Featured Interview with Dr. Wes King

1. How would you describe your experience with AI?
As a young human, I first encountered AI in the realm of science fiction and the promises of emerging technologies. My father worked for IBM starting in the 1960s and I was exposed to the idea of “thinking machines” growing up in a home where he drank coffee from a mug that said, “I compute, therefore IBM.” We joked about the HAL computer imagined in 2001: A Space Odyssey was named in reference to IBM. I have read and watched science fiction most of my life, with Blade Runner and The Terminator among my early favorite films. 

I am intrigued by the ways AI, robots, cyborgs, enhanced humans, and alien technologies are featured in both utopian and dystopian ways in science fiction. My experience with AI has primarily been in the realm of the imagination, considering how science fiction narratives of AI grapple with questions about what it means to be human and what it means to have human security in an increasingly complex world of human and computer interactions.

2. How would you describe your faith background?
As a queer scholar and person of faith, describing my faith background is challenging. Growing up in Woodstock, NY in the 1970s I explored faith in various new age religions and was exposed to Buddhism and Hinduism as alternative religions to the protestant Christianity that had failed my family. While in college, I explored evangelical and charismatic forms of Christianity and became a leader in various Christian organizations for the next 25 years. I was a full-time ministry leader and had a crisis of faith when my gender assigned at birth excluded me from certain leadership positions.

I became involved in the emerging church movement of the 1990s and early 2000s and decided to pursue professional graduate studies at Portland Seminary. During my seminary experience, I encountered feminist theologies that challenged traditional interpretations of Christian scriptures and doctrines. I graduated from seminary with more questions than answers and began my journey into academia. Portland Seminary offered me an adjunct faculty position while I pursued further graduate studies. My questions about the roles of women in Christianity led to deeper questions about gender and religion which I researched during my master’s program in Comparative Religion at the University of Washington. During that time, I came out as queer and subsequently resigned from my adjunct faculty position at Portland Seminary after being asked to sign a statement of faith that defined marriage exclusively as between a man and a woman. I currently serve the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Learning Group with the Q Christian Fellowship.

3. What led to your interest in the intersection of AI and faith?
I became interested in the intersection of AI and faith while studying theological anthropology in seminary. During this time, I was exposed to various Christian theories about what it means to be human. Additionally, watching sci-fi films and television shows that explore relationships between humanity and AI technologies sparked connections with those theories. I began writing about this in 2014 and presented a conference paper in 2015 examining Sci-fi TV through the lenses of digital and theological anthropologies. A few years later, I proposed a special topics course at the University of Washington iSchool on Religion and Information to explore connections between religion and information technologies, including AI.

I taught the first version of the course in Winter of 2020, just before the Covid-19 pandemic. Students in that first class were most interested in the learning materials about AI and religion and less interested in religious communities meeting on Second Life. I revised the course to focus on AI, Robots, and Religion and created an online-asynchronous course that invites students to wrestle with questions like: Can a Robot Be Divine? Will humans merge with technologies that enable them to transcend current reality? I teach the course once a year and it is always full of curious students. In the course, we explore (1) religious underpinnings of technological progress, including AI and transhumanism; (2) ways religions imagine and use AI, including the development of robotic priests and religious chatbots; (3) how values of major world religions inform ethical debates about AI and related technologies.

4. Why are you involved with AI&F?
I first heard about AI & Faith through a graduate Christian fellowship meeting at the University of Washington in 2019. I found their website when I was planning my special topics course and signed up for the newsletter. In 2020, I attended a Veritas Forum on “Human Identity and the Meaning of AI.” I met some people affiliated with AI and Faith, but as a queer person of faith, I was hesitant to get involved because some Christian groups are anti-LGBTQ and openly hostile toward queer Christians. After concluding my dissertation research on queer Christians and dating apps, I returned to my interest in religion and AI. I reached out to join AI and Faith in hopes I could contribute to the ongoing work of understanding the complex relationships between religions and emerging AI technologies.

5. How does AI&F affect your work outside the organization?
My involvement in AI&F is intricately intertwined with my teaching and research. Through participation in the research seminars and salons, I can stay in touch with researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of religion and AI. I have made some wonderful connections with scholars like Beth Singler, Jane Compson, and Muhammad Ahmad as collaborators in my work as a scholar at the University of Washington. Finding other scholars who are interested in questions about the human in relation to AI expands my understanding of these questions from different religious perspectives. When we call something “artificial” we are considering it in relation to something that is considered “real” and NOT artificial. The “real” intelligence that most AI is intended to mimic is human intelligence. As most readers know, this broad and contested term, AI, which has taken hold in the popular imagination, includes a variety of technologies including Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), and Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (A/IS). The histories and genealogies of AI developments include faith in the growing capacities to use machines to automate activities that we associate with human thinking, including decision-making, problem solving, and learning. Connecting with other people who are concerned with the ethical implications of programming machines to think and act like humans is imperative to my work.

6. What open problems in AI are you most interested in?
Humans have long sought knowledge of the unknown, placing faith in ways of knowing beyond human capacities. Early Chinese writings on oracle bones and other artifacts show ancient practices of divination to predict unknowable futures. In pre-modern times, supreme knowledge was often attributed to supernatural entities or deities, including those in Western Christianity. Enlightenment ways of knowing later replaced ancient divination with modern science, creating a new faith in science and technology. I am interested in understanding intellectual foundations of AI development, including beliefs that advances in AI technologies offer some sort of salvation for humans, transcending human limitations by privileging “rational” intelligence encoded into machines.

Today, data scientists use various algorithmic techniques to infer knowledge about identities and predict human behaviors. Religious ideologies embedded in digital technologies can have a powerful impact, similar to how religious origin stories create enduring truths seen as God-given and natural. A datafied self that becomes encoded in and through algorithmic systems promises a more masterful, comprehensive objectivity than ever before, a final ground for knowledge of the self and others. Understanding what it means to be human involves exploring how we and others represent our connections to history, society, culture, and technologies like AI.

We have already seen the impact of emerging AI technologies on marginalized and underrepresented individuals and groups. I am most interested in the open problem of how we understand our identities in relation to emerging technologies, focusing on the impacts of emerging AI technologies on multiply-marginalized and underrepresented populations.