91Èȱ¬

From Reverend Sharon Grenham-Thompson, Anglican Priest and Prison Chaplain:

My 11 year old son Leo, like a lot of his kids his age, is an out and proud computer geek. I’m fairly cyber-savvy myself, but he’s already way ahead of me. And instead of having personal heroes from the world of sport or music, Leo found his hero via the film ‘The Imitation Game’ - the mathematician Alan Turing, who died in 1954.
Turing’s been described by his contemporaries, and people since, as a genius. He was the major force behind the code breaking activity at Bletchley Park during the war; he’s credited with being ‘the father of modern computing’; and his work on artificial intelligence led to the now famous Turing Test. This is a test to try to distinguish a computer from a human being through written conversation alone – if an independent judge can’t tell the difference then the machine could be said to be ‘intelligent’.

Well this week 91Èȱ¬ news is focussing on Artificial intelligence, and what it might mean for our lives now and in the future.  Books and films have tended to suggest that AI is a bad thing – you know ‘the robots will take over and spell the end of humanity’ kind of stuff. And people have expressed concern about what it might all mean. So I was very glad to find the 91Èȱ¬ research suggesting that my job as a member of the clergy only has a 2% chance of ever being done by a robot. I didn’t check out the possibility of DJs being replaced by computers though….
It’s one of our greatest fears isn’t it – that we’re replaceable, just a number, here today gone tomorrow. It’s not a new worry – one of the psalms says ‘our days are like grass, like a wildflower, when the wind passes over it, it’s gone.’ And in some ways of course, it’s true – no one’s indispensable, no one’s immortal, and humans are pretty small in the face of the universe.

But so far machines haven’t found a way to feel or express love, passion, compassion, forgiveness, hope. It’s these things that build a different kind of world wide web – a network that says each human person has immense value, and connections are made that have an impact long after we’ve gone. And it’s these things I try to teach my son Leo, alongside his techy know how. There’s nothing artificial about that kind of intelligence.