S7E7—Conscious Robot Dogs And God’s Sovereignty—With Wired Columnist Meghan O'Gieblyn

Device & Virtue

Is a computer actually like the human brain? And is God’s wisdom as mysterious as an AI’s black box? We host Wired columnist Meghan O’Gieblyn with fascinating conversation through sentience, suffering, God’s sovereignty—and of course, AI robotic dogs.

Meghan O'Gieblyn is the author of God Human Animal Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning. Her previous essay collection Interior States, won the Believer Book Award for nonfiction. She writes essays and criticism for Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Times, and Bookforum. Her writing has received three Pushcart Prizes, was nominated for a National Magazine Award, and has appeared in The Best American Essays and The Contemporary American Essay anthologies.

And she writes a monthly advice column for our perennial favorite WIRED magazine.

Big Questions

• How is it possible that humans can become attached to these artificial intelligence pets?
• What is the “hard problem of consciousness” in philosophy?
• How has the language of computers affected how we think about our own mind?
• Will artificial intelligence affect the way we think about God? Suffering?

A note on faith

Meghan openly talks on this episode that she no longer considers herself a Christian—despite growing up as an evangelical and a degree in Christian theology. She incorporates her personal story of belief and doubt into her recent book. While of course at Device & Virtue we produce our podcast from our own Christian worldview & faith, we felt like we had much to consider from her thoughts and were thankful she agreed to come on the show knowing we were a podcast of faith.

Books & Links

• Chris mentions author Ted Chiang’s science fiction story “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” about artificially intelligent pets
• Adam and Meghan discuss LaMDA—an AI chatbot by Google trained on conversation. In June 2022, news was made when a Google employee named Blake Lemoine claimed that the chatbot was sentient, a claim rejected by experts.
• Meghan O'Gieblyn’s earlier book that Adam mentions at the beginning was entitled Interior States

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