Created through prompt by Dall-E
Last month, I attended the 38th conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. The conference was held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It’s important for people of faith to learn about AI and talk about AI with the people who are doing the actual work with these technologies. Who are these people? They are a mixture of academics in the social and natural sciences, as well as scientists and engineers in technology and research companies. For example, Microsoft’s Chief Science Officer, Eric Horvitz, was at the event.
Attendance was over 4000, drawing people from all over the world, especially China. Breakout sessions focused on specific problems or segments of the field. For example, “Formalizing Robustness in Neural Networks: Explainability, Uncertainty, and Intervenability.” One of the sessions I attended was on “AI-Driven Personalization to Support Human-AI Collaboration.” There was just one session on philosophy and ethics, which in the technology space is usually referred to as AI alignment. This is the work of making sure that AI technologies will align with human values. It was interesting to hear papers about research being done to develop the ethical inputs of various AI programs.
This was a huge event, but religious ideas and persons were not particularly visible. While I could not be at the dozens of sessions that were held over the several days of the conference, including the pre-conference and post-conference tracks, I did not hear in the proceedings or read in the published materials of the conference anything about religion. The exception being the event’s social media app where some attendees had posted interest in having separate meetups for Mormons and Muslims. Muslim women were almost the only visibly religious individuals at the conference. I saw one Jewish man with a Yarmulke, and no doubt I was very visible in my friar’s habit. Of course there were religious people there who were not religiously visible. For example, I had a good conversation with a graduate student from Poland who is Roman Catholic.
I left the conference feeling more informed, inspired, and concerned. The general tenor of the conference was positive. There were very few comments in presentations on the potential harms of AI. When they were given, they were brief. Again, it was a massive event. There may have been more extended conversations about these dangers. For example, there was an all-day session I didn’t attend on, “Diversity, Belonging, Equity, and Inclusion.” This was the seventh annual workshop held on that topic in the thirty-eight years of the conference. Like with any new technology, AI will bring both positives and negatives to the world. One positive development I learned about was in health screening. In some areas, it has become more accurate due to AI. This will save more lives by detecting the presence of diseases like cancer earlier, leading to people getting treated earlier.
Attending the conference strengthened my belief that people of faith, from across the world’s religions, have an important part to play in thinking deeply about this technology. Philosophers, theologians, faith leaders and scholars have spent centuries pondering questions about what it means to be human and how to flourish as human beings. We often call this wisdom. As human beings our track record with wisely engaging emerging technologies is mixed. Often, we quickly embrace new technologies without any deep reflection about how they will shape our lives and the world. I’m glad for organizations like AI and Faith. The more we can bring together the people doing the AI technology work with the wisdom of the world’s religions the better. There will be controversies, but I trust, a wiser engagement with AI. AI-related technologies will increasingly shape our lives, for good and ill. The more reflective we are about them, the more the good can be realized and the bad minimized. If you desire, you can click here for a short reflection on the conference and how we should respond from the perspective of my own faith tradition.
The Rev’d Dr. Kevin Goodrich OP is a vowed member of the Anglican Order of Preachers (aka “The Dominicans”).
