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If religious leaders aren't thinking about AI, they should be

Several times in the last year I've written about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and what relationship, if any, it has to religion and to morality.

Artificial-IntelligenceAn example from late last year is this post in which I wrote about a book that offered lots of warnings about the damage AI can or could do if we don't understand its limits and do our best to control AI's future.

The idea behind my writing about AI on a blog that focuses on religion is that it's important to think theologically (which includes ethically and morally) about everything, including AI. Our views about the world inevitably seem grounded -- or at least influenced -- by our views about eternal matters. If we leave those matters out of our thinking, we may find ourselves devaluing and even dehumanizing others.

All of which is why I was glad to see this article from a Catholic publication called The Pillar. Drawing on the thinking of scholars, it offers a Catholic perspective on several essential aspects of AI and how humans are wise to think about AI. The article is a good model for all faith leaders who want to help their flocks understand both the promises and the dangers of AI.

Among the questions editors asked scholars was this major one contained in a double query: Is AI a person? Could it become a person?

Here's part of how that question got answered:

Brian Green, a Catholic moral theologian who serves as director of technology ethics at Santa Clara University, told The Pillar that AI is not conscious now, and can not become conscious in the future. 

“AI is not even alive,” he said. “And there is no reason to believe that consciousness can exist in non-living beings.”

Green warned that AI developers are going to try their best to make AI seem to act like a conscious person would.

“But we should not be fooled,” he warned.

So should we quit worrying if AI can't be thought of as a person? Well, not quite. The Pillar story adds this:

Luis Vera, associate professor and theology department chair at Mount St. Mary’s University, says. 

“We need an ethic for relating properly to robots, full stop,” Vera insisted.

Even if AI-driven robots are not conscious persons, Vera believes that treating them virtuously is “part of an ethic of our proper relationship to God's creation.”

In addition, while treating AI-powered robots “like dirt” might help remind people that machines aren’t persons, Vera worries that “this might corrupt our ability to treat real persons with justice and charity.”

And if that ability gets corrupted, what happens is what today you see happening all around: People dehumanize other people, removing both the aggressor and the victim from being considered fully human. And that opens all kinds of dangerous doors.

So look around to see what your own faith tradition, if any, is teaching its followers about AI. If nothing, you might want to ask your leaders to get busy before we get all of this irredeemably wrong. To get things started,  here is one report at least tangentially about AI from my own denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA).

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USING SCIENCE TO VERIFY BIBLICAL STORIES

Scientists from several universities in Israel have used a special technology to corroborate a story from the book of II Kings in the Hebrew Bible, this Jerusalem Post story reports. The findings say that the conquest of the Philistine city of Gath by Hazael, King of Aram, as described in that biblical book, actually did happen based on their study of the magnetic field recorded in burnt bricks found at the site. It's additional evidence that the Bible is a collection of real history as well as metaphorical stories that make some point about God and humanity. The trick, so to speak, is to figure out which stories are historically accurate and which are told for some purpose beyond verifiable history. This II Kings story now is an example of the first kind of biblical account. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden or the Noahic flood are examples of the second kind.

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P.S.: On this weekend's anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection attempt in Washington, D.C., here is a good piece from The Guardian chiding the mainstream media for focusing on its coverage of the commemoration of the event mostly on the current race for president and not on the current threat to American democracy. It's a common media failure when covering politicians -- focusing on the horse race and not their policy ideas or broader issues.

As Margaret Sullivan writes, "In a constant show of performative neutrality, journalists tend to equalize the unequal, taking coverage down the middle even though that’s not where true fairness lies. . .But journalists do have an obligation to get beyond delivery and appearances, to get beyond poll numbers and approval numbers – all the things that they are most comfortable with.

"The mainstream media is not nearly as comfortable with communicating the larger concepts, even when the stakes are this high. Constantly under attack from the right, they fear looking like they are 'in the tank' for a particular candidate or party, so they fall back on those traditional building blocks of coverage – numbers, polls, approval ratings. That may have worked in the past, or at least been relatively unobjectionable. Not any more." I think she's right. Do you?

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