I COULDN’T resist asking a well-known AI for a first review and summary of this new Cambridge Companion. Chat GPT produced a reasonable, coherent, and accurate review in four short and well-constructed paragraphs. Artificial intelligence is in daily use now in many different workplaces and households. Only yesterday, I had a conversation with a vicar who described how he used ChatGPT to summarise 120 different responses in a parish vision and strategy exercise. How are the main world faiths interacting with the questions that AI raises?
Beth Singler and Fraser Watts have produced a helpful anthology structured in three main sections. The first, Religions and AI, offers a summary essay from the perspective of five different world faiths (Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). This is probably the most helpful section of the book. Increasingly, the world faiths are being drawn into dialogue with civil society about the deployment of AI. These five authoritative essays (with good bibliography) are an excellent foundation for gaining access to both similar and divergent insights.
The essays in each of the world faiths are consistent with all that I am hearing from those I am in dialogue with. The essay by Marius Dorobantu on AI and Christianity majors on the doctrine of creation. I would have valued much more on the doctrine of the incarnation and what this says about humanity in relation to AI.
The second section, on social and moral issues, has a further five essays focusing on particular issues (transhumanism, eschatology, ethics, black theology, and human-robot relationships). Inevitably, five essays cannot cover a vast field. In themselves, the essays are comprehensive and helpful. I particularly enjoyed Scott Midson’s reflection on imagining human-robot relationships, and I learned a new word: “lovotics” which describes the science of designing robots that human users will want to interact with and develop relationships with. This covers areas of physical appearance (robots that look like cute animals) as well as philosophical and theological cautions.
The third section has a further four essays on how AI might influence or support religious studies. This is the section that will date most rapidly as AI capabilities expand. In this section, I appreciated Yorick Wilks’s essay on artificial companions and spiritual enhancement, which flags several issues relevant to AI assistants now being deployed across many platforms.
Singler and Watts have, therefore, made a very significant contribution to mapping a new field of study which is of global relevance. The book is well researched and referenced, and the collection brings together and builds a network of scholars of various faiths in a timely manner. Nevertheless, it has a couple of significant weaknesses.
The first are the conditions created by the rapid development and deployment of large language models (such as ChatGPT) and the new questions that they are raising in every field of human endeavour, including the faith communities and churches. Much of this development has happened since the essays in the book were prepared. Developing academic and reference literature of this kind inevitably takes time, and there are, therefore, risks that some of the questions and agendas will change and evolve. AI has moved in the past five years from the margins to the centre of human attention.
The second is in the choice of subjects, which tends towards the more philosophical and focuses on the larger questions that AI raises in relation to transhumanism, the potential advent of general AI, and the more speculative parts of the sector. These are fascinating and important questions. But AI is being deployed now in a wide range of ways across narrow fields of activity and in ways that are affecting human lives profoundly.
So, there is nothing here about how interaction with technology and social media is affecting mental health, particularly among the young; nothing about the balance between freedom and regulation in AI safety; nothing about the exploitative mining of the human personality for profit exposed by Shoshana Zuboff and others; nothing about the environmental costs of AI and the offshoring of deeply unpleasant work to the global South; nothing about the future of the labour market and what that might mean for human flourishing; nothing about the ideologies that lie beneath some of the Big Tech companies.
The Christian Church and other world faiths need to engage with the real-world effects of AI in the present, not simply the more speculative risks for the future. I hope that future volumes will be able to pick up these real and urgent questions in a similar and scholarly manner.
Dr Steven Croft is the Bishop of Oxford. He is a member of the House of Lords Select Committee on AI and a founding board member of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation.
The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Artificial Intelligence
Beth Singler and Fraser Watts
Cambridge University Press £23.99
(978-1-009-01365-9)
Church Times Bookshop £21.59
