AI, Religion and Identity #12

On today's episode of The Future of You, I'm blessed by the algorithm to be joined by a pastor and an anthropologist to discuss digital religion. Dr. Beth Zingler is the Assistant Professor in Digital Religions. Yes, that's religions, plural. We'll get into that in a moment. At the University of Zurich. And Dr. Joshua K. Smith is a pastor and theologian researching ethics around emerging technologies, including robotics. In this discussion, we cover the trends in digital religion, how people are developing communities and ideas about technology online, as well as how AI shapes and molds what we are doing spiritually. The conversation covers our perspective bias at the dawn of a new millennium, anthropomorphism of AI, whether AI can help us become better moral beings, corporatist agency, personal agency, and AI politicians, and the ongoing outsourcing of our own decision-making to AI. The focus inevitably turns to nihilism, apocalypticism, and the reemergence of the satanic and occult aesthetic. And we even talk aliens. So join me, Beth, and Josh for a chat about digital religion and our spiritual identity online. Well, hi, Beth and Josh. Thank you for joining me here on The Future Review. Great to have you both here with me.

It's really great to be here and to be able to have this chat with you both.

Yeah, it's nice to meet you both.

I've been wanting to talk to you both for ages. Um, now I'm right out of my comfort zone on this one, um, talking about religion and theology, but I'm hoping I might be able to catch up a bit on the technical digital side. For the listeners of the podcast, I wonder if you could both just tell us a little bit about what you do, because I know you are both in very, very different ways involved with tracking digital religion and looking at theology and technology and how they interplay in that culture. I wonder if you could just share a little bit of your work and tell us a bit about your methods in the madness.

Sure. My name is Josh. I'm a pastor in Mississippi, um, so in, in North America. I primarily do that as my full-time job, but I'm also a researcher, and so I look into robotics and kind of the social ethics concerns from a theological perspective, of course. But that's kind of my, my area of focus, and I just kind of happened to fall into it by accident while doing my doctoral work. And just kind of, I don't know, I felt like it chose me. I didn't choose it. So everything from war robots, sex robots, work industry, anything that has to do with kind of the disruptive technologies and how that fits in with our ideas about morality and ethics as a society. So that's kind of what I do in my night job, and my day job is just helping people in crisis and trying to be a force for good.

Uh, well, I am the new assistant professor in digital religions at the University of Zurich. Uh, I'm an academic. I've been working in the area of AI and religion and religion and technology, um, well, since I went back to my master's in 2010, where I started looking at people's spiritual identities online. So I'm primarily an anthropologist rather than a theologian. I'm looking at describing and theorizing how people develop community and ideas on technology, quite often with a religious perspective. And then from 2016, um, after my PhD, I started— I joined a postdoc position which was looking specifically at artificial intelligence, and that's been a through line of my work since then. So I look at both how religion describes and understands artificial intelligence, but also how artificial intelligence will shape and mold how we do spirituality religiosity, uh, not down to a specific faith, but I look at all different faith groups and, um, the development of new religious movements and new spiritualities on the internet and in social media. And basically, that's an area of particular interest for me— AI and religion.

I remember when you and I had a, a conversation on Twitter about an amazing job which was like Head of the Apocalypse or something like that, some university department. And I think we both thought that just sounded Fantastic.

Well, yeah, there's certainly people who are looking at questions of apocalypse, existential risk, the concerns about what will happen with technology, in particular artificial intelligence. That's probably why we were both looking at it.

Well, we'll come back to that because it is— we're at a fascinating time, I think, in which all of that's popping up again. What are your observations and insights around how this area is changing? What sorts of trends have you observed of late that you think are are taking hold or already have taken, taken hold and are having quite a big impact on various areas of our life, society, culture, etc.?

Well, in terms of the technology, it's really hard to keep up with the exponential growth of applications. And a lot of those applications are not very apparent. They're invisible. There's not very much transparency in where they're being applied and what's happening as a result of them. In the technology itself with artificial intelligence, it's sometimes hard to understand why particular decisions and outcomes come out of the algorithmic decision-making system. So, in that sense, it's hard to keep up with some of the trends and the changes, but we can make some sort of thematic continuities out in the discussion. We've already had mention of the apocalypse. As soon as there is the smallest, most incremental advancement in AI technology or digital technology, I immediately, as an anthropologist, see people online panicking about the end of the world and the Terminator and Skynet and all this is going to go down that very familiar science fiction route. So we're always going to see those sorts of repeating patterns. And as a religious studies scholar as well, I look out for religious narratives and tropes that repeat, that we've had them historically for a long time, quite often monotheistic Western civilization tropes, but they play out again and again in our imaginaries of artificial intelligence.

Yeah, I think it goes in cycles, so we're just in another cycle of challenge and change. Not really anything significant, but like Beth was saying, any challenge to what we've kind of known always brings fear, and that is very much, you know, any challenge to our anthropology or I think I've been thinking a lot about electricity. Lately and how society responded to that. And it's very much similar to how we're responding to AI and advanced robotics now. Um, it's still a lot of challenge, especially from a religious perspective. You see a lot of pessimism, um, but a lot of inconsistencies in how people apply those technologies because we use them every day and incorporate them into our life. And they may be very invisible as far as like how it changes us, but we're very— humans are very inconsistent in how they are both afraid of technology, but they're also kind of attached to it in a lot of different ways. And so I don't think anything has changed or is new. It's just we've— we're in a new century. So we just— that's the only thing that's changed. And I think about this too, especially as my study of theology, and Beth knows this as well, is that You know, every generation has had like some type of vision of the apocalypse. And, you know, for a long time it was the Pope, you know, this is the Antichrist or whatever. And so I don't know, I could just try to be a false optimist or a calm pessimist is kind of where I fall into and try not to buy into the doom and gloom. You know, so try to be hopeful.

It's funny you mentioned that about— because I've got it on my notes here to ask you, is there something weird about the new millennia? You know, is there something about going into a new millennium that's, I don't know, creates some sort of, as you say, you know, fear and uncertainty, but maybe even more than that, like a moral panic, especially when there's new technology around? I don't know. Is it nothing to do with it? Is it just accidental or what?

I think there's certainly a perspective bias. So we are in this moment as individuals and as communities observing events and interpreting them as a part of our own narrative. So that leads us into thinking that this is the most significant time there has ever been because we are the ones—

Because we're in it.

We're in it, right? So we know historically, and obviously, okay, time is also socially constructed. So the millennium isn't the millennium for for every cultural group. But we know historically there have been numerous fears of the apocalypse. I think to pick up on Joshua's point about technologies being disruptive, and yes, you can look historically and say, okay, the advent of electricity was a significant moment. It changed society, changed how we communicate, how we travel, all these aspects. I think what's slightly different, if not entirely new about AI, is the way that we anthropomorphize it, that it's not just a technology that changes things. It's a technology that is being created intentionally by humans to interact with humans. So that interactivity makes it significantly different, I think, to things like electricity, or the spinning jenny of the Industrial Revolution, or the emergence of the novel, that it talks back because we are creating it to talk back. It creates things that seemingly happen on their own. So the narratives we're telling ourselves about AI in particular, is that it is a person before it could be anything like a person. And there's a whole big philosophical/theological debate about that, which I'm— I described, but I'm not necessarily qualified to get into the nitty-gritty of. But I think it's interesting that, yes, in this moment, we can tie it into where we are historically, we can tie it into subjective bias, but also we're interacting with a technology that interacts back with us. In a way that other things didn't.

Yeah, I think that's one of the things that makes some of the best science fiction the best science fiction, that it's about communications technologies and not just, you know, sending something up into space or some sort of military technology. It is that, that's what captivates people's imaginations, isn't it? And where do you two stand on this anthropomorphization of robots and that leading to conversations around robot rights and the way in which we will interact, as you say, Beth. Um, I mean, do you take the instrumentalist view, or are you a bit more— I don't know, a bit more open-minded about the way in which we might come to emote with these beings?

Yeah, I've, uh, I've been on a journey with this question, um, for years now, thinking about, um, the nuance here when we talk about persons, when we talk about Something I think that is a feature of human, of us as a creature, a created being, that we want to see ourselves in our creation. We want to see ourselves even in the animal kingdom and how, you know, we deal with domestic pets. And I would say even how if you really look at things like cattle and stuff, you look in their eyes, you see a lot of beauty. You see Not that we know what it's like to be a cow or any other animal. You can make assumptions, but we project something to them. And anything that squeals or says ouch or barks or, you know, squirms, feels pain, we give it a new level. And I think the same thing is true of AI and robots. It's not necessarily that there's something underneath the hood or behind the face, so to speak, but that we will struggle, especially if you're more open, if your moral circle is a little bit wider than some such as the instrumentalists, you know, and I tend to be sympathetic towards that because in my religious background and, you know, the Hebrew scriptures, especially with my study of Judaism, there is moral consideration of animals and of creation, because it's not that I am a conqueror of the world, like this world is given to us to conquer and, and dominate, but that I am a steward of the world. And so everything within the world is for me to help flourish, to make it grow, to make it blossom, to create beauty, to be creative with that. And And I think AI and robots certainly can be a part of that, but there's also a darker side that we all know. It could be very destructive, very disruptive. And so I see our part is not necessarily saying yes or no to whether or not we give more consideration to certain robots, qualified robots, or AIs, but to make sure that, you know, it's not harming other people. It's not socially disruptive, and some of them are very disruptive right now, and are causing harm, right? And so I see it as a way, I see personhood as a way to kind of mitigate some of those harms. It's not necessarily for me about, you know, making a robot person like me. I don't think that'll ever be the case. I think we will always be biologically distinct. But just because I'm distinct from something doesn't mean I have a right to treat it however I want to. And so that is my concern for that question. Like, I'm not saying habeas corpus, all rights to robots, you know. I'm very closely related to David Gunkel's argumentation on there. I mean, we disagree a lot about philosophy and different things, but I think we're on the same boat. So to speak, in that regard. Like, there are societal benefits to granting a robot rights or considerations or whatever, not on the same level as humans, but for the benefit of humans. And I think, yeah, we should consider it. And I think rights in general should be— all things on the table should be considered. We shouldn't just ever say no, we're not ever going to consider this. And we could just look at the historical analogy. I've been reading, you know, working a lot my project now about womanist perspectives, right? So Black, African American rights, that movement, and, you know, it's very recent. And I would still say, like, even now in this, I live in the South, there's still people that I pastor who think there's something different about a human with one phenotype versus another. And that is very much a, like, folk understanding, and it's not, you know, I don't believe that there is any distinction there, but for them it's very real. And so I see this, these connections, not just with human-to-human interaction, but with human-to-technology and how we interact with it, you know. And some of the arguments are very eerily similar, and I think I have a lot of problems with some of that logic. And if you look at how the history of technology and how the black body has been imagined as a technology. I think there's even more problems about the language that we use to describe it. And so I'm very concerned about some of these arguments. And that's more than you asked for, but that's my heart as far as like the social justice side of it and what I'm concerned about as a theologian and a pastor about how we're using this. And sometimes a lot of people just dismiss it altogether. So, yeah.

I'd like to partially agree, but add some sort of caveats as well. So absolutely, I agree with the positive of recognizing historical continuities in our discussion of both non-human and human others, including sort of, as you say, indigenous cultures, that when we, quotation marks, encountered intelligence elsewhere, There were long debates, sometimes theologically informed or badly theologically informed debates about personhood, and we see analogies now to early discussions about AI and robot rights. My caveat is that with our natural tendency to anthropomorphize, we can see corporate hacking of that tendency. So yes, it's valuable to have conversations about rights because then, of course, you raise these issues and you expand our consideration to say what would happen if this could happen. But already the conversation is being pushed there by some corporate interests who want you to focus more on the question of individual agential AI's rights versus what is the corporation doing when it creates that algorithm that makes the decisions, that has particular weights on it, that has outcomes for particular groups. So if you, if you hand over agency too soon to AI, or even as some of my work looks at super agency, when people start to think of AI as already super intelligent or even godlike in some ways, then it just obscures the role of humans in the machine. That humans in the corporate setting have made specific decisions on how algorithms will work, and that's not individual agent— agency in an AI, that is a corporate agency, and that needs to be highlighted as well.

Have you got any examples that you're thinking of specifically of those sort of corporatist versions?

Well, I mean, it's sometimes there in the nebulous public discourse. So when figures like charismatic authorities like Elon Musk start talking about the dangers of summoning the demon with AI, that narrative pushes this idea that it's already, it's already somehow in that instance malevolent, that it's also somehow making decisions for us. And some of my ethnographic research has been on people's conceptions of AI, as I say, is more like a godlike entity, where people on social media report feeling that they've been blessed by the algorithm because particular decisions— say, if you're in a gig economy role, and as a Lyft driver or an Uber driver, you get a series of good rides and you make lots of money— the feeling that you've been blessed by the algorithm might be reported. It's not a large-scale thing. The actual corpus I looked at was very, very small, but if we skip quickly into the idea of AI as already having agency, and then beyond that, some sort of form of super agency, then we obscure the fact that those corporations like Lyft or Uber or YouTube with recommendation systems are making decisions that benefit them within the framework of capitalism, that algorithms are designed to either garner attention or be efficient in particular ways for the purpose of making profit. So if we start thinking of AI, I'm going to make a pun, if we're going to start thinking of AI as profits, we'll miss that AI is about making profits.

Yeah, that's good. And I, you know, I think as a Westerner, you know, we, we can't think about technology without thinking about capitalism in a lot of ways. And so we think about TurkWork and these ghost workers and different things. I think a lot of it has to do with like, and I don't mean this, you know, facetiously, but I think a lot of people are just very ignorant about technology in general. Um, not that we aren't, not that we can't use it. And so we could go on YouTube and, and find, um, small kids who can teach you how to code things on Scratch or C or, you know, but as far as like actually understanding some of this stuff. I don't, I don't think that we, we have a lot of knowledge about that. And I think that's why it's so hard in, and even jumping to the question of robot rights, it's just so discombobulating for a lot of people because we're like, I'm not even sure some, some of my people understand how rights work. And I'm not, and I'm not saying that if I wouldn't have studied it the way that I have and others, like, I wouldn't either. And, and so it's not a judgment. It's just all these things are so complex and so esoteric to the public. Um, and so sometimes it's overwhelming. Like, how do we even educate people? Like, people that don't read, people that are— that their only concern is about the pragmatics of everything. Will this technology help me in my business? Or— and so when I think about this, as far like the church, there's not much, if anything, that's, you know, trying to make an altruistic AI or platform that has no desire to manipulate or, you know, and I think about this in terms of the Replika chatbot and stuff, like purposely, as Beth was talking about, manipulating the consumer to upgrade to certain features. And I think that's the biggest concern that we need to educate people about is that your technology is not working for you. It is working against you in many ways. And even the stuff that we're using right now, why, why does a particular platform want me to use Chrome? Why does it want me? Because it wants to steal from me. It wants to take analytics from me and can't use DuckDuckGo. I can't hide from it because it wants my information. And to a degree, most people in the United States, they don't really care about that. They don't, they say, well, what do we have to hide? I'm like, you know, you, like you, I mean, you have a lot to hide and there's a lot of value to your information. And so just to go along with what Beth is saying, there's a lot of people, at least in my context, just don't care, don't want to know. And they're, they're okay with the media manipulation part as long as there's a payoff and a benefit. And so it's the click agree boilerplate type stuff that I'm not going to read. I don't care about. I just want to use iTunes. So who cares? And, and I'm still not sure how to help people make that jump from, okay, I know I should probably care about this. I'm like, would you want somebody to sit and observe your children, like, just in— just outside your home? Would you— would you allow that, you know, so that they can send you an email saying, hey, Susie, or whatever, um, she likes these things, here's a Christmas list for you? Um, I'm like, there's toys that do that. And, you know, I, I don't— I don't know, like, there's just— there's so much happening, um, in our Western mindset to kind of push that aside while, like you say, that we are totally being taken advantage of and being manipulated either by film and these narratives that we get pushed before us, you know, Skynet, Terminator, um, every, every movie that comes out about AI robots, um, somebody's gonna, you know, take advantage of you or you should be afraid of them. But no, really, it's the, the creators that I'm afraid of. It's the human behind the machine that I know from my anthropology, I'm like, that's who we need to, you know, tie up or, you know, round in. And so that they can understand that it's not okay just to make money off people.

It's really interesting because I used to think it was— it's just the path of least resistance for most people. They just want convenience. But when I started to do quite a lot of research with, I suppose, what we'd call Gen Z, Well, they were in their early 20s at the time, and it was on a specific project about the future of media. What I realised was that they were outsourcing lots of decisions, more than I even realised, to, I suppose you could call it machine learning or AI. And I remember a couple of different specific examples. There was one example of a girl who was saying that she wanted an AI or a bot to tell her what fashion most suited her. And we had this discussion about, well, isn't that the job of your best friend? And it was like, well, yes, it could be, but the AI will absolutely know. It will know what suits me. And it became very obvious to me, oh, you don't trust your own instinct in terms of what suits you. And you feel like you have to outsource it to AI who really knows, knows, i.e., has analysed and knows something that you could not know from what I take as a data point, a gut instinct. And then there was another example of a guy who was like, "Well, I want the fridge to shut its door and lock itself when I've had too many calories that day." And it made me realise that they want AI to self-regulate them. And it made me wonder, do we think maybe it's beyond just the convenience and somehow, maybe even unconsciously, we're hoping that AI will make us good? AI will make us more moral, put us on the right path. I don't know how to express it, but that's sort of one of the things I was, I think I was starting to realize, and it was particular to that younger generation, but then of course I hadn't compared it with older generations. But I don't know what your thoughts on that. Do we think we're somehow making, using AI to make us good?

I think definitely there is a very strong narrative and you, I mean, you can trace it back way before we had something that we called AI. But a very strong narrative of the irrationality of humanity and the rationality of machines. That there is a way to purify all the good things about our intelligence and replicate it in a different format so that it doesn't succumb to all those problematic messinesses that humans have. It won't get angry and it won't get hungry and therefore hangry. And I'm a very hangry person, so that I recognize that. But it, you know, this idea that there is a purified version of the human that can operate in the digital realm and therefore can make these better decisions, which obviously completely obscures the fact that all the data going into these systems is from humans. So it comes with all of those messinesses that we want to be rid of. But you see, you know, I've done a small amount of work on people who think that robot politicians, quotation marks, so AI decision-making systems, would be in some way preferable to human politicians because they wouldn't be corruptible and they wouldn't make irrational choices. And they were, you know, and that comes again partially science fiction, come up a couple of times, and I have no bone to pick with science fiction. I think the bone I have to pick is when we're not clear when we're being told a story or not. So if I go see a science fiction film and it presents— oh, my favorite, Star Trek. If I go watch an episode of Star Trek: Next Generation, Lieutenant Commander Data presented as utterly rational, and you can see his precursor in Spock, but he wasn't an AI, but utterly rational Commander Data. That's great, that's a story. But if I then start to perceive AI as having that purified rationality and able to do these almost superhuman things in terms of intelligence, then that's dangerous because it obscures, as I say, all the problems and the mistakes that we feed into these systems with our data. And I can completely understand. I did some schools engagement work where I talked to much younger children than Gen Z, and they're already at the age of sort of 7, 8, 9, they have narratives of AI and robots and what they should be able to do for them. And it is things, as you say, like making decisions, making good choices, clearing up for me, you know, being the ultimate sort of almost Jiminy Cricket on the shoulder of telling you what you should and shouldn't do. So an AI conscience. And that's, that's a concern because again, like, that story does obscure all the irrationalities in machines that for a lot of instances it's better to think of them as artificial stupidity than artificial intelligence. They do make an awful lot of mistakes. They do some very impressive, successful things, but the whole For instance, the whole bloom of AI arts we're in at the moment, where people find it fantastic, a magic trick. You can put in a sentence and get a piece of art. But if you narrow in and look at the art, how many fingers does that person have? You know, there's lots of problems in the dataset that's coming, and not to mention the ethical issue of using artists' work without permission. But yeah, once we actually start focusing in on the decisions that are being made, we have to question if they're the perfect decisions for us, or the perfect friend who can give you the perfect answer about what you should wear.

Yeah, because I felt like it was beyond just efficiency. It's almost like duty. I'll be dutiful if I only download this app and use it. Josh, sorry, did you want to come in?

Yeah, I think some of this goes back to like the erosion. If, you know, don't read too much into that. Like, where we used to have self-regulation and, you know, we practice willpower. So like, I think about the Frog and Toad book about the episode about the cookies. You know, we, I mean, whether it's, I don't know, it's just nothing will replace that aspect of our humanness where we, we have to have discipline and and that's, there's a reason why it's hard. But also the fact that, like you and Beth were saying, that if you look inside something, you look inside its code, those that make stuff, those actually, they understand that it's not perfect. And so I try to tell people that it will always be. And so in theological language, we have what's called the fall. Right, where everything was in harmony, you know, shalom, perfect peace with God. And then humans in their curiosity and creativity, they saw that as a prison, right? We want to go outside this fence. And so from that moment, which I think every human understands, right, even from when we're little, we we want to do something opposite of what we're told. We just, for whatever reason. And so I think AI, robots, they're always going to be a part of that system because it's tied to the system that we're in. So I think all things in harmony, like all molecules are attached to one another. So we can't just say that, you know, all this stuff comes from the ground. It's connected to a fallen world. We can't say that it's somehow going to be perfect. Just because we polish it and put it in a nice plastic package, now somehow it's different. No, I mean, things still lead towards death and destruction, decay. That's the natural progression of life. Um, and so I try to help people understand that just because I make a robot doesn't mean that it's perfect in any sense. In fact, most people know that when you create things, it's a lot of issues, right? And so for every one robot I have working, I probably have 10 that don't work. And sometimes you don't know why. Why does this optical sensor go out? What happened? What, you know, why did this circuit blow? What, you know, there's no rhyme or reason to it. And I think if anybody that's ever worked on a farm, they understand that there's some days where the pressure just affects things differently. Like the electronics in, in the houses and stuff. They— why aren't they working? Why did that sensor not work? And, and now the heaters are going on too high. And all like, maybe nothing's wrong, you know, but it's just not working right. So, you know, I think about this from agriculture because there's a push to automate farming in different— and that's, I think, could be great in some ways, but most farmers are pessimistic because they understand Yes, tractors are amazing tools and help us be more efficient in farming. But unless you've worked on one, you don't really understand the— like, things break easily. And even now, like, farmers are struggling because John Deere won't let you work on their tractors now. And yeah, so I mean, the more we integrate, the more complicated that relationship becomes. And then just to my last point here is that with AI politicians stuff. It will always be, in my opinion, will always be a human-machine team. And this desire to outsource regulation, temperance, discipline, it— I don't think it will work. And I'm a total pessimist about that because we will always be— and I look at to, um, in, in the Department of Defense and stuff where we get all this technology from and all this research is, you know, even there, they understand it will always be human-machine teamwork. And so I don't envision a society where we're completely— some do, like this complete utopia of robots doing everything and humans just have all this leisure. Just because of practical experience, sometimes the robots just aren't going to work. Sometimes the sensors aren't going to connect. Things blow. I don't know. And maybe we'll get to the point where they can fix themselves and stuff. But I don't know, I feel like there'll always be a need for us to work together. And I think a part of our desire to separate from that is a part of our fallenness as well. And our weakness is that we were made for a relationship. We're made for connection with humans, with creation, with animals. And we have this kind of rebellion with it and this tension. Like, I'm a pastor. Okay. So my job is people. And I tell my people this all the time. I don't like people. Like I'm hardcore introvert, you know, leave me alone with books. I'd be perfectly fine with an R2-D2 or, you know, a Dio, whatever, like that. To me would be great, but that's not, in my opinion, why I was made and created and the lineage of what I'm a part of. And I think that is a fault. So, you know, I fight against that and I try to help people understand that, you know, we're supposed to do this together and we can make wonderful tools that certainly at some part could be our friends and perhaps even better friends, but we shouldn't forego all of our calling and I guess our duties in a way to outsource that, and the more we outsource, the more I worry that we're kind of subverting our original design maybe, so when we think about good and use that word What is the good? I think, you know, well, depends on what the design is. What was— what were we made to do and why are we here? What's our purpose in life? And so if that is meaningful relationship connection, then I don't think it's a good design if we make things that take us away from that. And certainly we can use technology in a good way that does fit into that good design. So that would be my challenge. For the next generation coming up and even for myself, I guess.

I hope you're right because this is an interesting point about the AI politician because I feel like during the pandemic we came kind of quite close. It was almost as if, hey, let's trial this idea that politicians can be replaced by modeling and AI and et cetera and technological incentives really. It's interesting that this has come up today because I was just— I don't know if you saw that piece in the— I think it was in The Atlantic that went around Twitter like wildfire this morning. It said, "Let's declare a pandemic amnesty. We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID." And I was like, "Hmm, interesting." Like, is this a, you know, is this about redemption, forgiveness? If so, you know, what's been committed here? What sort of of injustice has been committed. And I would say that, without getting into the whole COVID thing, but I would say there was lots of coercive behaviour. There were incentives being built into technologies and into narratives, Beth, that people were being nudged by, and sometimes rather unconsciously. And because they wanted to be a good person and behave in a moral way and not be branded or shamed as selfish. I think a lot of people were pushed into doing something they didn't want to do, or were threatened to, you know, losing their job if they didn't, you know, carry out some medical instruction. The whole area of bodily autonomy was up for grabs. And what we saw was technology, sort of, whether it's track and trace, or PCR tests, whatever, it kind of— the whole technocracy took over. And there wasn't very much space for human debate, discussion, or any humanity, actually. I felt the whole thing was really rather dehumanizing. I don't know. Those are just random thoughts because I was thinking about that Atlantic piece this morning, but I don't know if you want to speak to it.

Yeah, I have seen that piece and I've seen who it's come from as well. And people are obviously picking out particular things from that person that they said during the time and saying, why would you want an amnesty based on this?

Oh.

I think my particular interest is in that era that we're not out of, the era of the pandemic, was where modeling was, as you say, we had modeling going on, we had modeling of the pandemic, but there were attempts to avoid dealing with the modeling of the pandemic or to see it as overblown. So there was that human element there, but my particular interest was in the algorithms that were employed for predicting students' grades during the pandemic? Because, um, I wasn't directly involved, but I have a small— I had a small admissions role at my college at the university, so I got to talk with a lot of people who were more directly involved in dealing with the admissions problems that that caused. But you could see, like, the frustration of very capable students who were told that they weren't capable because their schools historically didn't have a history of sending students to Oxbridge or other excellent universities. And that kind of what I call algorithmic thinking, that you are bound to the history of your context, you're bound to even your own data sets that says previously you've done this well, so you can't possibly do very well in the future, that has wider repercussions. And it fits in as well to the modeling of the pandemic because it— our knowledge of what was going to be successful at the beginning was very limited. There was a lot of discussion about how transmission happened, our scientific understanding of the virus improved, and our modeling improved as well. But some people were very wedded to that, again, algorithmic thinking of because something— we thought something was like this in the past, it's going to be like this in the future as well. So we have to be very careful that we can allow for— I hate the word disruption because it is co-opted by technological discourse, but disruptive elements in our datasets, that we don't just see everything as history repeating itself, while also learning from the lessons of history. But if we start to think like algorithms, we're also in trouble.

It's like, what's the opposite of being blessed by the algorithm?

Oh, it's being cursed by the algorithm. There are people also who say that. In the corpus I looked at, it wasn't as significant a number as the blessed by the algorithm. But same idea, you know, but that's, um, that's with the interpretation of AI as being this superpower that makes decisions. You can be literally cursed by the algorithm in the sense that it makes decisions based on its, its parameters. But the way in which that narrative was being used was more, there is a almost like a powerful demonic entity that's deciding to do bad things for me. So we can make that distinction between sort of overblown narratives and the more practical outcomes of people people's personal mini-apocalypses when, um, say, uh, an insurance algorithm decides against them or a mortgage algorithm decides against them. And that's not because it has a pure agency and consciousness. It's not deciding it like it dislikes this person in particular, but again, it's just looking at demographic groups and making very broad generalizations.

Yeah, I feel like that's a human feature as well though. I mean, that, um, you know, my, uh, my father-in-law is a farmer and he was denied, denied a loan for this farm that they had a government initiative that they wanted to give it to a Black farmer. And so for 3 years, um, no one applied. And, you know, this is in the early '90s, late '80s. And, um, they basically said, we won't give it to you because you're Black. And, and so it's like, you know, looking for that particular pattern I think that's a very human thing.

Yeah, it is, absolutely, which is, you know, what I'm saying, we have to be careful we don't fall into that kind of thinking, but also that we don't reinforce it with our algorithmic systems. Like we were talking about earlier, that the view of AI as being, having perfected rationality, we're only going to reinforce those kinds of unfair systems if we think that it's actually making better decisions, but it's making the same kinds of decisions that we've made historically.

Yeah, you know, you're just able to, instead of using a human to, you know, force your will, you're now able to kind of hide behind the veil of your code. And, and I think that's just going to be a part of it in a capitalistic economy. And I think there's, there's ways to mitigate that. But I don't, I don't know how realistic they are. I mean, I hope for them to be a reality. And I look at barristers like Jacob Turner, who's written a book called Robot Rules, which is about AI and how to regulate it. But again, it's going to depend on government agencies to ensure that. So I don't know, like, I don't know how realistic it is. If we're not a human-machine team, right, ensuring that this didn't happen or being accountable for what the system does. And it's just like in the gig economy with— it wasn't— was it Uber or one of them that the AI just started detecting fraud in some of it and they started firing people? The AI did.

Well, we had in the, in the UK, we had a very bad case with the post offices and the algorithms they were using to judge whether the, um, so post offices are sort of like a franchise, whether the, the individuals and couples who were running the post offices deciding whether they were committing fraud or not. And lots of very innocent people got accused. There's been a whole massive court case where they've tried to get restitution for it. Yeah, same sort of idea.

I have two pressing questions I really wanted to ask you. The first one is, what about Satan? I know, my, you know, we often talk about AI and these being these godlike tendencies and superpowers or omnipotence, but there seems to me, and you can put me right if I'm wrong, Beth, but there seems to be an awful lot of a kind of occult aesthetic around at the moment. And also all of this chat about conspiracies, but also secret societies. And what is all that about at the moment? And have I just woken up to it, or has it just been around forever?

We need another— we need another hour or two for me to delve into that. But obviously there is, as I said, there's, there's continuities of religious narratives, tropes, and images when people discuss technology. And I mentioned Elon Musk talking about how AI could be like summoning the devil or the demon. Um, and that's absolutely an aspect of it. And I don't, I don't approach this theologically. Perhaps Joshua would like to do that. But I look at those communities of thought around those ideas and looking at some of these very strict, uh, moral utilitarian rationalist groups who start talking about AI as basically evolving into something demonic. That's, uh, it's very complicated. I won't go into it now. But thought experiments like Rocco's Basilisk which describe the ultimate superintelligence singularity AI as being capable of, of basically punishing people in hell forever. They, they draw very much on existing religious narratives, their conception of, uh, as a very simplistic view of monotheism, and that has space within it for hell and, and evil and Satan and all those things. So for some people, that's a very strong reality. Some people, if you look at the overlap between groups like QAnon and some conspiracy theorists and their views of transhumanism, which again is a whole big subject we could get into. But for some people, transhumanism is, is from Satan. This idea that through technology we can enhance the human being, we can extend our lives, we can perhaps even do away with death, is seen as a satanic purpose for some people in these kind of groups, that it's, it's mocking God to do any of these things. Even to create AI that was as intelligent as a human being could be seen as mocking God in some of these interpretations. So yeah, absolutely, there is a lot of this strongly biblically inspired apocalypticism, even in some groups that are very secular. They will overtly say they don't agree with religions, but they'll then use some of the same structures and ways of describing AI as a superintelligence as being in some ways demonic. So that to me is fascinating, and I have written various different things on it if people want to dig around in my work. But I don't, as I say, do that theologically. So Joshua, if you want to jump in and talk about Satan, that's up to you.

Yeah, um, I always love that. Um, yeah, I mean, I, I think what we have a tendency to do as humans is anything that bad happens in our life, um, I mean, just even without AI and stuff, it's like, that was the devil, or whatever. And I hear people say that, but theologically it's nonsense because everything that we know, at least in my theological world, every— you know, things happen under the sovereignty of God. So even technically in our system, even Satan is under the sovereignty of God, so he can only do that which God allows him to do. So it just doesn't make sense to kind of use that. Satan's just kind of a catch-all for things I don't understand or don't want to wrestle with, and I just see it as a laziness to just kind of lump everything in that category. But like Beth was saying, there is a lot of religious language in all of this stuff. So even in all the futurism, all the crazy rich white guys, I would include Elon in that. This vision of, you know, overcoming, like technology is going to overcome things. I find a very different narrative in the works of especially female theologians and others, a very different— and even roboticists— is a very different emphasis on, you know, caring for society versus escaping. Anyway, that's it. You can read more about that in my work if you're interested. But yeah, I do think there's a tendency to blame things that we don't like on Satan and kind of put him— and we've always done that, by the way. I mean, it's just, I think it's just a part of our nature just to kind of ascribe that to something we don't like or a figure that's supposed to be bad. And I think that kind of all gets to a roundabout way that all of this stuff, all technology, all of its efforts in some way or another is a religious effort. And so I think the Enlightenment has failed in that regard, like, you know, the removal of that part of our brain or our thinking. It's— you can't undo it from people no matter what. System you're in, all people have a worldview that they, you know, operate in and that they're trying to find meaning and purpose in. But I think in a lot of ways people are very religious to that, and they incorporate different aspects of different thoughts and worldviews into that. So ideas about heaven and hell, we use words, you know, good and bad. I'm a good person, not a bad person. You know, you just kind of dig around and say, what do you mean by that? And even with technology, I think, just my personal opinion, it's not wrong to create things, as long as it's not oppressing, hurting, enslaving another, and that you can keep it accountable. Like, anyway, there's lots of biblical principles behind that. But I think the biggest thing that irks me about this conversation is that people, anytime people use scripture or the Bible or any worldview, and they don't understand that reading is an ethical project. Right? And I think that's where just so much terrible stuff comes from is, you know, taking a book like the Bible, which is a very dangerous book if you can't read well, and then taking views about technology. That's a very dangerous combination. The Bible is dangerous just by itself, right? Lots of women and children have been killed just in the name of God, right? And so And with all this stuff, we have to be ethical readers. And we have to be very diligent about why this person is saying this. So why is this billionaire saying these certain things about AI? And then now he's making an AI humanoid robot. Like, I mean, people are much more simple than we— it's about money, right? It's all about money. And the Bible has something to say about that. You know, the root of all evil is the love of money. And so it kind of, kind of see how it connects there. Like, there's some wisdom in that. And, you know, if you're caring about your neighbor, if you're caring about creation, sustainability, right? We're the only creature that depends on nature and animals and plants to survive. Everything else is fine. Just, it can just be, but we can't. And yet here we are mining the earth for all these technologies that we may or may not need. And taking advantage of different cultures and bringing them into our imperialistic endeavors. And so it's a big mess, really. It's a big mess, but it's all theological. It's all spiritual. And I think at the end of the day, we just have to stop saying it's Satan's fault. There's some abstract thing that we're kind of pointing it to. And then, you know, just kind of look in the mirror of our own desires and deceptions. And say, you know, how am I contributing to this process?

Very good. Interesting. It makes me think of— I've got Douglas Rushkoff's book here. If you read it, Survival of the Richest, because it ties into a few of those threads we've been talking about. And one of the bits of blurb on the back says, Survival of the Richest is more than a primer on a soulless worldview pervading all aspects of life, defying fantasies of escape 'From each other, from earthliness, from earth. Rushkoff offers something at once more realistic, more imaginative, mutual regard, responsibility, and flourishing.' I thought that's some— I mean, it's a fun— it's kind of a funny and tragic kind of book when you read it, but it's well worth doing. It makes those points. And it kind of brings me to, I guess, my final question, although I'd love to speak to you for ages about this. I'll ask two questions. Take which one you want, really, because They are connected. I was wondering whether AI will be more successful in a secular society in the future, like China, than one that's perhaps Judeo-Christian or has a sort of Catholicism, a tradition of Catholicism or something like that. Or the other way of maybe thinking about the question is, you know, 50 years from now, will we be less religious or more religious as a society?

Well, I wanna, I wanna tackle the secular religious distinction because I, I, as a critical religious studies scholar, that doesn't, doesn't really hold a lot of water. We have, we, we've been talking a lot about narratives, and the secularization narrative is another one that emerges out the Enlightenment, and it's really very connected to our view of the possibility of a pure human rationality, that religion will decline and go away. And I like to say that I'm the person who's read Dan Brown's Origin 5 times so you don't have to. Um, and it's the same, it's the same story that AI will destroy religion because it will make us more intelligent, more rational, and more, you know, adult, more grown-up. Um, and so your question about, you know, will AI be more successful in a secular region, I mean, Yes, I debate whether China is a secular region. It's just, it depends on how you framed religion. And for Western culture, we frame it around, as you say, the Judeo-Christian, which again needs a lot of unpacking, but the kind of the monotheistic model, when actually there's a lot of actions going on, including some of these transhumanist ideas and groups that we've been talking about doing religious things without calling it religion. Um, so I agree with Joshua, made the point earlier that religion is a part of who we are. We just— I, I would say we call it different things at different times. And whether or not we call something a religion is an ideological act which has power in it. And you can either be positive about calling something a religion, or you can be negative about calling something a religion. So to go to your second question, because I want to quickly deal very fast with both of them, I don't think it's possible to see a decline of religion, except if you define it in very specific ways. And that's where all our graphs about the decline of Christianity come in, but that's because we have a very specific model of what religion is. So no, I think the future religion will be just as important in its multitudinous forms, um, and it will be a question of whether we call it religion or not. And AI will be entangled with that because religion human is entangled with society and so is AI.

I mean, I pretty much have the same opinion there. I mean, I don't— I, I do think that places like Japan, I know it's more so atheistic. I, I still like, that's, you know, you have to really, you know, delve into that, the embeddedness of Shintoism. And I think like, I think that will lead and has led them to more integration of especially robotics, right, where it becomes a part of the family systems, you know, in a way, right? Um, so I think it just deals with—

I just wanna, I just wanna quickly big up Western animism because it never gets a mention.

Yes.

Yeah, we always talk about Eastern animism and Western animism is forgotten, but we have strong animistic roots and they are still there.

Why do we ignore them though? Why do we ignore them?

Again, it's that meta-narrative of I mean, this isn't my term, meta-narrative of the rationalization effect of the Enlightenment. That we, quotation marks, in the West became more serious and sensible when we did away with religion, but them over there in the East, they didn't. I guess it's an othering, it's a, you know, it's orientalism to say. But it's— I'm not saying Joshua is wrong. I'm saying it's to reflect back on ourselves and say we also do these things.

We just haven't categorized it in that way or, or noticed it.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah. We have robot priests in Japan and we have robot priests in Germany. I mean, we've done things in the same similar sorts of ways because we're excited about robot priests.

No, I think it's all the same. I think, you know, even like there's a lot of First Nations in this area and it's, it's everywhere. Like it's not. It's not just in the East, and I think that is a shame that we only think about that, but I mean, it's, it's so fascinating to me. We look at these different cultures, cultures that we are part of, part of our family trees in the West, but then like you're saying, the Enlightenment has told us we have to have this one particular perspective and faith and reason can't possibly go together. But I'm like, there's faith and reason in all things that we do, you know, and I have faith when I get on an airplane that it's not going to crash, like it's going to, you know, the pilot's not going to be drunk. And so faith is a part of our lives. It's just how we want to talk about it and integrate it. And like Beth was saying, but I do think we will slowly get to where people are in the Eastern perspective. I think we'll open up to that more is where I was going. It's just Japan's just a little bit ahead of us. China's just a little bit ahead of us. But I see this kind of like melting pot happening in different societies as well, like integration of different perspectives that I've talked to people about, especially religious things. Like they're picking parts of Buddhism or they're picking parts of this religion and saying that it's mine. So, you know, I'm Baptist. And so we talk a lot about, you know, why are people leaving the church and stuff? And it's like, it's not that they're leaving the church, they're leaving this church. Yes, but they're just picking up on different parts of religion that they maybe have never heard before. And so maybe they weren't taught about animism, but they actually have a lot of those beliefs, like Beth is saying, and they actually have a lot of those practices. And so, and then the cultures where it is a part of their culture, it's like now they're, they're more atheistic. And so it's just kind of maybe this reversal is happening where we are in the cycle now. I don't know. But I'm not of the perspective that religion is going anywhere, that we're becoming less religious. If anything, I think we're becoming more religious. Some of the things that we believe about AI and especially about robots. And so I think we're just, I don't know, just kind of hodgepodge picking what we want to believe now when we're no longer just fully accepting our grandparents' and our parents' religion. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I don't. I think it could be a very positive and beautiful thing for people to really delve into what they believe and to wrestle with that and not take on the culture. I mean, not to reject their culture or anything, but to really challenge it. And like, I mean, there's lots of things that I love that are not part of my culture and not a part of my heritage, but I've learned a lot from them, and I see a lot of beauty and wisdom in them, and so I encourage all people. Like, one of the things we used to do when I was a church planter quickly just in the Northeast is there was this one road called Highway to Heaven, and it had a Vedic temple, a Buddhist temple. There were monks that you could talk to. There was a Jewish temple. There was a Sikh temple all on this like side by side by side. And we would take people there and we'd say, look, ask them questions, whatever you got, you know, whatever you would want to ask me, ask them, and we'll look at their answers together and we'll look and respectfully dialogue with them. And I think people always walked away from that like more like solidified in what they believed originally. They're like, this is what I believe. And so I think there's a purpose to that. And it's great to dialogue with people that are not like you and to be open to dialogue. And I don't know if Beth has encountered this, but I have in these circles is that, you know, not a lot of people want to talk to a theologian about some of these issues. And I'm like, why wouldn't you want to talk to an anthropologist? I mean, this person knows a lot about history and traditions and, you know, how we assimilate these ideas together. And These are the people you should be talking to. And not to say anything bad about computer scientists, but I'm like, what do they know about some of these things? And so they're like, what do you know about computer science? I'm like, I don't know. Like, we can— I can learn, you know, we can dialogue about them. But there's just this tendency to put everybody in a particular box and kind of like Beth was saying, other people. And I think we just need to resist that as much as possible. And give everybody a face, so to speak, and a place at the table. And I think that's the future of this is very religious, very open, a widening circle. And people don't like that, though. There's a lot of people that want homogeneity and sameness. But so the beauty of all this, this conversation is that it challenges perspectives. It forces people to especially, um, Westerners to deal with their, I guess, marriage to Descartes. And, you know, like, really to challenge that. And why, why did you reject Aristotle so much? And there are reasons to, but there are reasons that, you know, we're still married to him as well. And so, like, you know, how are we, how are we dealing with that? Not so well.

Well, on that theme of exploring rather than having things prescribed for you, Where do people find more about your work? Because obviously this is a very, very in-depth subject. We've covered a lot today, but of course we can't— this is the tip of the iceberg, really, but it's fascinating. So where would you point people to, both of you?

Well, I have a very comprehensive website with all my publications and my press bits and pieces and other podcasts. So I'm very Googleable. I'm also a social media addict. That's where I do a lot of my research. That's my excuse. But I am on many platforms and also debating leaving Twitter. But I'm very easy to find. And hopefully in the next year, I will have two books out on religion and AI, one an edited volume and one a book just from me. But there's things coming. But yeah, if you want to see some of my publications, some of my things, my website is the best place at the moment.

Did I see you tweet out something today about aliens?

Yes, I've just done a— well, I don't actually know how much of me they use, but I I was interviewed for a BBC documentary on first contact with aliens. Yeah, from the perspective of an anthropologist, you know, think very briefly, encounters with aliens is in some ways parallel to our encounters with how we perceive AI becoming as well. So there was a bit of that discussion and the societal impact of first contact.

Joshua K. Smith is my website and not as much material as Beth by any means. And so, still kind of new to the game, new to the table, but I have 3 works coming out in the next couple of years. So I guess be on the lookout for those. I'm not really sure when and where they will be published, but definitely excited about some of the publications coming out on AI and warfare, AI and Christian theology, and then AI and Christian ethics. So. If that's your cup of tea, then you'll be interested.

Absolutely.

I think between the two of you, you pretty much covered everything. Next time we do aliens, right?

Yes. Yeah.

That's a deal.

I want to hear that. Yeah.

Thanks so much for your time, both of you. Been a pleasure.

Thank you, Tracey Follows.

Thank you very much. Thank you both.

Thank you for listening to The Future of You podcast hosted by me, Tracey Follows. Do like and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you don't miss a single episode. And if you know someone you think will enjoy this episode, please do share it with them. Also visit thefutureofyou.co.uk for more on the future of identity in a digital world and visit futuremade.consulting for the future of everything else. The Future of You podcast The podcast is edited by Big Tent Media and produced by Emily Crosby Media.