Der Mensch als Turing-Maschine?

Abstract

The article asks for the conditions and restraints of artificial intelligence and reflects on its relevance for humans in a theological perspective. It first presents an account of Alan M. Turing's analysis of computational intelligence and uses it to specify the difference between (up to date) artificial and natural intelligence. It is claimed with reference to Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theoremes that natural intelligence is distinguished from currently possible forms of artificial intelligence by semantic openness. The second part of the article develops consequences for human self-understanding in difference to machines, answers the question which robots to which purposes we should and should not build, and asks for the relation between faith and reason with respect to the incompleteness of formal knowledge and description.