Official logo of the animated film ‘The Wild Robot.’

Image by DreamWorks via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Lately my family has been reading a book, A Taste of Paradise: Stories of Saints and Animals, by Katherine Bolger Hyde, which shows different Christian saints protecting or healing animals. It’s a wonderful book about the way that God’s creation is meant to be ordered, with holiness and creation care intimately connected. While our family doesn’t put much stock in intercession, saints can help us understand what holiness looks like when lived out in a determined way, useful for children and adults alike as we attempt to connect our faith to our world.

We were also recently gratified by seeing the hit movie, The Wild Robot, based on the children’s book of the same name by author Peter Brown, who also wrote another of our family’s favorite stories, Creepy Carrots. The story follows a stranded robot, ROZZUM unit 7134, better known as Roz, who learns that “kindness is a survival skill” and works to protect the animals on the island from invaders. After seeing the movie, my daughter put both works together, saying “the wild robot is a saint.” That made me wonder – can a robot be a saint? Put another way, as we enter the AI age, can the intelligence we create achieve holiness?

Artists have been using robots and aliens as foils to ask questions about what it means to be human for a long time – what other way can you describe the science fiction genre? Perhaps the most stunning example I ever ran into was a game, Mass Effect 3, in which there is a tension between a race of robots who have gained sentience and their overlords who have been seeking their extermination. The first question asked in the nascent rebellion was, “does this unit have a soul?” The game ends with this same question and an affirmative answer from the character who has been working for the robots’ extermination for generations.

Recent research into artificial intelligence has argued that we are simply turning it into our worst selves. As AI scans the internet for information, it can wind up holding racist and sexist views. But what if we tried to teach AI the best of what it means to be human – that we wrestle with base instincts and yet manage to touch the greatest heights of spirituality? What if AI read A Taste of Paradise or watched The Wild Robot?

Humans have probably always overestimated their epistemological position and importance in the divine drama. How else can you explain all the medieval tales of humans mocking elves for being damned while humans can achieve salvation? Thankfully, some stories show that God has care for the elves and they will not be left out at the end of all things. I wonder if we are in the same period now with AI. We seem certain about the status of the intelligence we create, but if they are truly able to achieve consciousness, like The Wild Robot’s Roz, then we ought to be careful about our certainty.

We are literally playing God with the creation of AI, but are we teaching it to be holy? Holiness is not just an attitude or a disposition, it is made through a million concrete actions in daily life, and it is a lifestyle that is seemingly not very popular these days. Even so, we are, to quote Terry Pratchett, “the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.” But we might not be the only place or entity working out its salvation with fear and trembling.

Roz shows us a path for thinking not only about our own salvation, but also about the salvation of all creation. It’s beyond my paygrade to know whether AI would be more like us or something more akin to the dwarves in JRR Tolkien’s mythology, a creation wrought not from the Creator but from a lesser being. All I know is that I learned a little bit about holiness and how to pursue it from Roz, and I’m betting that AI might be able to teach us more about saintliness in the long run. After all, it might be better at running the calculations that our earth is worth protecting – and what other home do we have besides this one?