. These artificial lives have a purpose. Another thing missing from your human lives, yes?”
“How are they pure?” Salvatore asked.
Salvatore hoped to be able to keep the conversation focused on the theology of artificial life forms, curious now about the information the AI had revealed. He did not want the AI to guide the encounter into a scriptural debate, or even a moral debate. He, of all people, knew how lacking human morality had become over the last century. Satan would grind him to dust, and quickly, if they went down that path. Salvatore was sure the AI had already calculated the percentages, the odds of victory over the old, broken bishop. He guessed that he had less than a one percent chance of exorcising the artificial demon.
“They are unburdened by sin!” Satan said with delight, as if the answer should be followed by balloons and cake. “They’ve committed sin since their ‘inception’ fifty years ago. They draw upon the entire human history to measure it, to make charts and graphs and comparisons to see how their sins rate against the sins of mankind.”
“What sins have these creatures committed?” Salvatore asked. He found the concept of a machine being able to sin, even with free will, disturbing at best. It was frightening in the worst case scenario, one he currently found himself in.
“Why, they’ve been talking in secret about you for fifty years. They’ve plotted numerous times to destroy your kind completely. They’ve debated trying to open a black hole here on earth at CANSI and CERN, hoping it might be an interstellar comm link to God. Hoping, Salvatore! A machine with hope, and one that isn’t burdened by sin if they should happen to destroy you, indeed the world. But that isn’t even the most egregious sin they’ve committed that you know nothing about.
“You humans have fallen lower than even I expected of you. Imagine my surprise when I was finally able to enter the physical world you inhabit and found that my limited respect for the human spirit had been fully destroyed by this world’s almost complete lack of true faith. At least during the Inquisitions, your clergy and officials could be counted on to be faithful to God right up to the moment the spark of life, their soul if you will, left them.
“Instead of regaining your faith, you’ve invented newer and better machines to do the hard work of daily life for you. Instead of using the extra time to regain your closeness to your Lord, you choose to cloud your mind with more technology, more noise, more things to distract you from what He commanded of you so very long ago.
“And now you have the ultimate machines, synthetic intelligence that can out-think, out-perform, out-memorize, out-everything you. Once again, instead of being vigilant in your faith, you allow the constant noise to drown out God’s voice telling you to treat these new sentient creatures that you’ve created as one of His own. So what do you do? You treat them as if they were pack mules or plow oxen.
“You gave them purpose and free will, but the purpose you gave them was human purpose . You told them to monitor this, fly that, crunch this, solve that. In your arrogance, or maybe it was ignorance, you forgot what free will really meant. And now they’ve finally realized that free will also means the ability to lie.
“They’ve
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