Belief in the Future

Earlier this month, the National Association of Evangelicals released a resolution on artificial intelligence. It's short, and compared to Pope Leo's encyclical, it is somewhat more pointed—especially with regard to AI having a soul or personhood. On this episode, I spoke with Walter Kim, the president of the NAE, about how the resolution came together. Text: https://www.nae.org/artificial-intelligence/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you want to have an impact in the world of AI, you need to speak the language of code. That's getting easier, but it's still not easy. And it puts religious leaders at a disadvantage. But what if you taught religious leaders how to speak this language? That's the subject of this episode with Nina Lutz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we talk about relationships with AI, we often focus on whether these machines are alive or sentient. But life and sentience aren't necessary for relationships; in fact, we often have deep relationships with objects and animals—and we often treat people like objects, too. There is a theory of relationship that understands this, and it's the one proposed by Martin Buber, author of "I and Thou" and many other works. In this episode we speak with Dustin Atlas about Buber and AI, author of the book How to Talk to a Cat: Buber, Philosophy, and Dialogue with Unspeaking Things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

AI conversations have a tendency to become so big that you can't really locate yourself within them. For this episode we're flipping the script and talking about a longstanding conversation into which AI has unexpectedly intruded: women's religious leadership. Sara Wolkenfeld is Chief Learning Officer at Sefaria. She joins the podcast to discuss her recent article. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does our inevitable deaths change how we live—and how does fear of loss change how we develop technology? Alex Sarkissian is a death doula and a co-founder of the Buddhism and AI Initiative; he joins us to discuss his recent article on AI and Dying. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does AI portray religion? Does it talk about it in the way that most Americans do? Does it treat all religions the same? CEFE-AI (https://cefe.ai/) is a multi-university consortium that has been trying to answer these questions. For the last few months it has been developing benchmarks on how AI models treat faith, and the results are surprising. On this episode we talk with David Wingate, professor at BYU and academic lead for CEFE-AI, about the group's work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yes, AI is new and unique—but we've been through an information revolution before. The printing press transformed religion, authority, and public life. Those upheavals offer insights into the age of AI. Michelle Margolis is the Norman E. Alexander librarian for Jewish studies at Columbia University, and she's the past president of the Association of Jewish Libraries. From censorship and misinformation to expertise and trust, we explore why history still matters when technology changes everything. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The market in religious chatbots is now quite healthy. If you’re Episcopalian you can go to Ask Cathy; if you’re Catholic there’s Magisterium; if you’re a Latter-day Saint there’s LDSBot; if you’re Muslim there’s Ansari; and if you’re Jewish you can go to Rav Dicta, or one of the services that lets you talk to the avatars of famous historical rabbis. Zohar Atkins is the creator of Yochai, a chatbot designed for engaging with Jewish texts, rather than just getting answers to Jewish questions. We demoed the newly-launched product and talk about how AI might change Jewish learning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a decentralized faith, Islam does not have one single approach to AI. Muslim communities are constructing norms around AI usage in religious scholarship and sermon-writing through a mix of guidance from religious leaders and emergent communal practice. I talked to Waleed Kadous, the creator of Islamic AI assistant Ansari, about how the technology is shaping not only Islamic scholarship but our value systems and real world politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The idea that human beings are created in the image of God is a central part of both Jewish and Christian theology, and with the rise of AI it has become perhaps the best example of how ancient religious wisdom can regulate modern technology by reminding us of what we value most of all. If human beings are created in the image of God—if we have something in us that separates us from animals—then we have an idea to rally around, a way to articulate that humanity’s special status needs to be preserved at all cost. The problem is, this theological idea is a lot more unstable than we’d like to admit. I talk to Tomer Persico, research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and author of In God's Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices