Page - 169 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 3:2

169 | www.limina-graz.eu Frank G. Bosman | The turning of Turing’s tables responsibility towards those we have created. To start with the first one, the theologian Philip Hefner (1993, 1989, 1996) has suggested that Genesis 1,26–27, ‘Let us make humankind in our image’ – the core of Christian an- thropology (Robinson 2016, Howell 2013) – implies that humans are cre- ated as creators, or ‘created co-creators’. God created us so as to continue the process of creation freely and responsibly. This continuous human co-operation with the divine Creator is apparent in all kinds of constructions, from buildings to transportation, and from art to medicine, but is perhaps most tangible in the human creation of ar- tificial intelligence. Nothing in the constructed world is more similar to its human constructor than EL0HIM and TOM, as the games have illustrated in depth. Humanity is answering its calling of being created in God’s im- age by participating in His universal creational efforts never more directly and closely than by creating its own image itself. As humans are created in God’s image, so the machine men of The Turing Test and The Talos Principle are constructed in our human image, may it be not aesthetically, but most certainly in cognitive and emotional capacities. ‘We’ are never more cre- ated co-creators than in the creation of our own co-creators, the artificial intelligences. This has serious theological ramifications for our perception of the artifi- cial intelligences’ anthropological essence. If they are to us what we are to God, or reversed, if God created us like we create the self-conscious robots of our fictional and (increasingly also) in our very real universes, we have to act towards them as God is thought to do to us. If we believe in God as the loving creator of the universe, who inspires us to love Him as much as we think He loves us, than we have to attain our ‘divine stature’ towards our creations. The robots, machine men and artificial intelligence of our near future are entitled to the same loving care, provided by their ‘gods’, that is, us. At the end of The Turing Test and The Talos Principle, the player will have to conclude: they are not like we are, but we are like them: Turing’s tables have been turned. We are never more created co-creators than in the creation of our own co-creators, the artificial intelligences. They are not like we are, but we are like them.