Religion and technologies and artificial intelligence
Developments in artificial intelligence are in the process of fundamentally transforming our planet, our society, and us as individuals. Our perception of humanness, our understanding of intelligence and consciousness, as well as how we live together is being shaken by AI. The disruptive power of AI also has severe effects on Religion. Artificial Intelligence is transforming religious institutions, movements, discourses, practices and actors. Independent of their religiosity all actors are completely involved in neu digital technologies. In order to not be helplessly subjected to the new technologies and the elites which utilize them, the modes of action of the discourses and practices of AI must be decoded.
Thus, the diagnostic potential of Religious studies should be applied in two areas. For one, the broad spectrum of interactions between religion and AI should be investigated. For another, the theories and findings of religious studies should be applied to AI as a formation analogous to religion.
Questions about the interactions between religion and artificial intelligence can be further divided into two areas: AI and religion and AI as religion. The former thematic block focusses in the influence of AI on religions, for example in mission and administration, in the use of AI (examples include religion in Apps or as the use of robots as priests), and in the transformation of religious beliefs and practices, such as in the form of new religious movements. Further, artificial intelligence can be investigated as a challenge to images of humans which are contingent on religion and culture and also as an impulse for theological processes of the conception of oneself (theologische Selbstverständigungsprozesse). The latter thematic block is concerned with the discourses and practices of AI as a formation analogous to religion. Key research questions point towards the religious rhetoric and soteriological promises of the discourses about AI, as well as the core functions of AI and the algorithms which AI can produce.
To investigate these questions, we must work with the discourse and ideology critical approaches of religious studies. With the help of multimethodological approaches, the societal dynamics and social consequences of AI can be presented and discussed. The material religion approach helps to consider the so far often neglected anthropological dimensions of AI-praxis. Aspects of gender-theory can generate insights about the effects of androcentric research into AI, as well as take the so far barely considered differences between male and female realities and the transformations of these realities through AI into account.