24 | NewScientist | 15 February 2014

For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technologyTechnology

Religion vs robotCan theology help shape technology, asks Hal Hodson

A SPECIAl guest will be attending this year’s creationist conference in North Carolina. It is not a Christian. It is not a even a human. But it is helping evangelists find answers.

The Southern Evangelical Seminary in Matthews, North Carolina, this week unveiled the $16,000 humanoid NAo robot from Aldebaran Robotics it has bought to study the ethical dilemmas posed by technology.

“That Jesus adopted human form is extremely significant, from a Christian perspective, on the value of humans as a holistic being that’s physical and spiritual,” says Kevin Staley, who is leading the project. He worries that rapid advances in robotics may start to erode some of the value that Christian theology ascribes to humans.

Staley has a list of questions he wants NAo to help answer: “What sorts of societal burdens or pressures are these robots intended to alleviate? What sort of problems will they introduce? What are the advantages to having a robot like this in our company?”

Religious interest in emerging technologies is nothing new, says Arthur Caplan of the NyU langone Medical Center. Until now, the focus

has been on medical technology. “Religious concerns have shaped blood transfusion, vaccine research, xenografting, stem cells and cloning,” Caplan says. The driving theme is whether those technologies are respectful of human life. Robots with human-level functionality may push the same buttons, he says: “Does it break the natural order of things?”

Humans have a tendency to anthropomorphise robots to a much higher level than other non-human

things, says Kate Darling, a lawyer turned roboticist working at the MIT Media lab. She says this is down to robots’ seemingly unpredictable motion, growing ability to interact socially and their physical presence in our lives.

“We had people interact with very cute baby robotic dinosaurs, and then at the end of the workshop we asked them to torture and kill them. They were pretty distressed by this,” Darling says. This raises questions about how

to bring up children with a robot in the house, she says.

Some companies are already tackling these questions. Google, for example, obviously has questions of its own. After spending billions of dollars on a slew of robotics and artificial intelligence companies, the internet giant has reportedly set up an internal ethics board to handle the technology from one acquisition, AI outfit DeepMind.

Staley has different concerns. He wants to understand how robots might end up replacing us. “We’re approaching a point where it’s possible that a robot would become an accepted substitute for a human person in a number of ways,” he says. “There’s the question of marrying robots. There will be another significant market for robots when it comes to sex.” (See “The cure for love”, p 29.)

Ultimately, Staley says he wants religious communities to have a say in the way robots shape our future. They are well on the way to doing this. The Southern Evangelical Seminary has launched a competition to give its robot a name. “They’re obviously anthropomorphising it already,” says Darling. n

“ Robotics may start to erode some of the value that Christian theology ascribes to humans”

XIN

HU

A PR

ESS/

CoR

BIS

POACHERS beware. Surveillance drones offer a highly effective way to catch wildlife criminals in the act. Namibia’s Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET) came to this conclusion after trialling a raft of wildlife crime-fighting technologies, with funding from Google.

In field tests conducted in two national parks in November 2013, drones with 2-metre wingspans flew day and night missions to video black rhino herds and send live footage to poacher-tracking rangers on the ground. Smart radio tags attached to rhinos allowed the drones to home in on each herd’s current location, says Pierre du Preez, MET’s chief conservation scientist.

“We broke new ground using technologies that have never been integrated before to provide powerful wildlife protection,” says Crawford Allan, leader of the Wildlife Crime Technology Project at WWF, which was also involved.

The MET says it will now deploy drones in areas of Namibia where rhinos and elephants roam. WWF estimates that illegal poaching in Africa nets criminals $10 billion each year – with some 22,000 elephants killed annually and 1000 rhinos killed last year in South Africa alone. Similar projects are under way in Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Seychelles. Paul Marks n

InSIghT Ethics Elephants and rhinos gain drone protection

–Created in our own image–

HEl

GE D

ENKE

R, N

ACS

o/ W

WF

IN N

AM

IBIA

140215_N_Tech_Last.indd 24 11/02/2014 09:47