The seemingly sudden public emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), especially in its recent incarnation of ChatGPT, has led to a good deal of speculation in both the secular and religious media. Various observers see the technology as speeding up secularization, creating new religions and spirituality, or even making space for a more human-based religiosity to flourish. In the first few months of ChatGPT’s appearance, curiosity drew people to experiment with the software, asking it religious and theological questions and even prompting it to deliver sermons and compose prayers. But reflection soon overtook curiosity, as scholars and journalists looked for the long-term meaning of AI for organized religion and spirituality. The secularist historian and futurist Yuval Noah Harari argues that the unique storytelling capacity of AI will further supplant traditional religion while making up its own faiths. Writing in The Economist (April 28), Harari sees the end of culture in “its human-dominated part.” Since he sees religion as a product of culture and human imagination, Harari asks, “What will happen to the course of history when AI takes over culture, and begins producing stories, melodies, laws and religions? But with each passing year, AI culture will boldly go where no human has gone before. For millennia human beings have lived inside the dreams of other humans. In the coming decades we might find ourselves living inside the dreams of an alien intelligence.”
In his Nonzero Newsletter (June 29) on Substack, science writer Robert Wright argues that AI as it has recently appeared resembles the “noosphere” envisioned by the Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “more organically than I would have guessed a few decades ago; it’s more like collective human cognition, and less like some alien intelligence that walked out of an MIT lab, than I would have imagined.” Wright, like de Chardin who coined the term, sees the noosphere as a “global brain” connecting the world together. He does not necessarily accept the theological vision of de Chardin, but adds that it can “offer a theological (or at least teleological) framework for our mission. I emphasize the word ‘offer.’ Though the best-known proponent of a noospheric perspective was a theologian, the theological emanations of this perspective are more speculative than some of its other emanations. That said, I do think a noospheric perspective gives reason to suspect that there is in some sense a ‘higher purpose’—that natural selection was set in motion for a reason, a reason reflected in the current technological moment, and that AI is inescapably involved in the realization of that reason.”
Source: Mohamed Hassan | PxHere.
In First Things magazine (May), Liel Leibovitz argues that rather than creating a new technological global spirituality, AI will actually allow and maybe even encourage more human-centered religious impulses. He writes that AI will ironically challenge the hi-tech economy that has “focused all of our energy toward marching, in a machine-like fashion, toward the maximization of bottom lines…Were machines to grow so advanced as to outperform our lawyers, our doctors, and all other highly paid professionals, humans will have no choice but to learn how to be human again, which is to say, how to be soulful and not just clever and smart…Maybe we will now see investment flow toward things that engage us spiritually. Maybe we’ll have no choice. ChatGPT and its pals are on course to put many of the information economy’s best and brightest out of business.”
