Robots can't sin. That's why they would make lousy priests.

The program I use to compose and arrange music has a tool which will take a passage from one instrument and create accompaniment for other instruments out of it. Arrangement is a complex task which can turn a simple folk tune into a lush orchestral symphony or reduce a well-known classical piece to a New Orleans jazz combo (as Harry Connick, Jr. did with “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairies”). The small handful of times I used the “Arrange” tool, the results either took a lot of adjustment before they were acceptable or were too horrendous to keep.

The program knows a lot of the rules and conventions of music but has no aesthetic sense. It doesn’t know how an oboe can express longing, or how an oboe can put a comedic feel to a passage, or how a trumpet can bring a leap to the soul. It doesn’t get music. As such, the program will never be more than a tool to be used by a creative human.

I know quite a bit about theory and composition, yet I will probably never write a song as catchy and memorable as Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” or Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville.” By contrast, Elvis Presley claimed to know nothing about music — “In my line of work, you don’t have to” — but he got musical performance on an intuitive level that I can only appreciate.

“Robot priests can bless you, advise you, and even perform your funeral,” says the title of a story in Vox by Sigal Samuel. If you don’t expect much beyond the kind of gee-whiz goo and gush over the latest futuristic concepts you find in Popular Science, Samuel’s writing won’t disappoint you. Vox is not a religious platform, let alone a Catholic platform, and rarely rises to the challenge of deep intellectual engagement. Occasionally, they’ll print an op-ed piece that defies expectations. Otherwise, it’s as if every article were deliberately crafted to appeal to shallow, left-leaning twenty- and thirty-somethings.

In the last few years, I’ve become more of a technology skeptic. It has nothing to do with the “pervasive cultural narrative” to which Samuel refers “about our impending enslavement at the hands of ‘robot overlords.’” I appreciate the many benefits technological innovation has brought. But I’m also aware that these benefits have often come at costs to our society, environment, and psyches that have yet to be fully reckoned.

Nevertheless, I fear no future enslavement because the future of artificial intelligence is oversold. Computer scientists have too much faith in algorithms and neuroscientists not enough knowledge of how the mind really works.

I’ve heard it said programmers believe that so long as they can get a computer to emulate a behavior, they don’t have to know what really goes on in the black box of the human mind to produce that behavior. If true, then it practically guarantees that, no matter how complex they make the algorithms, the result will be a robot that doesn’t get humans. What will pass for its mind won’t work the same way human minds do; it won’t make decisions or evaluate facts the same way we do. A robot priest might never sin, but it would never understand sin, either.

To be effective as a preacher, or as a confessor, or as a spiritual father, the priest has to understand people and the Catholic faith at an intuitive level (at least 90% of the time). He has to know what it’s like to be tempted, to be prone to sin, to suffer, to be remorseful, to have well-intentioned actions result in injury to others, to be conflicted, to be socially pressured, to feel envy, anger, lust. Not only must he get the human condition from the inside; his people must also know he gets it.

Robots will never be able to sin in any meaningful sense because they will never be able to understand being able to do, or to even consider doing, something you must not do. They could give you reasons for their choices, but the reasons would not be their own. Their programming may demand conflicting actions, but they will never feel the anguish of a conflicted soul. The fact that they don’t get free will or sin from the inside will betray itself over and over, in ways both subtle and egregious. Empathy is hard to fake successfully for very long.

And we’ll always know deep down that they don’t get us, that they’ll never get us.

God gets us. To show us that He gets us, He became incarnate, taking on not only human flesh but human nature as well, like ours in everything except sin (Hebrews 4:15). He is eternal, so He has never not known what it’s like to have nails pounded through your hands and feet, what it’s like to be a mortal among mortals. Other cultures have created few gods who care about us, let alone empathize with us. This is not an element of the Christian gospel that we can do without. This is why a sinful, erring man can act in persona Christi and a sinless robot can’t.

Today our current problem isn’t that God doesn’t get us, but rather that we don’t get us. As a result, we don’t get either God or religion in general.

Sentient robots are the Martians of the 21st century. They make interesting story devices through which we can contemplate concepts like free will, values, otherness, and other aspects of the human condition. But I’m more worried about us growing too dependent on machines than I am about machines “awakening” and developing free will. I’m more worried about a subculture that has an uncritical craving for novelty and a near-pathological refusal to learn from the past than I am about a future robot apocalypse.

And I’m more worried about people who are willing to worship a robot god than I am about robot priests. That’s not progress. That’s a psychological return to golden calves. Why would I want to worship a god that doesn’t get me?