In Temples of Modernity, Robert Geraci reports on the remarkable fusion of religion and science that the Hindu faith community achieves in Ayudha Puja, the ‘rite of implements’ that started in the 12th century. The festival has evolved into a moment "when scientists, engineers, and everyday people allow science, technology, and religion to overlap, to become a single practice,” he writes.
AI, Protein Folding, and the 'Interdependent Web'
In AI’s most impressive demonstration yet of its problem-solving power, DeepMind’s AlphaFold has generated maps of more than 200 million proteins, the basic building blocks of life. This feat will contribute greatly to science’s ability to develop new drugs and therapies. For Unitarian Universalists, it deepens our understanding of the “interdependent web of all existence” that we celebrate in our Seventh Principle.
As miniature EEG and fMRI machines take their place on more and more heads, Duke philosopher and law professor Nita Fahaney says it's time to engage in a "battle for our brains."
The 70,000 thoughts we have daily are becoming more and more transparent. If we’re to keep our thoughts our own, we’ll have to fight for our neurorights.
"The breath -- or spirit -- of God works in unexpected ways, so I don't want to minimize the potential importance of the milestone that LaMDA represented," says Mike Langford, an ordained Presbyterian pastor and Professor of Theology, Discipleship and Ministry at Seattle Pacific University.
"But I'm not ready to view AI as a peer that deserves the rights of human personhood — though I'm more open to that idea today than I was ten years ago."
"Apocalyptic literature can help us see a greater hope that's both realistic and radical,” says Michael Paulus, co-author of the just-published AI, Faith and the Future. “It's a unique way of looking at the world that emerged out of oppressed Jewish communities who said, 'This is not the way the world is supposed to be. This is not the world that God promises. Where is God in this world?'"
"One of my deep theological questions about AI is whether the people who are developing it can even conceive of an expansion of our social imagination," says Brian Brock, Professor of Moral and Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen. "Without it, I think we're bound to remake the human in ways that are violent, especially against those who are least able to protect themselves.”
“I consider AI to have spirituality when it can participate in … a community and share goals, purposes and mutual interpretations with humans and other AI systems,” says Mark Graves, who has just joined AI and Faith as a Research Fellow. “At its foundation is the ability to strive toward some committed moral idea with others in mutual interpretation.”
"As a species, we have moved from creating intelligent tools in our own functional image to having those tools execute human functions so well that they're forcing us to remake ourselves in their machine image,” says Kevin LaGrandeur, emeritus professor of English at New York Institute of Technology and co-editor with James Hughes of Surviving the Machine Age: Intelligent Technology and the Transformation of Human Work.
Humanity's future in face of AI will be the focus of a Unitarian Universalist service hosted jointly in Zoom this Sunday, February 20, by the Boca Raton Fellowship and Saratoga Springs Congregation. A new cluster of Unitarian Universalists who stand for dignity and justice in the development and deployment of AI is forming.
Are TransHumanist enhancement technologies a threat to humanity and democracy and therefore should be banned? Or must we defend our rights to use reason and science to improve the human condition, to control our own bodies, and to create a TransHuman democracy safe for an increasing variety of citizens? It’s time we decide — or at least ask the question.
“We’re a species that can transcend itself,” said James Hughes in a landmark 2005 sermon. "This desire to transcend the human condition is one of the most fundamental spiritual drives we know.”
Raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Levi Checketts has evolved into a Catholic social ethicist. He broke new theological ground with a Ph.D. thesis focused on the ethics of consciousness uploading.
We’re helping AI and Faith bring the conversation into Unitarian Universalist congregations by hosting, transcribing and publishing conversations in Zoom with members of its expert community.
Elon Musk promises a “whole brain interface” with AI by 2045. We take this prediction seriously. We hope you will, too.