from the edge

Thursday 14 April 2016

Preparing to configure

telegraph.co.uk
Robotics are the next big thing. According to Bill Gates, they will allow us to access all sorts of aids to living, or apps, which we barely dream of. The trouble starts when the apps become indispensible and then go wrong, as we learn when people’s computers are held to ransom by fraudulent individuals who appear to be operating beyond the reaches of the law for much of the time.

Back in the seventies people were imagining, quite confidently, the day when trying to prevent the robot from continuing to make your bed while you were still in it would be a commonplace morning mishap. Now, it is reckoned that by 2045 artificial intelligence will be on a par with what we currently take for granted as human intelligence, just in time for many of us who will be in 'care' homes by then to be tended by such realistic beings as 'Nadine', a product of the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. 

Looking at the bigger picture, if such an artificial intelligence, mathematically configured, were to run away with itself, we could be forgiven for wondering what it would feel like to be caught up in the global equivalent of an infinite version of the bed-making scenario. But perhaps, given the present level of global conflict and what it is doing to the planet, we will have done something worse to ourselves long before the robots take over. On the other hand, they might come to the rescue, once their intelligence overtakes ours, and if we survive that long.

Whether or not we survive the intervention of the robots will depend on the resilience of the human spirit. The increasing commodification of learning, at the expense of art, music, poetic imagination and a compassionate and wise teaching of religion, will ultimately do irretrievable damage to the human spirit, and consequently to the human person, so it should not take the robots long to overtake us. Once the spirit is defeated artificial intelligence will have free reign. There will be no more disturbing moral questions for us to address together in the fellowship of our shared humanity, only programmed ones, selected to enhance the efficacy of the system through the constrained autonomy of the pre-programmed individual.

Human intelligence is shaped from within the human spirit for better or for worse. Unless righteousness, compassion and the will for genuine peace can be programmed into artificial intelligence in such a way as to allow these essential virtues to grow exponentially with the developing robotic functional intelligence, it is hard to imagine what the world will look and feel like beyond 2045. What kind of uniform preconfigured politics will reshape the way we make moral decisions? and what will we yearn for, if anything? How do you program righteousness? How do you program hope?

It is the human spirit which yearns for righteousness, in other words for God’s own justice and loving kindness, but if that God-ward yearning has been factored out of the artificial mind, will we even know that this has happened? And will it matter? I think it is the last element of this postulated scenario which is most chilling – that the question of humanity’s belonging to a loving God will simply not matter. Hope will have been effaced in a single stroke, or minor equation perhaps.


There are parts of the UK where Polish immigrants are the new life blood of their local Catholic church. For them, the Christian faith is a life-sustaining continuum. In it, they carry their history, their sense of their humanity and their hope for the future. They wonder how it is that British people seem to have forgotten God. Perhaps they have something to teach us.

Sunday 3 April 2016

Hope and Glory

Easter is the most important feast of the Christian year, but the Churches have yet to agree where it belongs on the calendar. Perhaps this somewhat ludicrous difference is a kind of prophetic blessing. The ‘postponement’ of Easter on certain Church calendars reminds us that Christians can live with at least some differences. Our household postponed its own Easter celebrations – those which involve hunting for chocolate across several acres of soggy terrain, eating quantities of Easter cake with homemade marzipan (so much better than the shop stuff), and lamb not done the traditional way, for once, but spiced and slow cooked Ottolenghi style. We postponed all this because we had church commitments, as did our friends who came to stay with us.

Having taken the Good Friday service, and with Easter Sunday yet to come, I was particularly glad of the emotional space provided by Holy Saturday. Holy Saturday provides a chance to find our equilibrium in the context of the emotional swing which hurls us from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. Holy Saturday provides time to prepare for Easter Sunday without having to shop and cook at the same time. The preparation on Holy Saturday corresponds to the Jewish Sabbath, so we can also think of the women who had earlier prepared spices with which to anoint the body of the Lord once the Sabbath had passed. We need a Sabbath rest between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, not just to shop, cook and prepare the egg hunt, but to make sense of where the Church and our society stands in this ‘in between time’, in relation to the Easter event itself.

The Saturday space, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, allows us to think of the world in the light of how all things will be when Christ comes again. I have long felt that Holy Saturday is better suited for ‘end time’ reflection than the Sundays preceding Advent. There is a sense of Christ’s absence about it which invites thought about how he will return ‘in glory to judge the living and the dead’, as the Christian creed puts it. This sense of absence is important. It gives us time to bring the suffering and dying of Christ into the light of his rising again and, in so doing, try to make sense of the world through the prism of these events.

Tradition holds that on Holy Saturday Christ descended into hell. While his descent might also be construed in his words of desolation and abandonment spoken from the Cross, he also descended into hell later, as the creeds declare, in order to grasp poor, despairing Judas by the hand and to offer him the kiss of peace in return for his kiss of betrayal. The hope offered to us by God in Jesus would not be hope if it did not travel beyond the reaches of despair.

While we were having supper on one of the evenings when are friends were with us, conversation turned to politics. We were generally agreed about one thing, and that is that the world is a pretty grim place and that it is hard to see where it will all end. Various end time scenarios were postulated, but that was about as far as the conversation was going to take us, until our youngest guest (aged 11) took us to task. What, she asked, did we think we were about? Had we nothing better to offer her generation than a generalised imminent doom scenario? What was she supposed to make of such talk?

Our young guest was far too intelligent to be fobbed off with an abrupt change of subject, or with being told not to worry her pretty head about such things, as if all would be well in the end. So we had to pick up where we had left off and posit something like believable hope. The conversation did not last much longer, but it did invite us to consider in our own minds how such hope, or the lack of it, relates to the kind of despair which Jesus experienced on the Cross and from which he later rescued Adam (the symbol of our humanity) and Judas.

The hope offered to the world in the risen Christ is not like any other kind of hope. It does not depend on vague belief in God, or on vague belief in anything. It is not a straw to be clutched at. Hope lives in the worst imaginable scenarios, past, present and future, and in any degree of despair in the life of any one human being. It is the hope of glory.


Glory pertains only to God. All other forms of glory, and the seductive and temporal power which they bring, are a poor imitation of the glory which pertains to God alone. The delusional desire for this counterfeit glory, and the seductive nature of power itself, accounts for the scarcity of true leadership in the world and in the Church of today. But hope sustains the human spirit because it proceeds from the glory of the ongoing life of the risen Christ. This is the Christ who speaks into the empty politics of the world and of the Church, as he spoke to the grieving woman who had brought spices with which to anoint the body of the one she loved, and found an empty tomb.