AI & Christians

Salon Magazine offers a unique article on artificial intelligence, especially for a secular publication.

Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte N.C. has a robot which is handled by an assistant theology professor.  They use it to pursue questions "about what it means to be human; about how we should interact with the non-human entities in our lives; and about what a uniquely Christian response might be to a world in which humans start to seem more like computers, and computers start to seem more and more like human beings."

Very good questions.  The author says that the "robot’s biggest role may be in helping to thaw the long silence among evangelicals."

So . . we have here a secular thinker who is waiting for evangelical Christians to think through the place of artificial intelligence in the Christian worldview.  That's awesome.

FYI, the only other Christian organization doing this now (besides this seminary) that I know of is Reasons to Believe.  Vice president and biochemist Dr. Fazale Rana has written a book on it, and it's summarized here and other posts that week.

It's true - we really need to think through this before ethics and policies toward AI are set in concrete by materialist thinkers alone.