Insights

We're suddenly seeing a lot of promotions for "AI writers" -- research tools powered by Natural Language Processors like GPT-3 that can generate well-structured, perfectly serviceable and bland text. It has no personality, but it is grammatical and relevant to the...

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the brain-computer interface (BCI) next June, we're learning as much as we can about the current state of the BCI. We're also exploring where these thought-reading technologies are taking us, asking experts to give us their best...

  In July of this year, Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, broke his confidentiality agreement with his employer by publishing his conversation with LaMDA, an artificial intelligence entity (or bot) that he and his colleagues created. It has been reported that he...

Unitarian Universalism and Hinduism have much in common. Most centrally, we agree that "there is a unity at the core of religious diversity," says the Unitarian Universalist Association's web site.   "God can be experienced in many forms, with many faces, but...

The Mechanized God’s Eye — Creating a Clergy? Imagine descrying machines could make legible the otherwise veiled intimacies of another’s thoughts and propensities — even if this capability existed, would it be moral to condemn or exonerate someone based on a brain...

As we head into Labor Day weekend in the US, we want to once again highlight the excellent videos made by our own AI&Faith contributing fellow William Barylo. Each video discusses different aspects of faith/work integration, a topic near and dear to our hearts. If...

Can AI help us make more virtuous choices? Can it make us more heroic? More creative? More compassionate? More oriented to our community's well-being? To our world's well-being?  It's worth asking. In the last of our Seven Principles in Unitarian Universalism, we...

  Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) are three factors commonly used by socially responsible investors to measure sustainability and ethical impact of an investment in a business or company. Recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)...

As EEG and fMRI "smartcaps" make their way into general use, Duke philosopher and law professor Nita Farahany says it's time to engage in a "battle for our brains." The 70,000 thoughts we have daily are becoming more and more transparent. It's time to fight for our...

A key purpose of AI&F is to identify AI ethics and values issues of particular importance to the faith traditions of members in our AI&F expert community.  We asked our Advisor Yaqub Chaudhary (AI, cognitive science and ethics) to provide an overview of such...

A claim for 'sentience' in a Google AI agent challenges us to ask: What is a person? The case of Blake Lemoine has the sound of a sci-fi film. In fact, it's a drama that's actually unfolding, signaling the start for real of the big debate we've known all along was...

A Conversation in Faith with Michael Paulus "Artificial intelligence has become one of the most powerful and pervasive technologies in our lives," writes Michael Paulus in his just-published AI, Faith and the Future, a book he co-edited and co-authored with colleagues...

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...