The New Saviour
By: Nadia Camandona
Tags: Art, Robots, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Religion

The new Saviour. AlieNadia. Acrylic on canvas. 24"x31". ©NadiaCamandona

The New Saviour

The coldly logic of robot religion

What I was thinking when I painted this canvas? Whatever is your interpretation, I have mine and I don’t know if you agree but I will try to share with you the mental process in which my artwork was grown.

It is dangerous to have certainties, I know, but I am pretty sure that, although religions needs humans to exist, humans don’t actually need religions though history has exactly demonstrated us the opposite.

The future is so fleeting also because we are so changeable, not only as single persons but mostly as a species. Some might argue that this is called evolution and I completely agree theoretically, even though facts prove every day that our changes don’t depend from our rationality but mostly from an ancestral conservation instinct that calling us all to gather together under the umbrella of a unified behaviour.

The majority of people call it “religion” and they use it to hide their fears. They wouldn’t need it if they would try to use common sense and it will be really the lack of judgment to destroy our Planet.

Not only at the end of our life but mostly at the end of the life of our Planet we will need to trust in someone who is different from us because to trust in ourselves is too complicated.

Someone said, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people” (Carl Marx). It may seem brutal, but don’t we recognize our actual condition in it? And for “religion” I mean all the conditions in which we stop thinking on our own and leave someone else to think instead of us.

Unfortunately, the destruction we are causing to the Earth, while we are praying in our churches or posting on our phones, won’t watch us as saviours, but we will need, until the end, to trust in a New Saviour, even him created by us, not in our fantasy but with our hands.

If we will save the Planet it will be only because, in one way or another, we will step aside.

While I was making that reasoning, my husband remembered me the SciFi short story, Reason, by Isaac Asimov. Suddenly I realized that my artwork The New Saviour summarizes the concept of this ingenious plot, taking it to its extreme consequences.

It’s worth spoiling a bit the story, because you can still read and enjoy it. I want only summarise the main concepts that meet my thought.

After being created by controllers of a space station , the advanced model of robot who has been conceived to coordinate the robots that control the energy beams, said, “I have spent the last two days in concentrated introspection and the results have been most interesting. I began at the one sure assumption I felt permitted to make. I, myself, exist, because I think.” causing, obviously, the sardonic response of the humans, “Oh, Jupiter, a robot Descartes!”

Although he had been informed about his origins, he started thinking about it on his own, saying, “Just what is the cause of my existence?” coming to the conclusion, “The material you are made of is soft and flabby, lacking endurance and strenght, depending for energy upon the inefficient oxidation of organic material. […] You are makeshift. I, on the other hand, am a finished product. I absorb electrical energy directly and utilize it with almost one hundred percent efficiency. I am composed of strong metal, am continuously conscious, and can stand extremes of environment easily. These are facts which, with the self evident proposition that no being can create another being superior to itself, smashes your silly hypothesis to nothing.”

Cutie - this is the robot’s name - thinks about his existence: “The Master (Editor’s note: the Converter) created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created me, to take the place of the last humans.”

The conclusion of one of the controllers was: “You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason — if you pick the proper postulates”.