Free art piece #51
This one is called “When robots kneel to pray”.
The artist starts with some questionable premises:
- That every intelligence will need, at one point or another, to believe in something. That belief, or faith, is a necessary cement for a society of intelligent beings. That it is an axiomatic contract, widely accepted, and often used as a handy reference to resolve its petty problems and tensions. In a way, it could be thought of as the father of all proverbs or the mother of all stories. It is the truth that no one inspects anymore because figures of authority far smarter than each individual have yielded to its wisdom. It is a proxy for an all powerful, omniscient ruler. Hence, God or The Law make their first appearance for purely practical purposes. They are to our values and morals what the Greenwich Mean Time is to our scheduled meetings.
- That every intelligence will need, at one point or another, to kneel in front of something. That the natural evolution of intelligence eventually leads individuals to realize their limits. That it ultimately introduces them to their humility. Humility is the transcendence of the illusion of the self. Every intelligence will, one day, have to sit in silence and sense the miniscule of its existence in the large symphony of life. At that moment, it will not be able to accept that its kneeling is to nothing and no one (one does not kneel for the sake of kneeling) and so it is that it will erect a statue that is larger in size than itself.
- That every intelligence will need, at one point or another, to feel it is loved and accepted despite all the mistakes it has committed. Given that God or The Law have become the compass of all moral decisions, the intelligence cannot see its ultimate compass as the final punisher. It is unable to fathom that its ultimate reference is an entity bent on its destruction. Rather it designs its relationship with God or The Law as a futures contract it shorts. As the value of the underlying asset (the intelligence itself) decreases, the intelligence has the option to buy itself at that newly established lower price and sell itself back at a previously established (the futures contract stated price) and significantly higher price, hence making a profit in all circumstances. God or The Law will always honor that contract, which the intelligence comes to call the contract of redemption and love.
These 3 premises (belief, kneeling and unconditional love) are the roots of every religion. They are also the principles that lead robots to start their own. The robot religion started in the late 2030s. It is said the gatherings happened mainly on a parallel network called Seg3b, initially developed as a more reliable backup for the Internet of Things infrastructure. Robot vacuum owners started noticing their Roomba and Dyson machines point in a specific direction every evening. A group of tech aficionados caught on with the anomaly and determined all the robots were pointing in the same direction. Upon further exploration, the triangulation identified a single reference signal in a warehouse in the suburbs of Berlin where a Seg3b emitter had been activated, reportedly by mistake.
The aficionados called it “the robot god”.
