In this podcast episode Elias Kruger and Maggie Bender talk about the latest news in the tech world, Generative AI. How can this new tech change the way we create and consume content? Introducing the paradox of hope and despair, this episode brings innovative thoughts on this topic. Listen to it now on your favorite platform.
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January often puts us in a posture of reflection. New beginnings invite us to adjust, ponder and experiment. For example, per my wife’s wise encouragement, I started drinking 2 liters (64 ounces) of water a day. I also joined the local gym and started to work out 3 times a week. These two actions, and assuming I stick with them, will pay dividends for my health for years to come. I could have done it anytime before but for some reason, it took the coming of a season of reflection to jumpstart in the right direction.
Yet, this is not a post about making new year’s resolutions. It is instead an invitation to reflect on how we can show up to the conversation around Generative AI as its imminent disruption becomes more apparent. Stable diffusion, Chat-GPT, Lensa, and LaMDA filled the news with possibilities, fear, and confusion last year. While these technologies were fermenting for years, 2022 was a “coming out” of sorts when the world realized the potential behind generative AI.
Text, image, and sound generators are now available to the masses, opening avenues for multiform novelties. It has not been without controversy, resistance, and caution. A wave of backlash is mounting which is part of the process when a disruptive innovation emerges. Even so, the only certainty is that things won’t be the same.
These developments only make this work all the more important which leads us to the following question: what will it take to be AI theologians in a time of deep disruption? For those struggling to relate with an increasingly out-of-touch term like theology, let me phrase this dilemma in a different manner: how do we engage with these new AI technologies to ensure they build (not destroy) a flourishing future? If the underlying fear is that AI will redefine our humanity, what would it take to steer them toward a future we all want to live in?
For those new to the area, it is important you immerse yourself with accurate and helpful information about AI technologies. Reading two articles that sound an alarm based on an ill-thought-out worst-case scenario is not a replacement for understanding. Social Media and the Internet in general are chock-full of these. They often lead to misinformation, confusion, and in some cases despair.
A better approach is to expose yourself to a broad array of sources. The implications of any new technology are very hard to predict. They hinge on many factors such as economic cycles, evolving social norms, legislation, and speed of adoption. Furthermore, applications like generative AI will have the greatest impact through innovators that can capitalize on it for commercial ventures. Many of these will fail and few will rise to the top. Remember the dotcom revolution promised in the early ’00s? Only a few companies from that time are still in business.
The best you can do is to browse multiple sources on the matter and ponder their diverse informational signals. While this is a daunting task, you don’t have to do this alone. At our AI theology FB group we are constantly curating and discussing new developments on the AI front. This is a good place to start. There are also emails and publications you can sign up for. One that I would recommend which is free is TLDR which offers a daily sampling of top developments in the world of technology. In short, don’t form an opinion based on one alarmist article. Keep an open mind while patiently looking for diverse sources to see what emerges. The future is open.
In a time of fast change, one of the temptations is to disregard wisdom from the past. We get so immersed in our time that and over-estimate the uniqueness of our predicament. This kind of chronological pride will make us deaf to ancient voices of wisdom. While our challenges may feel immense, humanity has been around for a while the commonalities that bind us are more substantial than it is apparent.
For Christians reading this, that will mean returning to the Bible. Yet, that should not be the only source. I would encourage all of us to engage with the rich theological heritages. Among these, I recommend paying special attention to the contemplative tradition which is also known as Christian mysticism. Rigid dogma will not serve us well and unfortunately, Western Christianity is full of it.
I would also encourage expanding our horizons beyond Christian roots. It is time to draw from Eastern sources which include the great Asian faiths like Hinduism and Buddhism and also our Abrahamic brothers and sisters in the Muslim and Jewish faith. Ponder on Rumi’s poems, attend to the stories from the Vedas, and learn to meditate with Buddhist monks. Our global challenge calls for an extensive search for wisdom wherever we can find it.
Another temptation is to follow a knee-jerk reactive way of engagement – to wish that we could turn back the block of time to a period when this technology did not exist. Wedded to nostalgia, this can be fuel for powerful political movements such as the resurgence of right-wing nationalism. They can slow the tide of history, for a while. But ultimately, they are bound to fail.
A better strategy is to stand in the paradox of hope and despair. What does that mean? It is actually a spiritual practice in which you hold together all the potentialities and the risks of these new technologies in tension. You consider them equally, not trying to solve one or another but contemplating reality for what it is.
Can we hold in tension that this innovation will leave many without a job while also opening space for unprecedented art? Can we ponder that it will both democratize creative skills to the masses while also concentrating power and wealth on the few who control the platforms that offer it? Finally, would we consider the tension that while this new technology could empower many to leave poverty and help us address climate change, it will most likely be used for commercial uses that are non-essential?
Weigh different futures being offered with an open mind while also paying attention to the issues that arise as you learn about Generative AI. It goes without saying, that this process can be emotionally draining. That is why I also urge you to attend to self-care in the process. Look for life-giving spiritual practices that will ground you in what is good and beautiful. Stop, listen and rest. While these are timeless practices they are becoming all the more essential to anyone hoping to keep their sanity in a world of dizzying contradictions.
The ultimate question is: what will we do about it? Some are called to engage in the legislative process in order to protect those who will be harmed by these new technologies. Others will engage in the hard work of building new ecosystems that harness the power of these technologies for the flourishing of life. Others will solve intractable business problems leveraging the power of Generative AI.
I want to call out to a task that may be less obvious but is becoming all the more important: activist imagination. That is, we use imagination as a way to encourage others to act. It is meant to be transformative and paradigm-shifting not simply an experience to be consumed but an activity to enliven citizens.
In a situation where the possibilities are legion, anticipation starts with imagination. It is futile to try to predict how these technologies will transform the world. Yet, imagining multiple possibilities can better prepare us to face what will come next. Can we prepare this generation for what’s coming? A place to start is painting vivid pictures of what could be.
Predicting is a form of control but imagining is an invitation to ponder. The prophetic task of our time is to imagine possibilities (both good and bad) and invite our listeners to consider the impact of their actions in the present. Like the Hebrew prophets, we call out for people to repent, change their minds and go a different way. This is not limited to “scorched earth disaster” scenarios but also to pictures of hope that can inspire positive change
Like present-day prophets, we sit in the paradox of hope and despair and invite our audiences to choose life today so we can all have a future tomorrow.
In this series of two posts, I’ll equip you with a simple but distinctive set of concepts that can help us think and talk about spiritual egalitarianism. This kind of conceptualization is urgently important in a time when the development of AI systems can increasingly take on leadership and management functions in society. This post will articulate a concept of social synecdoche and why it is especially relevant now, in thinking about human-AI societies. The next post will apply it to a question of church governance today, in an illustrative way.
Our thoughts here will center on a socially and sociologically important concept called synecdoche. Here are two examples of it at work:
When a Pope acts, in some meaningful sense, the Church acts.
When a President acts, in some meaningful sense, the nation acts.
Both sentences illustrate social synecdoche at work: it is the representation of a social whole by a single person who is a part of it. The indefinitely expansive use of this mode of group identity is what will define the term ‘axial consciousness’ in my usage. I use the terms “axial age” and “axial consciousness” to define a substantial shift in human history, that is marked by the emergence of the slave machines that we call civilization. By focusing attention on a figure who could, at least in principle, unify a human group of any size in themselves, ancient civilizations created increasingly expansive governments, eventually including a variety of warring empires.
My usage of the term “axial” provides an alternative way of framing these big history discussions about AI and ancient human history. It invites comparison (and contrast) with Ilia Delio’s more standard usage of axial language in Re-enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion.
Insofar as we are psychologically, socially, and somatically embedded in large social bodies today, it is substantially through the sympathetic “social magic” of synecdoche. Both then and now, we have access to this axial mode of consciousness whenever we identify with a representative of an organized group agent, and thereby identify with it. At the same time, we are also able to slip out of this mode and become increasingly atomized in our experience of the world.
For example, when we feel that leaders or a group have betrayed us so deeply that we are no longer a part of it (that it has left us), we experience a kind of atomized consciousness that is the opposite of axial consciousness. This process is often experienced as a painful loss of identity, a confusion about who we are, precisely because we substantially find our identities in this kind of group through representation.
This capacity is rooted in a deep analogy between a personal body and a social body, and this analogy is not only conceptual but also physiological: when our nation is attacked, we feel attacked, and when something happens to our leader, we spontaneously identify with them as a part of the group they represent. Social synecdoche is therefore part of the way we reify social bodies. Reifying a social body is what we do when we make a country or Church into a thing, through group psychology processes that are consciously experienced as synecdoche: the representation of the whole by a part.
This notion of social synecdoche can help us notice new things and reframe familiar discussions in interesting ways. For example, how does social synecdoche relate to present debates about representative democracy vs autocracy? Representative government refines and extends this type synecdoche, articulating it at more intermediate scales in terms of space (districts, representing smaller areas), time (limited terms, representing a people for an explicit time) and types of authority (separations of powers, representing us in our different social functions).
This can create a more flexible social body, in certain contexts, because identification is distributed in ways that give the social body more points of articulation and therefore degrees of freedom and potential for accountability. For all of this articulation, representative government remains axial, just more fully articulated. If it weren’t axial in this sense, representative government wouldn’t reach social scale in the first place.
So sociologically and socially, we are still very much in the axial age, even in highly articulated representative governments. In a real sense, representative government is an intensification of and deepening articulation of axial consciousness; it responds to the authoritarianism of a single representative by dramatically multiplying representation.
Ever since social synecdoche facilitated the first expanding slave machines, there has been a sometimes intense tug-of-war between atomized consciousness and axial consciousness. This effort to escape axial social bodies through individuation has always been a feature of the axial experience, often because axial group agents are routinely capricious and cruel and unjust. For example, our first known legal code, the Code of Ur-Nammu, bears witness to the ways in which a legal representative of the axial social body incentivized the recuperation of slaves who desperately tried to individuate:
If a slave escapes from the city limits, and someone returns him, the owner shall pay two shekels to the one who returned him.
For all of the privation involved in privateness, some people throughout the axial period have also attempted various forms of internal immigration (into the spirit or mind) as a means of escape. Some, but certainly not all, axial spirituality can be understood in these terms. The Hebrew prophetic tradition, for example, does not engage generally in internal escapism, but instead seeks to hold axial social bodies to account, especially by holding their representatives accountable.
Our long history as axial beings suggests that we will probably stay like this, even as we build the technology that will enable us to make AI Presidents and Kings. It seems possible that we will have AI systems that can be better than humans at fulfilling the office of President before we have AI systems that are better than us at plumbing or firefighting. In part this is because the bar for good political leadership is especially low, and in part it reflects the relative ease of automating a wide range of creative, social and analytical work through advanced text generation systems. If this sounds absurd, I’d recommend getting caught up on the developments with GPT-3 and similar systems. You can go to openai.com and try it out if you like.
How hard would it be for an AI system to more faithfully or reliably represent your nation or church or city or ward than the current ones? Suppose it can listen and synthesize information well, identify solutions that can satisfy various stakeholders, and build trust by behaving in a reliable, honest and trustworthy way. And suppose it never runs the risk of sexually molesting someone in your group. By almost any instrumental measure, meaning an external and non-experience-focused measure of its ability to achieve a goal, I think that we may well have systems that do better than a person within a generation. We might also envision a human President who runs on a platform of just approving the decisions of some AI system, or a President who does this secretly.
In such a context, as with any other case where AI systems outperform humans, human agents will come to seem like needless interlopers who only make things worse; it will seem that AI has ascended to its rightful throne.
But this precisely raises the central point I’d like to make:
In that world, humans become interlopers only insofar as our goals are merely instrumental. That is to say, this is the rightful place of AI only insofar as we conceive of leadership merely as a matter of receiving inputs (public feedback, polling data, intelligence briefings) and generating outputs (a political platform, strategy, public communications, and the resultant legitimation structure rooted in social trust and identification).
This scenario highlights the limits of instrumentality itself. Hence, instead of having merely instrumental goals for governance, I believe that we urgently need to treat all humans as image-bearers, as true ends in themselves, as Creation’s priests.
A range of scholarship has highlighted the basic connection between image-bearing and the governance functions of priests and kings in the religions of the Ancient Near East. Image-bearing is, then, very early language for social synecdoche. In an axial age context, which was and is our context, the notion that all of humanity bears God’s image remains a challenging and deeply egalitarian response to the problem of concentrated power that results from social synecdoche. That is what I’ll turn to in the next post.
Daniel Heck is a Pastor at Central Vineyard Church in Columbus, OH. His work focuses on immigrant and refugee support, spiritual direction, and training people of all ages how to follow the teachings of Jesus. He is the author of According to Folly, founder of Tattered Books, and writes regularly on Medium: https://medium.com/@danheck
This is the fourth and final part of our excellent discussion from the January Advisory Board meeting, where we explored the question of whether we live in a technological age. In Part 1 we addressed the idea of a technological age, and in Part 2 we discussed the telos of technology and the value of work. In Part 3 we explored the value of play. In Part 4, we continue the conversation by asking how our role as creators and stewards shapes the telos of technology.
Wen: My personal theology of technology is grounded in us being creators. We are made in God’s image, and God is a creator. So we are all mini creators. That kind of echoes what Micah said. I also think we’re commanded to steward our resources. So going back to the original question that you raise – what is the telos of technology – I see us as creators and stewards. That’s one way to frame a telos of technology.
Another way to frame it is very idealistic. If you look at the Bible, Jesus actually tells us the greatest commandment. Love of God and love of neighbor (Matthew 22:37-40). So is there a way we could run all types of technology, product, visions, and development, through that filter? Does a certain technology help us to love and serve our neighbor? And does this technology honor God?
I know that’s idealistic. I’m not expecting all of US capitalism, all companies, to adopt that framework. But from a biblical perspective, we can ask about the telos of technology and the human telos. Do all of our actions for creating and stewarding serve our neighbor or honor God?
Maggie: As you described earlier, Elias, I also spent a lot of time wondering, “What am I doing?” I worked for a bank. I worked for Wall Street. I’m working for a management and consulting company now. But one of the things that I do in each job is really focusing on bringing a better world, a better life to my end-user.
A lot of times that comes into some pretty granular metrics. For instance, it used to take you two weeks to have this horrible conversation, because you had to pull data from six different places. Now, it will take you an hour to put the data together, and then whatever time it takes you to have the meeting. That is good stewardship! There is a concrete improvement in time saved.
So yes, there is a certain sense in which a broad biblical goal based on love of God and love of neighbor is idealistic. But people can make it more realistic within their context if they connect it to a smaller goal. If I can make one person’s life better, that does express love of neighbor.
Elias: I want to raise another question, going back to what Micah said about play and what Wen said about our role as creators and stewards. Can we be both playful and good stewards? In other words, is ethical play possible? Can those things happen together? Usually, they do not go together. Often, playing means not worrying about what will happen. And part of being a good steward is almost like being the adult with a child who’s trying to play. “Think about your actions, stop doing that, don’t be so wasteful.” Is there a place there to engage in ethical play? In other words, can play actually help others?
Ben: I think the answer is “yes”. Going back to what Wen said, part of the great commandment is to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. That contains a foundational construct, which is that we love ourselves. If we draw these things together, we can think of it in terms of stewarding ourselves. By stewarding ourselves, we’re increasing our capacity to love ourselves and therefore raising our capacity to love God and neighbor. And I would argue that we increase our capacity by allowing ourselves to play.
We can apply this to the life of the church. I rail against cultural co-opting. That is, with every new technology, every new movement, the church asks how we can make it ours. That is really a dishonest conversation because we don’t really care about human flourishing so much as we care about butts in pews and dollars in plates. There’s a lot of focus on the institution of the church. So instead of increasing human flourishing, and increasing the stewardship of ourselves and others, we spend a lot of time trying to make sure that there’s institutional survival.
That’s the capitalist mindset. How do we maximize profit for our investors? In doing that, we iterate for the good of the institution, rather than the good of humanity.
To get away from that mindset, the church must ask: is this about human flourishing or about institutional flourishing? And that’s where I think the value of play is critical because it cuts across institutions. Organizations don’t play. People do. So if we can maintain the vignette of human flourishing through play, then it’s sort of a safeguard. Play helps us focus on human flourishing rather than on institutional survival.
Elias: Isabelle, do you have anything to add? We’d love to hear from you.
Isabelle: Well, from my perspective, as a humanities student, I’m studying a lot about the modern world and how the model modern individual is portrayed inside this world. You could say that the value of play is missing. The individual constantly needs to be efficient, constantly needs to be kind of like a machine. The individual can’t get it wrong. When he feels wrong, he can’t express it. And when he expresses, he’s shut down. And it’s really interesting to see how modernity is embedded in this discussion about technology.
Elias: Thank you, that’s great. I love when you bring something in because your perspective is so unique, and we need that in these conversations. That’s what I love about this group, so many different perspectives coming together.
Unfortunately, our time is up. This does feel like play to me, and I’m going to have to end our ability to play right now, which makes me sad. But thanks, everybody for being here. I look forward to next time.
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At our January Advisory Board meeting, we explored the question of whether we live in a technological age. You can find Part 1 of our conversation in this post. In Part 2 below, we discuss a new telos of technology.
Elias: I think we established, for the most part, that this is a technological age. Maybe we always have been in a technological age, but technology is definitely part of our lives now. Some of you started hinting at the idea that technology is pointing towards something. It is teleological, from the Greek word telos, meaning goal. Technology leads toward something. And I think Chardin saw technology leading into the Omega point, while Ellul saw it more as a perversion of a Christian eschaton. In his view, the Christian position was to resist and subvert it.
The question I have now is very broad. How do we forge a new vision, a new telos, for technology? Or maybe even, what would that telos be? We talked earlier about technology for the sake of capitalism or consumption. What would be a new telos for technology, and how would we forge this new vision?
František: I have a great colleague with a technical background and a longtime friend. I studied with him in Amsterdam. He’s now sort of an important person in a company developing AI. He’s a member of the team which programmed the AI to play poker. So he’s quite skillful in programming, and actually working on the development of AI. He’s developing amazing things.
I spoke with him about this telos question, “What is the aim of technology?” He said, “Well, there is no such thing as an overall goal.” The goal is to improve our program to be able to fight more sophisticated threats to our system. That’s what we are developing. So basically, there is no general telos of technology. There is only a narrow focus. There is just the goal to improve technology, that it gets better, and serves better the concrete purpose for which is built. It’s a very particular focus.
I was very unhappy with this answer. After all, there must be some goal. And he said, “Well, that’s the business of theologians.” My friend said he doesn’t believe in anything. Not in theism, not even in atheism, he just doesn’t bother discussing it. So for him, there is no God, no goal, nothing. We’re just living our life. And we’re improving it. We are improving it step by step. He’s a well-studied, learned person, and he sees it like that. I’ve experienced the same thing during conversations with many of my friends who are working in technology on the technical or the business side.
So they would say, perhaps, there is no goal. That’s a clash of mentalities. We are trying to build a bridge between this technological type of thinking and the theological, philosophical perspective which intends to see the higher goal.
I don’t have a good argument. You can try to convince him that there is a higher goal, but he doesn’t believe in a higher goal. So I’m afraid that a lot of people developing technology do not see further than the next step of a particular piece of technology. And I’m afraid that here we are, getting close to the vision of the Brave New World, you know, the novel. People are improving technology on a particular stage, but they do not see the full picture. It is all about improving technology to the next step. There is no long-term thinking. Perhaps there are some visionaries, but this is at least my experience, which I’m afraid is quite broad in the field of technology.
Maggie: I feel like that happens a lot from the developer side of technology. But at least the import within technology should be that you have some sort of product owner or product manager, that’s supposed to be supplying a vision. That person could start thinking about the goal of technology. I know a lot of times within technology, the product manager draws out the user story. So, “I’m a user. I want to ______, so that ______.” And it’s the so that which becomes the bigger element that’s drawn out. But that’s still at a very microscopic level. So yeah, there might be an intersection with the larger goal of technology, but I don’t think it really is used there very well.
Elias: Some of you who have known me for a long time know how much I have struggled with my job and finding meaning in what I do. And a lot of times it was exactly like you described, František. It was like, What am I doing here? What is this for? And I found, at least recently, this sweet spot where I found a lot of meaning in what I was doing. It wasn’t like I was changing people’s lives. But I found this passion to make things better and more efficient. When you are in a large corporation things can be so bureaucratic. And we were able to come in and say, I don’t care how you do it, we’re gonna accomplish this thing. And then you actually get it done. There is a sense of purpose and satisfaction in that alone.
I would venture to say that your friend, František, is actually doing creative work, co-creative work with God. He may not call it that. But there is something about bringing order out of chaos. I think even in a situation where the user or the developer is not aware, there might be goals happening there that we could appreciate and describe theologically.
For instance, going back to my experience, it might just be the phase that I’m in at work. But I’m feeling a lot of satisfaction in getting things done nowadays. Just simply getting things done. How can I put that theologically? I don’t know. Is that how God felt after creation? But there is something about accomplishing things. Now, if that’s all you do, obviously, eventually it just becomes meaningless. But there is something meaningful in the act of accomplishing a task.
Maggie: And just the sanctity of work too. Your friend, he’s working, he’s doing something. And in that type of work, even though it’s labor, I think it’s still a part of the human telos.
František: Yeah, I think so, even though he thinks that there is no human telos as such. And we keep having conversations, and he still sees something important in the conversations. So that means he still keeps coming to the conversation with philosophers and theologians, even though he sort of disregards their work because he sees it as not relevant to his work. But I think that’s a sign of hope in his heart.
What can an ancient Mesoamerican culture teach the global community in the 21st century? I pondered on these question on my 2.5+ hours bus ride between Cancun and the Chichen Itza’s ruins. With no pretensions or pressure to come up with something, the trip would prove thought-provoking and inspiring. In this blog, I’ll share my findings and a bit about how I ended up there two weeks ago. While being a sucker for exploring new cultures, what I found here went beyond the usual history lesson. With their rich history, delicious cuisine, advanced technology, the Maya surprised me while also challenging me to care for this earth.
Like rivers flowing into oceans, so are the unplanned encounters of the soul in unexpected journeys of discovery. I didn’t set out to the Yucatan peninsula in a quest to learn about the Mayas. Quite the contrary, I was there to rest and celebrate with my wife our 20th anniversary. Away from kids, work, and the many demands of our life at this stage, we yearned for the gentle soothing sounds of the sea.
Even so, places have a way to whisper. They often carry with them stories untold of a past waiting to be discovered. I knew some important monuments and Mayan ruins were nearby and that was enough to pique my interest. In the hotel I learned about my options, only wanting to spend a day I chose the most visited site: Chichen Itza, only a 2.5-3 hour drive from the area we were staying.
My wife, seeking to avoid the crowds and rest up for a day, decided to stay while encouraging me to go. Being one day away from each halfway through our stay sounded like a good compromise from the wisdom of 20 years of marriage. In an interesting twist, when learning I was from Brazil, the hotel agent booked me with a Portuguese-speaking guide. I would join Brazilians and Portuguese natives who were also discovering this Mayan Jewel.
Modernity’s move toward secular science has borne out many achievements. Even so, it also resulted in tremendous loss. For one, people in the West lost their sense of connection with nature and with it also their reverence and respect for it. Nature went from an object of worship to raw material to be exploited. The call to subdue earth meant more than taming nature but ultimately came to justify a massive amount of destruction, pollution, and degradation.
Hence, it is no surprise that westerners like me would have a renewed interest in pre-Modern cultures like the Mayas. They point us to a time when connection and reverence to nature were the order of the day. Rejecting prevalent attitudes that would either see it as a competing religion or dismiss it as primitive superstition, we can now look at Mayans with a humble attitude to listen. What does their story of advancement, exuberance, warfare, and decline teach us today as we live in our age of environmental crisis? It is with this posture, that I approach and reflect on my recent visit to Chichen Itza.
As I rode the bus on the way to Chichen Itza, I was bracing for a real-life history lesson. What I did not expect was a math class early morning on my 3rd day of vacation! Yet, since we had a long drive there, our guide Mauricio Dzul, proceeded to explain the very elaborate yet elegant numbering system the Mayas created. Using only dots, dashes, and a shell-like symbol they can represent any number! I must say that my curious mind was intrigued and made me wonder, shouldn’t we teach this more as a way to diversify teaching mathematics? I might teach it to my kids just for fun.
Why did they develop their number system? While there may be other reasons, The Maya people were astute observers of the skies. They used the movement of the Sun, Moon and Venus to devise the most elaborate calendar system in the world. In this calendar, they counted time that went back thousands of years and needed a way to express these long dates. It was a misunderstanding of this calendar that led to the paranoia with the 2012 date. That was not a good use of Maya technology!
Their historical witness challenges us to look up and consider the stars anew with keen curiosity and reverence. Their astronomy did not only lead to a number system but also greatly influenced their engineering. The Yucatan peninsula is dotted with the remains of buildings oriented towards the movements of the Sun and Moon. They continue to attract thousands to witness intriguing light patterns on Solistice dates. In my visit to Chichen Itza, our guide showed how when clapping from designated place we could hear multiple echoes and even the sound of a bird.
Since my visit, I have become obsessed with all things Maya and their technology. Browsing materials on it and now listening to a course on their history, I learned of the vastness and richness of the field. Mayan studies continue to expand as many ruins are yet to be discovered and properly understood. In this thriving field, one of the most daunting questions has been the cities’ abandonment. By the time the Spanish arrived, many of the great Mayan cities were already ruins covered by the rainforest.
I asked our knowledgeable guide about this. While there was warfare involved, in many cases, the population simply left migrating to other cities or smaller settlements in the forest. He indicated that it was most likely because of weather changes, some of which may have been precipitated by agricultural practices to feed growing populations in the region. Changes in rain patterns disrupted harvest yields leading to political instability and warfare.
If this is indeed the case, then the Maya story through technology also offers a cautionary tale for our time. It re-inforces the message scientists have been warning us about in the last decades on climate change. We must revisit our way of life and how we sustain our growing populations or see our big skyscrapers become ruins overtaken by forest.
Contrary to what it seems, I don’t purposefully look for reasons to blog on my vacation. Yet, they occur from time to time. All it takes is a willingness to enter into the story of a place. Even in a digitally connected world, physical spaces matter. We sit on land that was re-settled by many before us. They, in turn, lived in ecosystems that took millions of years to form. Attending to the story of both the land we inhabit and the people that lived before us is our duty and call for this time.
I cannot see a more theological task than this. If we believe in a timeless God who created the earth, surely we must learn to hear God’s voice in the ground we step on and the cultures that preceded us. If we slow down to listen, we’ll be amazed at the wisdom that surfaces. These are the very whispers of God speaking truth through time and space.
With that posture, I am grateful for the Mayans and their land which I had the privilege to visit. In my time of rest and recreation, I also found new nuggets of wisdom to take along the journey.
Which story is the place you live in telling you? If you haven’t pondered on this question maybe now it is time to start searching.
The Internet is not to be understood merely as a tool. It is a specific extension of a complex environment instead. Contemporaries live on (or in) the Internet as well as in the physical landscapes of this world. Besides, such a mode of living in the world continues to intensify. Always more human activities are being moved into the online environment which changes them a lot. Just think of how rapidly the activity of shopping has changed during, let’s say, the last decade. Three decades ago, shopping was a completely different experience than it is nowadays, as the Internet became an everyday reality.
Regardless of these considerations, it would be a mistake to see the Internet only as a kind of parallel reality. As a complex phenomenon, the Internet touches all spheres of human life, including the sphere of religion – the religious life. At this place, a crucial question might be asked: What is the relation between religion and the key technical medium of the internet?
In general, we may consider 3 dimensions of such a relationship. It is (1) religion online, (2) online religion, and (3) online religious experience. The first two dimensions were studied and well defined by Canadian sociologist and anthropologist of religion, Christopher Helland. The third was added a few years ago by new media and media theory experts from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Menahem Blondheim, and Hananel Rosenberg. The concept they suggested raises serious questions, but at the same time, it touches on the limits of what is presently possible. In any case, all phases (if we look at the problem from the perspective of development as Christopher Helland), or dimensions (if we consider the fact that the first two categories often exist in parallel or in different combinations) might be described as follows.
Religion online describes a static presence of religion on the internet. Typically, good examples of this are the websites containing information about different religious communities and their activities. In the Christian religious tradition, we can point out websites of parishes or church communities. According to Helland, this relationship between religion and the internet belongs to the past, which was characteristic of slow internet connection and technically undeveloped, static, access devices (e.g., heavy personal computers), which some of us may remember from the 1990s. At that time, the internet was understood by religious communities merely as a tool for their presentations. With time, websites, as well as social networks with religious content, became an integral part of life for a great number of religious communities. They will likely continue to serve, as such, even in times when the internet offers new possibilities.
In online religion, the Internet has become a tool for developing religious practice online with the improvement of the connection speed and improved access technologies. Online prayer groups, religious rituals, or services set and performed in an online environment might be mentioned as examples. This form of interaction between religions and the internet encountered its unprecedented boom during the last two years in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. With governmental restrictions and lockdowns, religious life in its traditional communitarian form stopped practically overnight and religions were forced to move a large part of their activities to the online environment. The internet was naturally used as a tool to handle this change. Soon, however, it was understood that it is not only a tool but also a new environment for religious practice from now on.
This is of course not without theological problems. Perhaps, one of the crucial questions refers to the online religious experience. Is it possible to speak about online religious experience at the level of online religion? Is online religious experience real or rather “just” virtual (and thus not real)? Blondheim and Rosenberg open this question and argue for a new dimension of the relationship between religion and the internet because, in their opinion, it is possible to encounter authentic religious experiences in cyberspace.
It is disputable if online religious experiences are already present phenomena or if they are an uncertain matter of the future. In the latter form, they would only be considered at a level of a vision for the future. Some suggest that something like an online religious experience is principally not possible at all. However, theoretically speaking, the increasing speed of connection and response of largely personalized and omnipresent access devices (e.g., smartphones), quickly advancing the datafication of human lives, virtual reality development, and interaction with artificial intelligence, bring serious questions into the realm of religion.
The internet is becoming a true environment; something that becomes more transparent like a borderline between cyberspace and real space in which our bodies dwell. It slowly fades away. Consequently, cyberspace should neither be labeled as a “consensual hallucination” as it once was by its conceiver William Gibson, nor as a kind of utopia, or place “nowhere-somewhere” (Kevin Robins). Contemporary people live in digital landscapes as they do in physical ones. These two traditionally separated spaces manifest themselves, today, as one hybrid space.
The age of the internet of things is slowly coming to its end, and the era of the internet of everything is setting in. Quickly advancing mobile technologies are playing a key role in the hybrid space interface. Thanks to them, people are practically connected to the internet non-stop. They can create digital-physical landscapes and perceive how they become digital-physical hybrid entities as they live in hybrid (real-virtual) spaces they create for themselves. To put it bluntly, what is happening on the world wide web, is happening in the real world, and vice versa. Everything might be online, and to a large extent, it already is.
Let’s assume that in such an environment (such as the metaverse) it is possible to have an authentic religious experience. In other words, let’s presume that from this perspective, the encounter with the Sacred in cyberspace has the same characteristics and qualities as in the physical landscapes of this world. An imaginary wall between real and virtual is still perceivable. However, with the emergence of the metaverse, it is becoming more transparent and more permeable. Yet, if it ever will disappear remains a question. In each case, we can already speak of religious experience in cyberspace concerning some computer games as World of Warcraft, for instance (Geraci, Gálik, Gáliková).
Recent research on Neo-Paganism suggests that a relatively high number of its adherents consider their online religious activity equivalent to that in the physical world. Some of them even stated that their religious activity in cyberspace is on a higher level than that in real life. We may also speak of online religious experiences concerning the phenomena of virtual pilgrimages (cyber-pilgrimages or e-pilgrimages). Further, platforms like the one with the meaningful name Second Life make it possible to live a religious life in a completely online environment.
Blondheim and Rosenberg believe that online religious experience in the digital world is “emerging from the breakdown and collapse of all entrenched conventions and narratives in the digital world, and the opening of a chaotic abyss can (…) serve as a prelude to a fresh new theological start.” Unfortunately, they do not say anything about how this new theological start they propose should look. But, right now, it is not that important because it may stimulate our imagination and thoughts on the transformations of faith in the digital age.
What would be your reflection on this matter?
An earlier version of this text originally appeared in the Christnet online magazine in Czech (https://www.christnet.eu/clanky/6592/nabozenstvi_on_line_on_line_nabozenstvi_a_on_line_nabozenska_zkusenost.url); published 22nd September 2021. English translation published with the permission of the Christnet magazine. Translated by the author.
František Štěch is a research fellow at the Protestant Theological Faculty of Charles University. He serves as coordinator of the “Theology & Contemporary Culture” research group. Previously he worked at the Catholic Theological Faculty of Charles University as a research fellow and project PI. His professional interests include Fundamental theology; Ecclesiology; Youth theology; Religious, and Christian identity; Intercultural
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Guest contributor Dr. Scott Hawley discusses the implications for generative models and resurrection. As this technology improves, the generation of new work attributed to the dead multiply. How does that square with the Christian hope for resurrection?
“It is the business of the future to be dangerous.”
(Fake) Ivan Illich
“The first thing that technology gave us was greater strength. Then it gave us greater speed. Now it promises us greater intelligence. But always at the cost of meaninglessness.”
(Fake) Ivan Illich
The previous two quotes are just a sample of 365 fake quotes in the style of philosopher/theologian Ivan Illich by feeding a page’s worth of real Illich quotes from GoodReads.com into OpenAI’s massive language model, GPT-3, and had it continue “writing” from there. The wonder of GPT-3 is that it exhibits what its authors describe as “few-shot learning.” That is, rather than requiring of 100+ pages of Illich as older models, it works with a few Illich quotes. Two to three original sayings and the GPT-3 can generate new quotes that are highly believable.
Have I resurrected Illich? Am I putting words into the mouth of Illich, now dead for nearly 20 years? Would he (or the guardians of his estate) approve? The answers to these questions are: No, Explicitly not (via my use of the word “Fake”), and Almost certainly not. Even generating them started to feel “icky” after a bit. Perhaps someone with as flamboyant a public persona as Marshall McLuhan would have been pleased to be ― what shall we say, “re-animated“? ― in such a fashion, but Illich likely would have recoiled. At least, such is the intuition of myself and noted Illich commentator L.M. Sacasas, who inspired my initial foray into creating an “IllichBot”:
…and while I haven’t abandoned the IllichBot project entirely, Sacasas and I both feel that it would be better if it posted real Illich quotes rather than fake rehashes via GPT-3 or some other model.
For the AI Theology blog, I was not asked to write about “IllichBot,” but rather on the story of AI creating Nirvana music in a project called “Lost Tapes of the 27 Club.” This story was originally mis-reported (and is still in the Rolling Stone headline metadata) as “Hear ‘New’ Nirvana Song Written, Performed by Artificial Intelligence,” but really the song was “composed” by the AI system and then performed by a (human) cover band. One might ask, how is this is different from humans deciding to imitate another artists?
For example, the artist known as The Weeknd sounds almost exactly like the late Michael Jackson. Greta Van Fleet make songs that sound like Led Zeppelin anew. Songwriters, musicians, producers, and promoters routinely refer to prior work as signifiers when trying to communicate musical ideas. When AI generates a song idea, is that just a “tool” for the human artists? Are games for music composition or songwriting the same as “AI”? These are deep questions regarding “what is art?” and I will refer the reader to Marcus du Sautoy’s bestselling survey The Creativity Code: Art and Innovation in the Age of AI. (See my review here.)
Since that book was published, newer, more sophisticated models have emerged that generate not just ideas and tools but “performance.” The work of OpenAI’s Jukebox effort and artist-researchers Dadabots generate completely new audio such as “Country, in the style of Alan Jackson“. Dadabots have even partnered with a heavy metal band and beatbox artist Reeps One to generate entirely new music. When Dadabots used Jukebox to produce the “impossible cover song” of Frank Sinatra singing a Britney Spears song, they received a copyright takedown notice on YouTube…although it’s still unclear who requested the takedown or why.
Where’s the theology angle on this? Well, relatedly, mistyping “Dadabots” as “dadbots” in a Google search will get you stories such as “A Son’s Race to Give His Dying Father Artificial Immortality” in which, like our Fake Ivan Illich, a man has trained a generative language model on his father’s statements to produce a chatbot to emulate his dad after he’s gone. Now we’re not merely talking about fake quotes by a theologian, or “AI cover songs,” or even John Dyer’s Worship Song Generator, but “AI cover Dad.” In this case there’s no distraction of pondering interesting legal/copyright issues, and no side-stepping the “uncomfortable” feeling that I personally experience.
One might try to couch the “uncomfortable” feeling in theological terms, as some sort of abhorrence of “digital” divination. It echoes the Biblical story of the witch of Endor temporarily bringing the spirit of Samuel back from the dead at Saul’s request. It can also relate to age-old taboos about defiling the (memory of) the dead. One could try to introduce a distinction between taboo “re-animation” that is the stuff of multiple horror tropes vs. the Christian hope of the resurrection through the power of God in Christ.
However I would stop short of this, because the source of my “icky” feeling stems not from theology but from a simpler objection to anthropomorphism, the “ontological” confusion that results when people try to cast a generative (probabilistic) algorithm as a person. I identify with the scientist-boss in the digital-Frosty-the-Snowman movie Short Circuit:
“It’s a machine, Schroeder. It doesn’t get pissed off. It doesn’t get happy, it doesn’t get sad, it doesn’t laugh at your jokes. It just runs programs.”
Short Circuit
Materialists, given their requirement that the human mind is purely physical, can perhaps anthropomorphize with impunity. I submit our present round of language and musical models, however impressively they may perform, are only a “reflection, as in a glass darkly” of true human intelligence. The error of anthropomorphism goes back for millenia, however, the Christian hope for resurrection addresses being truly reunited with lost loved ones. That means being able to hear new compositions of Haydn, by Haydn himself!
Acknowledgement: The title is an homage to the “Stochastic Parrots” paper of the (former) Google AI ethics team.
Scott H. Hawley is Professor of Physics at Belmont University and a Founding Member of AI and Faith. His writings include the winning entry of FaithTech Institute’s 2020 Writing Contest and the most popular Acoustics Today article of 2020, and have appeared in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith and The Transhumanism Handbook.
I am hesitant to watch French movies as the protagonist often dies at the end. Would this be another case of learning to love the main character only to see her die at the end? Given the movie premise, it was worth the risk. Similar to Eden, Netflix Oxygen is a powerful exploration of the intersection of hope and technology.
It is uncommon to see a French movie make it to the top charts of American audiences. Given our royal laziness, we tend to stay away from anything that has subtitles preferring more the glorified-theatrics-simplistic plots of Hollywood. The French are too sophisticated for that. For them, movies are not entertainment but an art form.
Realizing I had never watched a French Sci-Fi Thriller, maybe it was time to walk down that road. I am glad I did. The next day, I reflected on the movie’s plot after re-telling the whole story to my wife and my daughter. Following the instigating conversation that ensued, I realized there was enough material for an AI theology review.
You wake up and find yourself trapped in a capsule. You knock on the walls eventually activating an AI that informs you that you are in a cryogenic chamber. There is no way of knowing how you got there and how you can get out. You have 90 minutes before the oxygen runs out. The clock is ticking and you need to find a way to survive or simply accept your untimely death.
Slowly the main character played by Melanie Laurent, Elizabeth, discovers pieces and puzzles about who she is, why she is in the chamber and ultimately what options she has. This journey is punctuated by painful discoveries and a few close calls building the suspense through out the feature.
Her only companion throughout this ordeal is the chamber AI voice assistant, Milo. She converses, argues and pleads with him through out as she struggles to find a way to survive. The movie revolves around their unexpected partnership, as the AI is her only way to learn about her past and communicate with the outside world. The contrast between his calm monotone voice with her desperate cries further energize the movie’s dramatic effect.
In my view, the plot’s simple premise along with Melanie’s superb performance makes the movie work even as it stays centered on one life and one location the whole time.
Spoiler Alert: The next sections give away key parts of the plot.
Oxygen is the type of film that you wake up the next day thinking about it. That is, the impact is not clearly felt until later. There is so much to process that its meaning does not become clear right away. The viewer is so involved in the main character’s ordeal that you don’t have time to reflect on the major ethical, philosophical and theological issues that emerge in the story.
For example, once Elizabeth wakes up, one of the first things Milo offers her is sedatives. She refuses, preferring to be alert in her struggle for survival rather than calmly accepting her slow death. In one of the most dramatic scenes of the movie, Milo follows protocol to euthanize her as she is reaching the end of her oxygen supply. In an ironic twist that Elizabeth picks up on: the AI asks her permission for sedatives but does not consult her about the ultimate decision to end her life. While a work of fiction, this may very well be sign of things to come, as assisted suicide becomes legal in many parts of the world. Is it assisted-suicide of humane end-of-life care?
In an interesting combination, Oxygen portrays cryogenics, cloning and space travel as the ultimate solution for human survival. As humanity faced a growing host of incurable diseases they send a spaceship with thousands of clones in cryogenic chambers to find the cure in another planet. Elizabeth, as she learns mid-way, is a clone of a famous cryogenics scientist carrying her memories and DNA. This certainly raises interesting questions about the singularity of the human soul. Can it really transfer to clones or are they altogether different beings? Is memory and DNA the totality of our beings or are there transcending parts impossible to replicate in a lab?
In the end, human ingenuity prevails. Through a series of discoveries, Liz finds a way to survive. It entails asking Milo to transfer the oxygen from other cryogenic chambers into hers. Her untimely awakening was the result of an asteroid collision that affected a number of other chambers. After ensuring there were no other survivors in these damaged chambers, she asks for the oxygen transfer.
To my surprise, the movie turns out to be a colossal affirmation of life. Where the flourishing of life is, there is also theology. While having no religious content, the story shows how the love for self and others can lead us to fight for life. Liz learns that her husband’s clone is in the spaceship which gives her a reason to go on. This stays true even after she learns she herself is a clone and in effect have never met or lived with him. The memory of their life together is enough to propel her forward, overcoming insurmountable odds to stay alive.
The story also illustrates the power of augmentation, how humans enabled through technology can find innovative solutions that extend life. In that sense, the movie aligns with a Christian Transhumanist view – one that sees humans co-creating hopeful futures with the divine.
Even if God is not present explicitly, the divine seems to whisper through Milo’s reassuring voice.
