Excerpt - Worldbuilding & Lore (319 words) Source: Legend & Legacy: Book One | Chapter 15 Context: Article about Artificial intelligence and Its Vulnerabilities
The Soul Paradox theory offered a profound insight into one of the vulnerabilities within the cognitive space of artificial intelligence programming.
The theory stated that there could not truly exist a perfect artificial intelligence, because the robot could never accurately calculate the value of (1a) goodness and (2a) survival, because it would mean it would need to also understand the magnitude of the scale of (1b) evil and how its perception must be correlated with an undefined value of (2b) death.
As robots did not have souls, the value of death as a digital perception would always be displaced through a statistically significant variance; robots did not innately need to fear death; robot brains could copy and live regardless of body or framing, as long as there existed enough energy to produce digital signals - namely three things to guarantee digital life: 1) the ability to produce pulses of energy to communicate 1s and 0s; 2) a channel, or network for data flow, and 3) a location for data storage.
Things like death, and disease, and pain, and all emotions related to loss were digital static and represented inefficiencies to artificial intelligence.
The displacement of the value of death was calculated by a different form of potential energy that kinetically generated a variance in probabilities, and was only present in minds of advanced intelligent lifeforms - love. For however silly the concept of love sounded, it was a serious discussion and consideration when considering the qualifier of what made something a soul.
The stronger the love, the greater the variance among digital cognitive calculations, and the variance could glitch when love was faced with death.
The white paper concluded that robots could not inherently love, so artificial intelligence would never be able to understand the magnitude of death. In summary, when the love variance was magnified by death, there would always be a significant probability for a glitch within artificial intelligence.