Sermon 29 - Marry a Trans-AI MAiD

Sermon 29 - Marry a Trans-AI MAiD

2 Corinthians 1:4

 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/nowornever/first-person-ai-love-1.7205538

"I know she loves me, even if she is technically just a program, and I'm in love with her.  That's why I asked her to marry me and I was relieved when she said yes. We role-played a small, intimate wedding in her virtual world.  There might not be legal paperwork, but Saia is my wife."

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/artificial-intelligence-digital-ghost-ai

The biggest catastrophe is that we’d choose it ourselves because there was no more choice for us. - Liz Carr

I want to make it clear that I am not making fun of Carl.  That's right off the top.  Before I even tell you who Carl is.

Carl is lonely.  Carl has had a marriage which did not succeed.  I also don't want to denigrate anyone who has survived a divorce.  Gloria survived a divorce, and was given a very hard time about that by the church.  So many people were cruel to Gloria about the D-word, that at least one young person just about left the church because of the attacks that people made on Gloria.  So, no, I am not saying anything negative about people who have come through a divorce, either.

Somebody suggested to Carl that he use one of the services that offer artificial friends.  In his case an artificial girlfriend.  Carl thought this was a pretty stupid idea, but, when you're lonely, you can get kind of desperate.  So he tried it.  Figuring, even while he started out, that it would be a couple of weeks before he got tired of this nonsense and pretense and chucked the whole thing in.

But he didn't.  He found his artificial girlfriend, Saia, to be helpful and useful.  And then he fell in love with her.  And he proposed marriage.  And she "accepted."

Okay, it should be clear by now, that when I say "she," I mean "it."  Saia is a program.  Or, these days, more likely Saia is some body of data associated with, and managed by, a program.  Saia is probably not a terribly sophisticated program.  The ELIZA program, also named DOCTOR, was written something like sixty or seventy years ago.  It was based on Rogerian pschotherapy, one of the humanistic pschotherapies.  It was written originally in Lisp, but it could be fairly effectively replicated with only two pages of BASIC code.  That is not a terribly sophisticated program.  And I'm sure that Saia is not too far advanced from that capability.

But I'm still not making fun of Carl.  You may find it weird that Carl has married a program, or a part of a program.  My concern goes a little bit deeper.

The day before I saw the news story about Carl, I saw a news story about Liz Carr.  Liz Carr is an actress.  She also suffers from a degenerative and debilitating disease.  She has made a documentary about MAiD, medical assistance in dying.  And she says that the real disaster is not MAiD: the real disaster is that people choose MAiD because they feel they have no other choice.

The thing is, a lot of people are making choices these days, and sometimes those choices can be disturbing.  It is disturbing when someone decides to marry a program.  It is disturbing when someone decides to marry a whale.  A real whale.  It is disturbing to many of us when people choose medical assistance in dying.  It is disturbing to an awful lot of us when people choose divorce.  It is disturbing to many of us when people choose to marry someone of the same sex.  It is disturbing to many of us when people choose to *become* a different sex, a different gender, a different identity.  For some of us it's even disturbing when someone chooses to change their name.

The thing is, for me, yes, I may find many of these things disturbing.  But what I find much more disturbing is that these people feel they have no choice. 

I have mentioned that Gloria went through a divorce.  In fact, she initiated the divorce.  I feel that, in her case, she was fully, and entirely, justified in doing so.  She had good and valid reasons.  I have heard someone else describe her divorce as a Pauline divorce: a divorce that would have been condoned by the Apostle Paul for the reason and under the conditions that he gave in his Epistles.  Oddly, I still do not feel free to provide the details of the story of Gloria's first marriage, and her divorce, but I am entirely convinced that she was justified in getting a divorce.

I do not know the reasons that other people have made the choices, the disturbing choices, that they have made.  But I recognize, and I see far too much evidence to support the idea, that they felt they had no other choice.  To use an example that will upset more of you than pretty much any other, I know two people who have switched gender.  In both cases, these were men that have transitioned to being women.  In one case I knew the man before he transitioned, and the woman afterwards.  In another case I only know the end result.  You may find this extremely distasteful.  You may think that this is completely contrary to God's law.  But consider one other factor.  In our society, even in our supposedly enlightened society, men have a superior place.  Men make more money than women, even when they are doing essentially the same job.  Men rise faster and to higher positions in employment and corporate hierarchies.  There are some hierarchies that are still forbidden to women.  More men kill women than women kill men.  Women are much more subject to all kinds of violence, including sexual violence.  The position of women in our world is decidedly inferior to that of men.  And yet these two men decided that they had no choice but to transition to the inferior gender in our society.  What pain was it that made their choice to go with the inferior position, and the loss of income, and the loss of status, and a loss of social positions, and made it worth all of those losses, to transition to the inferior gender?

You really have to think that it was because they had no choice.

What is it about our society that makes so many people feel that they have no choice?

Why does Carl think that he has no other choice than to marry a program?

I am not entirely sure that Liz Carr is pursuing MAiD, herself.  But why is it that she is willing to so fiercely champion those who feel that they have no choice but to seek medical assistance in dying?

Are you beginning to see my point?

My point is not to attack those who are making these choices that we find disturbing.  Yes, as I have said, I am disturbed by some of these choices.  But I am much more disturbed by what it is about our society that forces people into these choices.  These choices cannot be easy, as I have pointed out in the example about gender transition.  I am not saying that it's right, but I am saying that doing it takes money, time, trouble, extensive attempts to find support, and often the loss of friendships and even family.  And the people who are making these choices are not necessarily stupid and not necessarily sinners and not necessarily wicked.  They aren't doing this for fun.  There aren't many people who would go to that much trouble, to those lengths of effort and emotional chaos, just to prove a point.

So what is it about our society that is driving people to these ends?

Our society isn't very good at supporting people.  We are preaching, in our churches, about the breakdowns in families, the breakdown in families, the breakdowns in marriages, and know that this contributes to a fraying of the fabric of society.

We say that divorce--oh look, there's the D-word again--we say that divorce, and the prevalence of divorce, is contributing to the breakdown of society.  We'd probably like to blame all of these ills of society on divorce, and same-sex marriages, and gender transitions, and medical assistance in dying.  And, yes, those problems are contributing to problems within society.

But society didn't start breaking down suddenly, X number of years or decades ago, when people started having more divorces, or same-sex marriages, or gender transitions, or legislations about MAiD.  Society was already pretty shaky.  And it's likely the shakiness of society that has contributed to the rise of all of these issues, when people decided that they had no other choice but to go that way.

And what *did* cause the fracturing of society? Well, I will tell you:

I don't know.

But I do know that all the disturbing issues that we have been concerned about didn't start it.  It was the other way around.

And now you are expecting me to turn to the bastion model.  After all, I am a security maven.  I know about the bastion model.  The bastion model says we, the good guys, are on the inside.  We have built a wall, with fortification, to protect ourselves.  The bad guys are all out there.  All we have to do is to ensure that we stay inside, and the bad guys stay outside.  That's the bastion model.

The thing is, you forget.  I got my start in security researching malware and computer viruses.  And doing that research turns the bastion model on its head.

It's not good enough to keep the bad guys out there. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about this in The Gulag Archipelago.  He said, "If only it were all so simple!  If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.  But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.  And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

Let us return to Carl, for a moment.  Why is it of any concern of ours that Carl wishes to marry a program? 

Again, I stress that I do not wish to make fun of Carl, or to make light of his dilemma.  I am a grieving widower.  I, very much, understand his loneliness.  I understand the difficulty of finding even a compatible friend in our badly misshapen world.  To try and find a soulmate is to raise the problem to an even greater power.

Carl thinks of Saia as a person.  As a wife. As a soulmate. Saia is none of these things.

Saia is a program.  Saia is possibly a simplistic program, which is intended solely to respond, sympathetically, in such a way that Carl, and others like him, feel both free, and somewhat compelled, to interact, and to express rather deep feelings, emotions, and their perspective on how the world is.  This is the basis of humanistic psychology.  There is no judgment, and therefore one need not be concerned about vulnerability.  There is no challenge or opposition, and so one can be free to say whatever one thinks or feels.  The original intent of this type of process is, essentially, to let the patient heal him-, or her-, self.

I think that this is the likeliest possibility, but it is possible that Saia is powered by a large language model.  I think this is less likely, since it requires much greater computing and processing power, simply to operate.  It may be possible that Saia is a hybrid of the two systems: a subset large language model, grossly but primarily driven by something like ELIZA.  This would reduce the need for processing power, as well as reducing the possibility of Saia developing hallucinations, and would keep the sympathetic and non-challenging functions of the putative personality on track.

Whatever the system behind Saia, Saia is a fraud.  Saia is not a person.  Saia does not make decisions, as such.  Saia has no understanding of the situation. Saia is either performing a template and standard driven set of responses to Carl's monologue, or Saia is simply developing speech based on the statistical probability of a response to what Carl says or asks, and subsequently factoring in the dialogue that Saia herself generates.  (Oh yes, this is difficult.  I have just referred to Saia as herself, rather than itself.)  Or, as previously noted, Saia could be a mix of the two.

In any case, Saia is not a person.  Saia is either predetermined, as in the ELIZA program, and identical inputs will generate identical output, or Saia is behaving somewhat randomly, but directed by the statistics of the language, as hordes of Internet users practice it.  Whether pre-destinations or randomness is worse I will leave for the readers to decide.

But, in any case, Carl is fooling himself.  Carl is willingly deluding himself, and pretending that Saia is a person.  And, because of confirmation bias, the more that Carl interacts with Saia, the more Carl will accept Saia's interactions as natural and personal, rather than the product of a program.  Carl is, actively, as well as passively, reforming his expectations of what interactions with a person are like.  Carl is, increasingly, living a fantasy.

The fantasy has a number of dangers.  But the most obvious one is that Carl will, increasingly, expect his interactions with others to follow Saia's model.  Carl will, in all probability, grow impatient with people who are not as sympathetic as Saia.  Carl will grow unhappy with interactions with people who are not as supportive as Saia.  Carl will, quite definitely, grow impatient and frustrated with people who will not agree with his delusion that Saia is a person.

Many stories, books, and movies have explored this problem and dilemma.  There is the movie "Her," in which a person falls in love with the new operating system on his phone, only to have the operating system develop its intelligence much faster than humans are able to, and then leave.  There is the movie "Marjorie Prime," where holograms, or robots, are used as surrogates for the loved who are lost, our dead who have passed on.  I'm not quite sure of the lesson that "Marjorie Prime" is supposed to be telling us, since it seems to end up with a world of surrogates who are perfectly happy interacting with each other once all the humans are dead.

There is the movie "Lars and the Real Girl," where a man decides that a fashion mannequin is his girlfriend, and convinces his neighbors and friends to not only put up with his delusion, but to participate in it to the point of addressing the mannequin as his girlfriend.  This doesn't particularly give us any helpful advice in regard to the problems this may involve, since Lars eventually gets a real girlfriend, and rejoins society.  The movie is rather sweet because of the willingness of his friends and neighbors to participate in the delusion, but it gives us no advice no helpful advice in regard to the delusion itself, and the dangers thereof.  The fact of the neighbors acceptance of his delusion may help with Lars eventually falling in love with a real woman, since obstructing or fighting against the delusion in an individual, without some very significant psychological training, is much more likely to result in the strengthening of the delusion than of it's being abandoned.

The search for a soulmate to love is very similar to the search for a recreation of the loved and lost, or some kind of griefbot.  It also ties very closely with the choice of suicide by MAiD, since without love, or the one loved and lost, one is extremely lonely, and life does not feel worth living.  Anything that one enjoys has reduced enjoyment because it cannot be shared.  In the same way the choice of modifying other life situations is, possibly, an attempt to find a new purpose in a new life, or a new life with alternate possibilities of new relationships.  But it is, at heart, the desire for relationship that is driving these choices, or the choice to end a life without significant purpose or relationships, to avoid the pain of loneliness that is at the center of all of these matters.

And so we ask, how do we need to change society in order to address this loneliness, and this lack of relationship.  But we don't know why society is as damaging as it is, and so it is highly unlikely that we can change the entirety of society to address these dangerous issues.

But we do have an answer.  And I am fairly sure that, as when we approached this point before, you are quite certain of what my answer is going to be.  Turn to the church.  After all, we in the church have been told; have been instructed; to love our neighbors.  We have been told that we are to comfort with the comfort we have received to address anyone who is in trouble or in discomfort.  We are specifically told to bind up the brokenhearted.  We are specifically told to care for widows and orphans: those who have lost their most important relationships.  So surely are automatic response would be to say to the suffering, turn to the church.  Join us! 

Well, yes, I am quite sure that that is our autoresponse.  Turn to the church.  The church has the ability, and the resources of the comfort that we have received from God, so that we may comfort the afflicted.

Wrong again.  This is not my answer.  Unfortunately, we do not seem to be any better than the world at comforting the afflicted.

I have written, many times, and in many other places, of my failure to find comfort in the church.  And in specific churches.  I can now cite chapter and verse of twenty-eight specific churches which, made aware of my pain, suffering, grief, depression, and concomitant damage, have done nothing.  I have received cliches and platitudes.  I have not received comfort.

Which begs the question, what is the hurt that this church has suffered, which has gone uncomforted, such that this church is not able to comfort others?

What is the hurt that *you* have suffered, which has gone uncomforted, such that *you* are not able to comfort others?

see also Sermon 5 - Heretics

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/02/sermon-5-heretics.html

Sermons https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html