Are We Machines, or Something More?

by Bryce Morgan

Consider this exchange from a near-distant future between a grieving soldier, Joshua, and an advanced robot (or "simulant"), Alphie (who, except for the back of her head, is indistinguishable from an eight or nine-year-old girl):

ALPHIE: If you’re not a robot, how were you made?

JOSHUA: My parents made me.

ALPHIE: Where are they now?

JOSHUA: 'Off'. They’re up in heaven.

ALPHIE:  What’s heaven?

JOSHUA: It’s a peaceful place in the sky.

ALPHIE: Are you going to heaven?

JOSHUA: No.

ALPHIE:  Why not?

JOSHUA:You gotta be a good person to go to heaven.

ALPHIE: Then… we’re the same. We can’t go to heaven. Because you’re not good. And I’m not a person.

Joshua and Alphie, the main characters in Gareth Edwards' 2023 film, The Creator, provide just one example of how human beings of this fictional future interact with stunningly advanced technology. Specifically, the film focuses on the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence (AI). After a nuclear device wipes out part of Los Angeles, most in the Western world are strongly opposed to the AI-controlled robots and simulants (i.e., those that look like people) blamed for the attack. Others, in a region now called New Asia, live peacefully with their mechanical co-workers and neighbors. Whether with romance or reverence, there are those who even love these machines. But like many today who recognize that technology is often both helpful and harmful, Joshua is deeply conflicted.

There is so much to appreciate about The Creator. As the filmmaker behind Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and 2014's Godzilla reboot, Edwards has proven himself to be a visually-gifted storyteller, one who cares about substance as well as style. And The Creator is no exception. But as with many voices today addressing our complicated relationship with technology, the script quickly exposes its faulty assumption that human life is nothing more than a biological machine. This is evident from the film's obvious goal of moving viewers toward genuine wonder, sympathy, acceptance, and even love, for the AI-powered machines (since they are simply another kind of 'machine-life'). While earlier in the film, Joshua can dismiss a salvaged robot who cries out in fear (just as an actual person would), he discovers that he cannot easily dismiss Alphie, the most advanced AI-bot to date; one that even grows like a human child.

While films like The Creator reflect our growing appetites for and apprehensions concerning artificial intelligence and the world it may usher in, what is most valuable about these contributions and this conversation is what they force us to recognize about us; that we are more than biochemical machines; that what Joshua connects with in Alphie is a reflection of humanity in all of its mysterious complexity. While machine analogies can be helpful at times when talking about the material or physical aspect of humans, throughout the millennia, the vast majority of mankind has, in diverse ways, recognized our soulish and spiritual aspects as well. Human life is a miracle and a mystery. What powers it cannot be reduced to mere neural pathways and nourishing proteins, just as human creativity and culture, as well as our deepest human longings, point us to something beyond the material universe. Such realities simply cannot be replicated by processors and algorithms. 

While techno-utopians are content to sum up human life with a world like "intelligence", the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures describe us with far larger language: as those created "in the image of God" (Genesis 1:27). We are "spirit and soul and body" (1 Thessalonians 5:23), not merely a mechanism of fluids and flesh controlled by the pink matter in our heads. What's interesting is how everything that is moving in this movie, everything that is magical and poignant, all of its moral stances, argue against its faulty assumptions about people. We are more. We are special. But ultimately, that's only because of our Source. While Joshua does reference heaven in the dialogue above, he fails to provide a transcendent answer to Alphie's question, "How were you made?" This omission is one of the ways The Creator should drive us back to the Creator of all things. You and I may be the biological product of our parents, but ultimately, all human beings have been "fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:14) by the ultimate Intelligence. 

Amazingly, we can also know and love our Maker, just as we are known and loved by him. He is not a divine technician laboring away in some heavenly lab. Instead, he is a God who seeks and saves. The film chronicles part of Alphie's quest to be reunited with her creator. But when she finally is, the reunion ends with the comatose inventor being pulled off her life support. The scene is an interesting reflection of Jesus, who was, according to Scripture, our Creator in human flesh. But after his crucifixion, Jesus did not stay dead, since he was and is the true "Author of Life" (Acts 4). The heaven that Joshua and Alphie discuss is a world beyond our own, one that provides us today with hope of a life beyond the ugliness of this word and beyond death's shadow. Seeing that all of us, like Joshua, are not good as God is good, the Good News of the Christian faith is that our Creator has come to give us that kind of hope. And he does so through his own goodness and sacrifice, so that we might be rescued by his grace, and simply by trusting him. In light of these astounding and ancient truths, no matter what our future technological future holds, we can rejoice that there is nothing artificial about the true Creator's story.

Bryce Morgan is a husband and father, and the founder of Pop Eternal. He's also the creator of the Captain Sun adventures, as well as the author of "Confessions of a Secret Santa".