Insights

For many years I attended a church in Seattle whose senior pastor was a legendary preacher and Biblical scholar. The church doubled from 1,500 pew sitters to a peak of over 3,000 under his preaching. Invariably, the high point of a sermon came when he would rest his...

Expanding Our "Social Imagination" Brian Brock is AI and Faith’s Advisor on ethics and disability.  As the author of the pathbreaking Christian Ethics In a Technological Age and holder of an endowed chair in Moral and Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen's...

A new book by one of Stephen Hawking’s primary collaborators, Leonard Mlodinow, starkly raises the question posed in the title.  In his book published this year, Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking(Pantheon), Mlodinow provides a well-written survey of research...

When the ethical implications of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) are discussed in the military context, the conversation more often than not centers on lethal autonomous weapons systems or LAWS. While this is, of course, an interesting...

Some say AI will create many more jobs than it destroys. For a well-reasoned argument, see this World Economic Forum piece posted in 2020 by Mohamed Kande and Murat Sonmez. Look for a big spike in jobs with titles like "data analysts and scientists," "AI and...

Guillaume d’Alançon is the Director of Communications for Aliter Invest, an investment fund founded by Archduke Imri of Austria to apply Catholic social justice principles in their investment strategies.  Both Archduke Imri and Mr.  d’Alançon were speakers  at the 5th...

Two Unitarian Universalist members of AI and Faith's Communications Team have launched a web platform to help UU congregations address the wide range of issues raised by technologies that increasingly link AI and the brain. Dan Forbush, a member of the UU Congregation...

We asked three AI&F Research Fellows and an Advisor what is especially on their radar as key risk issues or opportunities in AI for 2022.  Here are their answers, answered in diverse ways we really enjoy and appreciate! Jason Thacker Jason is an Advisor of...

The Rome Call for AI Ethics, a Vatican-led effort to establish a set of ethical principles for AI, continues to be touted as an example of technology and faith working together to put some collective guard rails around the burgeoning use of AI. While the Rome Call for...

In Part 1 of this essay, I explained how the writing of the early Church Fathers (“patristics”) from the 4th Century CE is relevant to some of today’s important questioning about AI and society, and more specifically,  AI and faith.  This paper focuses on the question...

As part of this issue’s focus on a human rights approach to controlling AI-based technologies, we asked attorneys in the Seattle and Washington, DC offices of Davis Wright Tremaine (DWT) to describe the significance of a new call from President Biden’s technology...

On November 4, 2021, the Duquesne University Grefenstette Center for Ethics in Science, Technology, and Law hosted an in-person and livestreamed symposium on the present and future ethics of biometric technology. The symposium featured four panels focusing on...

On November 17, 2021, the Iliff School of Theology's Artificial Intelligence Institute hosted a virtual conversation titled “AI, Tech, and the End of the Anthropocene.” The conversation largely focused on confronting the impact of industrial technologies on the...

While I have no previous COSM to compare this COSM to, I find myself agreeing with Panic author Richard Vigilante, who moderated the final panel of COSM 2021, that this was the best COSM yet. To qualify his assertion, Mr. Vigilante explained that a good conference...

The Interfaith Business Network is a new Partner of AI and Faith, working to develop a network of business school students and alumni around questions of diversity, inclusion and equity, business ethics, and faith on a pluralist basis.  Angie Luo and Breanne White are...

The books arrived in my reading stack at the same time:  AI 2041: 10 Visions for our Future and The Perfect Police State.  So which would I read first?  I chose The Perfect Police State.  That order turned out to matter. Investigative journalist Geoffrey Cain’s book...

A 2010 book by well-known social commentator Nicholas Carr, titled The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, raises an ongoing, increasingly important question for computer science and the use of digital tools.  In essence, Carr argues that extensive use...

“Games are so addictive!” “You’re killing our children!” It’s a common objection I hear from concerned parents when they learn of my chosen mission field: video games. I remember a woman approaching me at a faith-forward business conference. We chatted for 10 minutes...

According to the World Economic Forum, by next year, around 50% of human jobs across industries will be subject to automation. Cloud computing, 3D printing and other leading-edge technologies share some responsibility for this, but the lion’s share is tied to AI,...

The Washington Workforce Board published its Future of Work report in December 2019, just as COVID-19 was spreading into the United States.  I served as Co-Manager of the Future of Work Project.  Little did we know that the Pandemic would throw the future of work...