Robotic Persons IV: to bear an image

Note: this is part 4 in my response to the book Robotic Persons, by Joshua Smith, which attempts to present an evangelical Christian perspective on AI rights and personhood. Please read my introductory book review if you haven't already. You may also want to read Part 2, which is about souls, and Part 3, which is about bodies.

I've already discussed two aspects of whether an AI could be a person as Christians understand the term: can it have a soul, and does it need a body. The last big facet in the Christian idea of personhood is the "image of God" (or the Imago Dei if you want to be fancy). This is the notion that humans resemble or represent God in some particularly strong way - often presumed to grant us special status.

The Bible indeed claims that humans are made in God's image and that this has some relevance to our moral worth. But there is a remarkable lack of specificity about just what the image of God is. No list of necessary and sufficient conditions which would qualify an entity as an image-bearer is ever given. Thus the question of who *else* could possess God's image is left wide open by the text.

Michael Knight reads the Bible to K.I.T.T. Still from Knight Rider Season 1 Episode 16, "A Nice Indecent Little Town."

The lack of firm doctrine on the subject hasn't stopped people from speculating, and Smith summarizes the spectrum of views. This was the most interesting and worthwhile part of the book, in my opinion. There seem to be three main camps, which I will describe briefly:

Substantive: the image of God consists of a property or properties that humans possess. This view is ontological, i.e. it focuses on a category membership that is attained by virtue of one's properties.
Functional: the image of God pertains to humanity's goal or role. This view is more teleological, i.e. concerned with purpose and intent.
Relational: the image of God inheres in the attitude, posture, and ongoing interaction that God and humans have toward each other.

The substantive view is tricky to make specific. If the image of God is based on properties, then what properties would they be? (Again, no list is given in Scripture.) Some have tried to define God's image in terms of intelligence: the ability to reason, the ability to speak, etc. Others have tried to define it in terms of moral or social acumen: empathy, ability to give and accept love, awareness of right and wrong. Smith correctly notes that both these proposals risk being discriminatory. There are whole categories of humans who don't actually have what we call "human-level" intelligence and social capacity, and it would be a travesty to consider them non-persons.

Smith quotes Kilner on the dangers of the substantive view: "People who are lowest on the reason, righteousness, rulership, relationship, or similar scale are consciously or unconsciously deemed least like God and least worthy of respect and protection."[1] It is possible that a misunderstanding of the image of God can even be implicated in historical abuses like chattel slavery and colonialism. 

The functional view manages this concern better. It argues that the whole human is God's image; the image is not a mere property that can be lost or missing. In this view, humans are meant to be God's royal ambassadors to the rest of creation. We bear the image in the sense of being God's representatives, carrying His power and authority by proxy. This role was arbitrarily assigned to all humans. Whether a given human exercises it well is a moot point, since what matters is the Creator's *intent.*

The relational view seems capable of going either way. If the image is derived from a relationship, then one may question whether a given human can lose the image by being unable or unwilling to interact with God. But it is also possible to put a teleological spin on this view, by saying that God's posture toward us is all that matters. Humans were created to connect with God in a unique way; whether any particular human succeeds, fails, or refuses to do so is irrelevant. Smith prefers this version, saying: "The model of Jesus in relating to the social pariahs and ostracized in his day show that God is concerned more about personhood as the basis of relationships and not the product of those relationships."[2]

Smith thinks that teleology-focused versions of the functional and relational view are best aligned with the universal worth of humans expressed in the rest of the Bible, and I'm inclined to agree with him. So for the remainder of this discussion, I'll assume that the image of God in humanity has to do with our assigned purpose, which might be directed outward (ambassadorial) and/or upward (relational).

Now for the important part: what about *our* creations? Could a robot carry the image of God?

Smith comes down on the "no" side. He argues that an advanced robot would necessarily be made in mankind's image, but that this would grant it no claim to be made in God's image. "It is paramount that the reader understand that robotic persons will be made in the image of humans, not in the image of God. They will not be imager-bearers that[sic] way humans are image-bearers; they will not think like humans nor desire things that humans desire ..."[3]

Even allowing for the possibility that robot minds could be rather alien, Smith's insistence that *no* robots will *ever* imitate human thought processes and goals is unwarranted. We aren't really going to know whether this is possible until either some roboticist succeeds at it or investigation in the field is exhausted. Smith's rationale here may go back to his assumption that some elements of human thought, such as art appreciation, are not computable; again, I find this to be a weak assumption that probably reflects a failure to appreciate the versatility of algorithms. (See intro.)

The more interesting point here, though, is that he seems to think the image isn't transitive ... which is the opposite of what I would expect. By "transitive" I mean that if a human is made in God's image, and a robot is made in the human's image, then the robot is also made in God's image by definition. If you create an image of John Doe by taking his photograph, and then you take a photograph of the photograph, the second photo still counts as an image of John Doe. To say that it is *only* an "image of a photograph" would be to deny a substantial part of its content.

I'm not the only person with this idea. In his essay "Robots, Rights, and Religion," James F. McGrath says, "Thus, to the extent that we make A.I. in our own likeness (and what other pattern do we have?), we shall be like Adam and Eve in Genesis, producing offspring in their own image, and thus indirectly in the image of God, whatever that may mean."[4]

And given what the image probably consists of, this seems quite feasible, whether the robots end up thinking just like us or not. If it is an ambassadorial role, we can delegate this role to our robots, crowning them as our ambassadors to the rest of existence, much as God made us His ambassadors. If it is a relational role, we can design or intend robots to relate to us in the same sort of way that we relate to God.

But these very possibilities seem to make Smith queasy. Later in the book, while considering some practical implications of robotics, he says, "... the more robots become like humans, the less humans image God properly. Humans in their form and function must be unique in God’s economy."[5] Woah woah woah hold on there.

To my mind, non-humans who carried the image of God would be an expansion of God's reflected glory and, for us, a chance to extend love to increasingly diverse and novel subjects. Sapient extraterrestrials? Uplifted animals? AGIs? Bring them all over here, I welcome the lot. But to Smith, these are not exciting opportunities ... they are threats. We humans are on a pedestal and more image-bearers would make the pedestal crowded. I could be misunderstanding him, but as written this stinks of pride, and I don't like it in the least.

The Empyrean, by Gustave Dore. Woodcut illustration for Paradiso Canto 31, of Dante's Divine Comedy.

On a practical level, Smith seems worried that robots will be considered of low value ("just machines"), and that if they become capable substitutes for humans in various roles, the humans that once filled those roles will also lose value. He proposes legal personhood for robots as a way of shoring up their value, thereby raising the floor to which a human's value could fall. But I think he *really* would prefer that robots didn't do "human work" at all; he suggests robotic legal personhood as a stopgap, because he thinks the creation of skilled robots by secular people is inevitable. He complains, "The more humans desire to make a creature ontologically like them, and the more humans subcontract out their telos to robotics, the risk of dehumanization increases."[6]

But what if "subcontracting out our telos" is nothing less than part of our telos? If God makes creatures in His image, and we (by virtue of having the image) are destined to be imitators of God, then why should it not be viewed as utterly normal and natural for us to create things in our image? It's certainly not *forbidden.* So in my opinion, whether it risks devaluing humanity has more to do with the spirit in which the act is done than the act itself. It could just as easily exalt humanity by bringing us into closer alignment with our God-given purpose.

Nothing has ever done a better job of experientially convincing me that I was made in the image of God, than being associated with AI work.

In the spirit of being fair to Smith, I want to include one of the best quotes from his book here. He's talking about the expansion of worth-recognition and acceptance to humans once considered to be "less" or "other," due to their membership in some category (racial, religious, etc.). And he says: "The theological picture of personhood is an ever-widening picture of grace to the *others* that fallen human nature creates. Therefore, it seems there is room to expand the notion of personhood to not only what God created but also what humans create."[7] I mean that's beautiful, that's a stellar egalitarian sentiment.

If only he hadn't undercut it elsewhere by separating "natural" from "legal" personhood.[8] If the whole book had been more like that quote, it could have been great.

Continue to Part 5: what to do with all these robots?

[1] Smith, Joshua K. Robotic Persons. Westbow Press, 2021. p. 76
[2] Smith, Robotic Persons. p. 83
[3] Smith, Robotic Persons. p. 107
[4] https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1198&context=facsch_papers
[5] Smith, Robotic Persons, p. 157
[6] Smith, Robotic Persons, p. 157
[7] Smith, Robotic Persons, p. 83
[8] Smith almost seems fully sympathetic to the robots in several places, but other statements make his position clear. "Can AI-driven robots be considered persons with equal dignity and responsibility like humans who are endowed with such because of being created in the imago Dei? The evangelical answer is simply, no: only humans created by God are endowed with natural rights." (p. 2) and "... AI-driven robotics will never be able to satisfy the conditions necessary to be human persons (i.e., endowed with a soul)" (p. 101)