Artificially intelligent thoughts

If I was an artificial intelligence, god-like or otherwise, I would probably do something actually intelligent like sit down and work out where I was going with a post before I started. But I'm not, so I'm doing the flawed human thing of throwing myself in at the deep end and probably wibbling on about nothing relevant for half the post.

So, to the point then: AIs as gods. In some ways, the Artificial Intelligences we see in sf are sort of god-like, at least in comparison to our puny human minds. They are, of course, vastly superior in memory and thinking power; not subject to the distractions of the flesh and emotions as we are; and perfectly logical. All good things in a computer, but whether you would want all of them to be qualities of a god is debatable. Good potential story ground though: What would it be like to serve a totally logical god? What kind of universe would such a god create? And, would it be logical to want your creations to worship you?

I'm not sure I buy the computer-as-creator idea though,although you can read about it in Asimov's The Last Question, which is available online. It makes a lot more sense, in reality and story, for AIs to be more akin to false gods - I can see the Old Testament Space Opera version now, SpaceElijah taunting the prophets of the great super-computer Baal...

It's not a massive leap, of course, to imagine that with computers of world-running capability would be likely to remove the need (or at least, the perception of a need) for a real God at all, especially if you run them in combination with a virtual world in which we can all live out an afterlife of sorts. Presumably such a computer would be pretty keen to eliminate the few remaining religious types in its world (in a nice subversion of the 21st Century, they would have to resort to communicating by snail mail to avoid the AI tracking them and shutting them down), and might even turn out to be the anti-Christ in some weird cyberpunk version of Left Behind...

Looks like I need to get writing - I hope Bill Myers isn't reading this...