ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argues that robots and artificial intelligence are being used in video games as thought experiments concerning the human condition, parallel to the use of angels in epistemological debates in medieval and modern times. In games as Nier: Automata, The Talos Principle, The Turing Test and the Fallout series, ‘artificial intelligences’ are represented as very advanced computer programs, possibly with the appearance of an android body, capable of behaving anthropomorphically and in the possession of feelings, usually ‘wrestling’ with growing self-awareness and self-consciousness. The author argues that human capacities like freedom, morality, creativity and speech are not only critically projected onto artificial intelligence but that these projections are also critical of these capacities in themselves. If a robot is capable of having a moral compass, then this has serious ramifications for our own perspective on morality. The same applies to language, freedom and creativity. The author ends this chapter by suggesting that the artificial intelligence found in our video games can be interpreted as another instance of the imago Dei: robots are built after their human creators, just as humans were created after the image of their creator.
