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Shkruar nga Pamfleti
In the confessional of a Swiss Catholic church, where the priest usually sits, the face of Christ appears. The “AI Jesus” speaks in a monotone German unless you set it to one of the 100 other languages it knows, opens with a data privacy warning, and then answers your religious questions. Powered by an OpenAI chatbot, the experiment took place last year in Lucerne’s St-Pierre Chapel. This Christmas, many Christians will use some form of AI to talk to Jesus. Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews have their own chatbots. Your favorite deity already looks more realistic in AI than in any painted image, and it will become even more so as AI and virtual reality advance.
Artificial intelligence is accelerating a decades-old trend: the transformation of religion from a communal activity to a private pursuit. “Community of faith” is becoming an outdated term. The lone believer, alone with his chatbot, is upending millennial tradition.
The decline of physical religious communities accelerated during the pandemic, as many people began attending services remotely. But in that now-distant era of the early 2020s, believers still operated in virtual communities. They followed clergy online or found companionship in chat forums. Today, with artificial intelligence, the believer can do without human companionship.
A religious chatbot is more available than a busy, live clergyman. French seminaries now graduate about 80 priests a year, down from 1,000 in the 1950s, researcher Olivier Roy said at an Aspen event. Various religions have already tested robot priests. Clergy could eventually be automated like management consultants.
Technology is more than just an extension of traditional religion; it is an extension of it. As Singler explains, AI can seem divine. Like God, its workings are mysterious and it seems to know and see everything — though not necessarily all good. The widespread fear that AI could wipe us out reflects the traditional fear of God.
Modern technology in general has acquired a quasi-religious quality. Utopian visions of technology can inspire more admiration than any ancient speculative description of paradise. Technology “evangelists” prophesy our relocation to other planets. They promise immortality in this world, not in the afterlife. Such powerful technology undermines the traditional religious notion of humans as the pinnacle of creation. It is no wonder that some technology evangelists, such as Elon Musk, support transhumanism: the merging of humans with technology, for example by uploading our minds to the “cloud.”
As people embrace religions with technological or personalized nuances (or neither), old communal religions are not disappearing. On the contrary, they are being repurposed from beliefs into markers of ethnic identity. This is a global trend. Roy says that when European populists talk about the continent’s “Christian identity,” it tends to be code for “Europe is white.” That’s often the message when, for example, politicians put up nativity scenes in town halls. In the U.S., some evangelicals who support Trump follow a creed that is not so much biblical as American exclusivist. The Russian Orthodox Church, which supports Putin, promotes an increasingly nationalist and messianic ideology. India’s ruling Hindu nationalist BJP and Israel’s religious right are both, in part, anti-Islamic ethnic supremacist movements. Hamas combines a violent interpretation of Islam with anti-Semitism. These days, if you want a community of faith, go to politics. Meanwhile, religious belief is becoming a personal matter.
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