Are You Ready for JIBO the Robotic Spiritual Advisor?

What if technology could help you feel closer to God?

Only July 15, Dr. Cynthia Breazeal and her team announced JIBO on Indiegogo. It is an impressive social robot that is priced to replace your tablet at home. After watching the video yesterday, my son said, “It’s hard to believe something like that will be real next year.” Fall of 2015 according to the site.

JIBO is not quite WALL-E or R2D2, but it looks amazing. At the end of the promotional video (see below), Dr. Breazeal asks, “What if technology actually treated you like a human being? What if technology helped you to feel closer to the ones you loved? What if technology helped you like a partner rather than simply being a tool? …Together we can humanize technology.”

People have imagined companion technologies since the dawn of science fiction and fantasy—from Dorothy’s Tin Man to Shelley’s Frankenstein. They have even found some success with early chatterbot programs. Consider ELIZA, a program developed in the 1960s by Joseph Weizenbaum. This simple text-based robot provided pre-programmed responses to users. For some people working with the program, ELIZA was a decent psychotherapist. Weizenbaum was surprised at how quickly people connected emotionally with ELIZA.

And that was just a text-based chatterbot from the 1960s.

As Editor of The High Calling, I’m constantly thinking about the integration of faith and work. For the past few years, much of our reflection has focused on the tools we use in our work. We have wondered how Christians can honor God when they use email, social media, or mobile devices.

Certainly, Christians have developed some wonderful new tools for helping us connect with God. YouVersion is one of the most popular. Pray As You Go is one of my personal favorites. And, of course, The High Calling Daily Reflection is a tool designed to help people think specifically about the integration of faith and work.

Robotics, though, promises something new. JIBO is a technology specifically designed to help us feel an emotional bond with the robot. Technology as our companion rather than our tool.

In the video, a young girl caresses her JIBO before going to sleep and is rewarded with a glowing heart icon. A young professional comes home from work and addresses his JIBO as “Buddy.” An elderly woman engages with her JIBO as if she is a character from the movie Robot and Frank. Imagine how quickly some people will develop an emotional bond with our cute little JIBOs. If our phones prompt us to pray, will our family robots join us in prayer?

Why not? Why not create technology so good we can bond with it emotionally? God created us in his image and loved us, so we long to create a companion in our image that we can love.

This is not a sinful impulse, but a creative desire to imitate a creative God and so to worship God.

Nor is this creative desire new. Before there were chatterbots, there were clay robots. For centuries, Jewish folklore has brought us stories of the golem, a sort of medieval clay robot.

In God in the Machine, Anne Foerst writes about golems as a way of understanding artificial intelligence. The word “golem” originally comes from Psalm 139, in which the psalmist writes, “You created me in my mother’s womb…. Your eyes saw my unformed golem.”

The helpful golem seems to have been a robot much in the spirit of Breazeal’s social robot, Jibo. And like any golem, Jibo needs good programming if we hope for him to be a good companion.

According to some versions of the golem story, Rabbi Loew created his golem with a simple program—a small piece of paper in its mouth with the name of God written on it. If we push on this analogy just a little further, it invites programmers, developers, and even users to consider the holy potential of technology.

To what degree are we including the name of God in our technologies? To what degree are we filling our technology with the identity of God?

Consider the fruits of the spirit, for example—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Where God is love and joy, many technologies foster selfish egotism. Where God is peace and patience, many technologies amplify our disagreements. Where God is self-control, many technologies fuel our compulsions.

Christians believe these abstract fruits are embodied in the person of Jesus. Whether you believe the story is literal or not, the Incarnation of God in Jesus reminds us how important our bodies are. My body is not simply a tool that I use to get around and do stuff. My body is me. When God wanted to relate to people in the deepest possible way, he chose to use a body like ours.

Most of our technologies are still abstractions without any kind of body at all. Today’s most pervasive “companion” technology, the smart phone, looks more like the scary monoliths from 2001 than R2D2. The abyss of a blank screen hides just beneath every swipe and tap. A smart phone is a poor golem, even if we fill it with the name of God using apps like YouVersion and Pray as You Go. Talking about the body of a phone makes about as much sense as talking about the body of a shovel we use to dig holes. It is a tool, not a body.

We think of our tools as an extension of our own bodies rather than as companions, but even this is changing with apps like Siri. Siri has a name. She has some spunk. My kids love to ask her funny questions and see how she will respond. But we will struggle to relate to her as a companion as long as she is locked inside a metal rectangular body.

So it is easy to accept Siri’s failure as a spiritual advisor, only slightly better than ELIZA. Ask Siri if she believes in God, and she might reply, “I would ask that you address your spiritual questions to someone more qualified to comment. Ideally, a human.”

Our robots will never be human, but JIBO is the most believable, consumer grade companion robot that I’ve seen. Dr. Breazeal calls JIBO a social robot. Her promotional video calls JIBO the world’s first family robot. The invitation is clear: we can experience technology as something between a thing we use and a thing we love.

Someday soon people will turn to social robots for more than just takeout and storytime. When JIBO and other our unformed golems come to market, God help us if we haven’t put God’s name in their mouths.