Theology and Artificial Intelligence

This is a longish quote, but it was nice to read a Christian Theologian who is making these kinds of arguments. The context is an article where he is arguing that the "soul" or "self" is a transcendent emergent property arising out of sufficient patterns of complexity in information processing. Once this pattern achieves self awareness, it become a phenomena in is own right, capable of being embodied in other forms (i.e. organically, digitally, etc) even if it's originating "hardware" (i.e. body, brain) is destroyed. 

Here's the quote:

"It follows from what I have been saying that we could, in theory, make artificial intelligence machines, super-computers, which really would have souls. That is, they would have states of conscious understanding, freedom and moral responsibility, and relationship to God (as I have put it, ‘determination towards supreme value’). In fact, I do not see why we should deny that possibility. We bring souls into existence whenever we have children. We can now fertilise embryos in laboratories, so that our control over procreation is increasing. It is possible, in theory, to construct a genetic sequence, which will begin embryonic development and so create a human life artificially. It is not out of the question that we could also construct a replica of such sequences in other forms, and so create quite new sorts of souls. 

Of course, if we did so, we would have just the same sorts of responsibility to those souls as we now have to human beings. We would have to respect and care for them, treat them as responsible and ascribe personal rights to them. It would be grossly immoral to treat them simply as machines, even if they looked like machines. They would indeed be persons. So there is nothing much to worry about in the rather sciencefiction idea of creating metal computer-persons. If such things were wholly controllable and predictable, because of some program we had put into them, then we know they are not persons at all, however cunningly they may be made to deceive. But if they really are free, rational and responsible, then we cannot wholly control them without infringing their truly personal rights and destroying that freedom."

Keith Ward. ‘The Soul and the Brain.’ In Defence of the Soul. Oxford: Oneworld, 1998.