When I was a boy I was raised by my grandparents. We had no electricity, indoor plumbing, no things like gas stoves or tractors.  Slowly, we acquired machines who made our lives easier—magic light at the flip of a switch, propane gas stoves  burning warmly and cooking great meals,  the miracle of a racing (at 40 mph) automobile replacing Shorty and his fellow horse teammates. We even heard wonderful stories on this new thing called “radio.”  In my profession, slide rules were replaced with scientific calculators, then Engineering Workstations. All this has made life easier in some way. What were these machines? Tools, nothing more.

I was a voracious reader—especially history, science, and ideas. This took me back to 1854 when George Boole made an outrageous claim that human thought could be reduced to mathematical logic.  He said we reason with equations though we didn’t know it.  As I moved forward in time to 1927, I found that John McCarthy at Dartmouth coined the term Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). He agreed with the philosopher Hobbes who believed thinking was just a matter of computation.

So, I noticed the next logical step.  Since we  are only logical machines composed of joints and connecting springs, I observed the efforts to begin to build a human. A.I has the potential for near infinite memory and information storage. If Boole and Hobbes are correct, self-created algorithms allows these robotic entities to do more than common machines but to “think.  One day I watched a video of what one can “see” wearing a Virtual Reality headset.  There I could recreate myself as this handsome, over the top I.Q. muscular individual in a virtual world of my own making. I could become liberated from myself and any troubles of this world

There is another phenomenon I observed now and in the near future.  People do not think  for themselves but are surrendering their reasoning and decisions to an A.I algorithm.  Even before wholesale incorporation of A.I into our social media and smart phones, people were no longer interacting with each other in person. They were glued to their impersonal phones instead. Children are preferring  A. I. generated  algorithms instead of being with real playmates. Workers  have lost their jobs.  Everywhere I could see how now and in the future people are becoming less human—less emotionally aware and less religiously grounded. Are we becoming incapable of love or even knowing what true love is? Instead of turning to God for wisdom, are we turning to A.I?  A.I. does not outright deny God. It just replaces God with 1’s and 0’s .  Is A.I  becoming an idol??

Does  A.I raise a fundamental question? What does it mean to be human?  Since an A.I. Machine can  imitate everything human –human emotion, human intelligence, memory, calculations, and sort through all human information, is it truly human? Then I remembered what no machine can never have or do:

• It can never have a living soul created by the breath of God
• It can never truly love
• It can never sacrifice
• It can never worship in spirit and truth

It can only assimilate 1’s and 0’s  to mimic what has been done in the past or predicted by the algorithm.