AI and Faith’s Programs Team is co-led by Thomas Arnold of Tufts/Harvard Divinity School and Barry Dynkin who teaches AI ethics at Hofstra University. The Team has a wide range of programs in the works for 2023 to speak powerfully into the global debate on AI for human flourishing.
Some of these programs are already well-baked. For others, we’re seeking both expert speakers and corporate sponsors. Our plans include:
- Two ethics panels and a potential plenary session for the May National Faith ERG Conference in Washington, DC. Last year we presented two panels with almost 10 speakers from major technology companies and organizations, showing representatives of Faith Employee Resource Groups how their own faith values can translate into useful contributions to their employers’ technology ethics. Our sponsor, AI&F Advisor Cathie Wood, founder of ARK Invest, spoke in a key note to her own deep convictions around innovation as stewardship. This year, we’re looking at algorithmic decision making as both an opportunity and ethical challenge, and the reach and power of Faith ERGs cooperating across the ERG world and international borders to pursue transformational goals. We are seeking a corporate sponsor or sponsors to encourage this high impact audience and vision. Please contact programs@aiandfaith.org.
- Two plenary ethics panels and ensuing small group discussions with tech senior executives launching the Religious Freedom and Business Foundation’s faith and business conference at the Taj Palace in New Delhi in early October. This conference will naturally follow our May DC conference, broadening our scope to a cross cultural discussion of how faith values, robustly presented in a pluralist landscape, can strengthen business risk management and promote acceptance of good technologies on a global scale. Here too, we’re seeking a corporate sponsor or sponsors to help us bring together leading eastern and western business leaders and faith-oriented business ethicists for an unprecedented conversation in the ethical AI space.
- Participation by a half dozen of our experts in regional conferences on Virtuous AI at Seoul, Rome, and Berkeley, sponsored by the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences and funded by the Templeton Religion Trust.
- Proposed appearances by our experts on use of AI in discipleship and spiritual formation programs and missional data collection at the 3rd Missional AI Summit in Orlando, Florida on April 12-13 , sponsored by the major Bible translating organizations including Wycliffe, SIL, the American Bible Society, and Biblica (the former International Bible Society).
- An academic conference on AI Ethics co-sponsored by Hong Kong Baptist University and Shanghai University in Hong Kong April 20-May 1 and organized by our Contributing Fellow for Networks Levi Checketts, who is Assistant Professor of Religion and Philosophy at HKBU.
- Three internal Town Halls and five “Salon” discussion groups bringing together our 120-member expert community featuring our own experts working in leading edge ethical challenges and opportunities like Generative AI and health care research, led by our Programs Fellow Pablo Ruz Salmones.
AI&F experts and other faith-oriented AI professionals and ethicists: we want to publicize and support your speaking and participation in the major AI ethics conferences like AI, Ethics and Society (AIES); the Fairness, Accountability and Transparency Conference (FAccT), We Robot, and more. Please let us know of your involvement at programs@aiandfaith.org! 
