Can a robot sin?
For, if a robot can never sin, then he is in no need of the salvation of Christ s death and resurrection. Robots will have choices to make, and some of these choices are moral choices. Is it possible that a robot could (a) know that a choice was wrong, and (b) choose to take it? It seems to me that whilst it is possible that much of the time a robot may consciously choose to do what he believes to be good, it is impossible for him to have perfect knowledge; therefore, he will frequently sin due to his living in an imperfect world. Thus robots will become corrupted by humans. One problem for cognitive science is that the behaviour of an intelligent system is largely viewed in terms of the knowledge it has. This naturally leads one to a similar view to Plato s of the nature of evil; namely, that people sin because they do not know any better. But ultimately it is probably a question of loving oneself above one s love for other people; in some sense this is a sort of knowledge, but how it
