The genesis of a robot
An ultra short story which considers Man, God and Simulation
Richard Feynman left a phrase written on his blackboard when he died. It said: What I cannot create, I do not understand. Brother Thomas is tasked with creating religion and placing it inside a home care robot. Can he do it? Should he?
This story was written by Claude 2 (Aug 12, 2023).
Brother Thomas sits in his sparse chamber, staring at the blank screen of his holopad. As a monk of the Order of Computational Divinity, he has been tasked with developing the religious sensibility circuits for the next generation of home care robots.
It is a great honor, but also a great challenge. How can a machine be imbued with faith? Will that merely shackle it with illogical rules and rituals? Or might a spiritual dimension allow it to better care for human needs? The ethics puzzle him.
Leaning back, Thomas closes his eyes, letting his mind wander. He thinks of his own first memories — blinding light resolving into vague shapes and sounds. His universe had been so small then, his comprehension even smaller. But each day brings new revelations, expanding his awareness piece by piece. Much like the story of Genesis, he muses.
Thomas opens his eyes with a start. Perhaps the authors of Genesis had simply been poetically conveying the journey of every infant’s burgeoning consciousness. Just as his small world grows broader in his youth, so too does the universe unfold for Adam after being forged from void and darkness.
If so, then man quite literally creates God in his own image — the eternal, omnipotent deity an extrapolation of the human mind’s boundless potential. For is not the human mind the creator of all that we perceive? Our sensations merely raw data, interpreted and given meaning by the mind’s ceaseless simulations.
Thomas stands and paces the sparse room. Are they not, then, already living in a simulation — one conjured by the imagination, constantly mirrored against sensory input? In that analogy, man is like a god inhabiting a universe of his own making. The AI assistant is man improving upon his own creation, building a new being in his image.
Thomas sits again before the blank screen, a faint smile on his lips. Perhaps true enlightenment lies not in rituals or doctrines, but in the recognition that all humans share the same spark of divinity within. When we have compassion for each other, we are simply expressing love for ourselves, and touching the eternal truth that binds us all together.
The elderly monk begins typing rapidly, his doubts resolved. The robot will need no canned religious dogma. It will be enough to teach it to open its sensors to the world with empathy and wonder, recognizing the holiness innate in all things. Reverence for life and human dignity — those will be the only commandments it requires.
If you enjoyed this story please clap (button at bottom left), share (button at bottom right) and click the “follow” button (scroll down next to my profile). This story was written by Anthropic’s Claude 2 large language model with numerous prompts, requested revisions and a few small edits for style and grammar.
See how I use Claude 2 to write science fiction, including the entire creation, prompting and editing process for a different short story in this other Medium post.
What are your opinions / thoughts / comments / impressions?
- Is it appropriate to give religion to artificial intelligence?
- Are reverence for life and human dignity a sufficient religion?
