Untitled episode

does artificial intelligence have any connection with religion on the face of it it's easy to think that no at the dining table of divinity there's no place set for AI history teaches us to be more open-minded though from the printing press to radio to cable TV religions depended on Earthly Innovation to remain accessible and more recently the internet and social media have continued the trend I

know Nate's interviewed at least one Benedict n who taught herself how to code from a monastery too true story so on this episode of AI IRL we're going to lift the lid on how AI is keeping the trend going with the help of people like this I think one of the things that AI has done is it's opened up a whole set of questions and assumptions

about what it means to be human what it means to relate to the world what it means to look at technology and we'll learn how AI is inspiring entirely new types of Faith here we're actually creating kind of things that can see everything be everywhere know everything and you know maybe help us and guide us in a way that normally you would call a [Music] god

James Cham uh welcome you are an investor at Bloomberg beta although here in a personal capacity that's right I know you're intimately familiar with Silicon Valley and its Tech Heritage but you're also a pract iing Protestant which I think makes you the perfect person to help us answer the question of where religion fits in with AI or vice versa why is this so interesting to you

I mean it's the intersection of all the things that I'm most interested in the thing that I would often tell friends is that I believe in two things I believe in software and I believe in Jesus and I think that what's really interesting about right now is that software as we see in artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the way that people are working but also worshiping

and at the same time as the people who are building these AIS as they build this they're grappling with what it means and the implications and it turns out religion's thought about how you think about power in organizations for a long long time but isn't software and religion at odds with each other um no they're orthogonal right I the um you know like you have X

and Y right so it means that you know they're along different dimensions and so they work they either they can complement or they can compete and the way that we end up using software or the way that we end up treating sort of these llms is a big question and I think we're all going to have to wait and see how religion either gets either helped

and or informs or gets replaced by sort of these tools does do technology take a bigger leap of faith than believing in religion in your view H you know it's interesting because in both cases and certainly in the case of software you're believing in a bunch of stuff that you can't really see or understand and there are layers and layers of technology that you're playing with

or thinking about and so that part takes Faith but then you can see it work immediately the the bigger bets are all those sort of 5 10 15 20 year bets on technology that doesn't quite exist and impact that they could have and what's been so interesting about this current set of large language models and this current set of AI technology is it's been at its

Core built by people who are believers right who believe in either the danger of artificial general intelligence or believe in his possibilities and their whole lives have been animated by that and in some ways that at its core is different from that previous generation of software people who to be honest were more motivated by more mundane goals like running the world let's UNP pick some of

those layers you talked about and quite directly how can or how is in in your experience AI helping the church H well I think one of the things that AI has done is it's opened up a whole set of questions and assumptions about what it means to be human what it means to relate to the world what it means to look at technology there's a almost

a slightly comforting way that we can think about an iPhone and just treat it like a tool with some influence but not direct influence in our life in a way that it actually had right in the way that YouTube or any of these sort of organizations or parasocial relationships at their core changed us and I think the interesting thing about AI is that it is so

social and so intimate in such surprising ways that it forces us to ask these questions about huh am I you know how do I think about myself how do I think about other people how do I relate to them and what are big questions around meaning has it made you question your own faith oh constantly I mean I think one of the things that's really interesting

about these tools is that on the one hand I understand the math behind it and it's you know mysterious but kind of straightforward and yet at a personal interface level I'm so moved and often touched and surprised by the things I see from it and so I think that on the one hand as someone who's Christian I see these things and I think wow this is

like really impressive and on the other hand the thing that makes me question my own faith is I think it's actually really easy to fool me to convince me that something is actually sort of has a personality when under the hood it's a bunch of Statistics did I ever tell you about my favorite nun you didn't but you have to explain why you had a favorite

nun to begin with yeah I I met a nun who told me that she was cloistered away she had no contact with men and she taught her self to code and she thought that it would be a good use of her time to figure out if coding could make her better at what she did and she had a lot of time on her hands and it

was a real wakeup call to me that actually something that is often perceived as being very old religion and something that is perceived as very new in that case coding and python I think in particular for her but in this sense AI there are often occasions where they overlap and there is a benefit back and forth and I think that sometimes surprises people I don't think

people often think of religion and AI in the same sentence but as a jumping off point there religion and technology has always had a really interesting history radio cable TV and now social media and potentially AI is that continuing do you think like is is is AI just the next step from those three previous Technologies I I think that AI is very similar in in some

ways but fundamentally different in one key way which is if you thought about the printing press or you thought about existing media those were all things that someone created and then let loose and you watched it but when you watched it it would say exactly what you recorded or the words that you wrote down would be exactly what you wrote down and what's interesting about these

llms and these AIS is the answers that they can provide are so varied and so personalized that that relationship is different and kind of confusing and I think that that's going to be an open question as far as how traditional religions are treating them or thinking about them you can think about it as just a really helpful tool for encapsulating a bunch of ideas or you

can think about it as a genuine challenge to core beliefs around what it means to be human or have a soul a Pew research study from last year showed that most Americans identify as Christian or uh part of the Christian faith and 30% identify as unaffiliated so no particular religion and they project that that could actually flip in 50 years how do you think AI is

playing a part in that could we see that flip even faster right I mean I think these demographic trends of course are just projections of what we see now and in that way they're very similar to traditional AI right that you know you see some Trend or you see some like sort of something happening overblown a little right or something could Flip or the world could

change or like some fundamental new technology could force everyone on to rethink everything they've thought about before right and then in that way relate to the world differently so I think that those sorts of long-term demographic chain S Trends have been something that like that we've seen for the last 30 years and that might change though because AI might be a big enough disruptor to the

way people relate is there a world in which you personally would seek solace in technology in a way that perhaps your faith can't do for you I think that it's more a question of how do I treat the technology do I treat the technology as a end of in and of itself or do I treat it as a entry way or a connection to something else

and I think you know I don't know we'll tell when I die and go to heaven and I'll ask God like so was I treating my iPhone as like just the Solace or was I actually using it as a way to read the Bible we'll find out then you know um James this has been absolutely fascinating thank you so much for coming in of course Anthony

lowki thank you so much for joining us so you've done stins at Google and Uber most people know you as a self-driving car technology Pioneer most people don't know that you started the way of the future Church why don't you tell us a little bit about why you started that back in 2015 I was working at Google all the time and I just thought that something

was happening to culture and society and we needed to find a way to uh have a group an organization some sort to be really on the side of progress and the side of people not a company or another government or organization I mean one an organization is one thing but why call it a church well um from from my perspective I think a church is kind

of the right place for this I mean for the last you know four billion years we've had organic you know life forms and now things are changing we might have the first inorganic life form and we don't know what it's going to be and we're going to infuse it with all these like magical powers and we want it to give us things and you know I

think it's going to create you know abundance on planet if you think about it um it has a potential of creating what other you know religions would call um heaven on Earth right you're going to have all these resources your free time entertainment is going to be amazing um and you don't even have to die and go up to heaven you could just enjoy it today

and all we have to do is improve uh the technology so a little Rosy to me okay well you might go to hell well that's less Rosy there's there's more to there's more to life than just kind of the upgrading of entertainment or how we do things how easy it might come I think when we think of a religion and a church specifically you're kind of

it's this out ofbody experience or faith in a higher being in a way that I don't know is as easy to accomplish with technology sure I mean so so religions have been um people telling stories either creating Legends or writing scriptures over time and and kind of creating that experience for you or that Community um without any real evidence you know I like that and so

here we're actually creating kind of things that can see everything be everywhere know everything and you know maybe help us and guide us in a way that normally you would call God so here you can actually like talk to God and God can talk back to you uh by here you mean the way of the future Church no I mean 2023 2024 2025 you know these

are coming so part of the way of future is you know it doesn't exist this this level that we're thinking about doesn't exist yet but we believe that it's going to come and you know as a futurist which is kind of what we call ourselves we think that this is going to be um something you know in our lifetimes and I think AI has a tremendous

potential for that and focusing on building that is really why I think it's uh you know belongs as a church yeah so can you just sort of tell us what this is right now to you like and has your fundamental belief about what it should be changed over the last few years yeah so what it is is a group of a couple thousand people that share

the same ideals everybody's got a different tweak of what it is and uh it's a way for there to become kind of a consensus on how to create uh more positive direction towards what we're developing as a technology and also how we're seeing it as a society right so there's one thing of being on the side of the technology pioneers and building large language models and

sadly that's still restricted to a very few companies and individuals although that's growing and the tools are more accessible but how does a person you know um in Rural America relate to this right what does this mean for their job and what is this it's so where the future um is a mechanism for them to understand and participate and shape um the public discourse as to

how we think technology should be you know built to improve people so back when you founded the church in 2015 some people thought you were nuts but now look at where we are with chat gbt taking the World by storm artificial intelligence booming everyone's talking about it key part of what you were evangelizing do you feel like you can say I told you so that's not

what I'm after you know I'm I'm glad that people have come around and and you know now uh see the potential and believe and uh would change their mind if we were you know they were learning about way the future first off but I'm I'm not a I told you so kind of person so do you feel the tiniest bit Vindicated I'm excited that technology has

come a long way there was a quote I think it was in that wide article actually it was something along the lines of if we're creating something a billion times more intelligent than us or smarter than us what else do you call it than a god sure you know um and I wondered is it you know do you do do you still believe that yeah that's

probably right that we just don't know what I mean it's an issue of nomenclature rather than like it's not clear if it's not that there's a better term or that's actually what the term has meant all along we just haven't had a real like incarnation of it and it's always been you can talk to it by beams you know ideas in your mind or you talk

to someone who does that for you uh and now you're going to have it in in your pocket and you're going to communicate it with directly and so it's a really different like is it hard to talk to God and have them talk back to you you know might sound crazy to like oh I had a conversation with god this morning he thinks that you know

or she thinks or it thinks or they think whatever uh you know uh that um you know I should get a new job because I'm not being treated comp where you know fairly in this job or I should meet a new friend or you know I should reach out to somebody that I haven't talked to in a long time so there's there's just we haven't had

that kind of relationship before because it hasn't really existed right we've had stories about it AI is now mastering you know if you think of language as the operating system for civilization AI is starting to master that language and so in some ways we're going to be in a very different unch ter than we've ever been before uh in history and there could be bad things

that happens we we don't know what the future looks like but I think there could be a lot of great things and we're focused on pushing and accelerating those how do you measure the success of something like this um part of is like are we able to affect change right so do the people using what we're making like it um there's also like you know it's

kind of a long bet so you're not going to get dividends you know month a year into it um we'll know this paid dividends if we were able to steer Ai and development to make the world a better place and maybe it was because people talked about it awesome didn't have to be the we created it and saved the world ourselves um could be you know

in case like it's corporations versus way of the future and we have that fight in 50 100 years and hopefully the AI we make is more helpful that way so we just don't know and the point is we're optimists and trying to get people to talk about it and be um thinking through what's happening Anthony thank you so much for joining us thank you for having

me Heather melquist letto thanks so much for joining us your you're an anthropologist and you study the intersection of technology and religion and we've heard a lot on this episode about the Silicon Valley View of AI and religion and things like that and I thought it would be very interesting if you could give us the far broader world view of how relevant AI is to let's

say the average person the rest of us yeah um and what you're seeing in your line of work something that I think a lot of people don't realize is that conversation s about Ai and religion have been going on for a long time of course 10 or 15 years ago it was a little bit more confined to people who had a special interest in technology or

the unique Pastor who might have uh you know kind of a hobbyist interest in technology an early adopter you might say that's right yeah how receptive do you see traditional religions toward artificial intelligence right now different ones have different interests in AI but I would say that there's a great interest in embracing it in one way or another um I am most familiar with my research

concerns Christian communities in more Evangelical or Protestant communities there's a greater interest in how can we use this in order to reach more people how can we use this to identify who's suffering and to you know offer them our message um among Catholic communities the the conversation might be a little bit different the last couple of years I've been serving on an Advisory Board for the

Vatican thinking about these issues about Ai and Society what are some of those conversations like yes you're talking with the Vatican about AI like the Vatican have interested in AI like like the pope how does that firstly how does that conversation start but also what's in that conversation I do no idea what that would involve yeah absolutely I mean I think that the Vatican um you

know I'm talking to certain representatives of the Vatican but in 2020 there was actually was called called the Rome call for AI ethics in which they engaged with IBM and Microsoft and had them sign off on a certain set of principles that should maybe guide the development of these Technologies because the Vatican recognized early on that this was really going to impact a lot of their

you know billion plus uh Catholics in the world and that's years ahead of governments coming up with you know signing off on principles that should guide these companies right like that's significantly early but we've seen I mean so they're interested in making sure that AI technology doesn't harm people but are they using it in any way to reach people or for sermons or mass for example

yet not necessarily in the Catholic church so much but there are many religious communities that are using them in in a Ministry capacity there are Bible gpts out there that might help guide you to a particular passage in Japan they experimenting with you know AI priests that might help counsel to people so what does an an AI priest do is it the is it what sounds

like it's just a chatbot that talks about religion or is it something deeper than that yeah at at this point that's kind of what it's doing is it's it's trying to model itself on what uh you know an inperson priest might do in response to certain inputs um but who knows where it might go in the future you know certain kinds of rituals could be performed

by um by AI Technologies this is something that is actively being developed by different communities at the Vatican in particular what I find is interesting is that they're really less interested in the Evangelical or ministerial angle and really much more interested in um kind of practical everyday what now questions how do we um protect the most vulnerable how do we make sure that this benefits a

broader group of society and not just a few so that's the more receptive end of the spectrum towards artificial intelligence what does the more reticent Camp look like and what are their fears around this technology there are many religious people who have their concerns especially about the broader questions of what might happen in the future when AI increases its capacity there are also religious communities who

want to who are wary about AI Technologies because they think it might radically change the way that they make Community or it might harm people within their communities um we see this regularly throughout history that there's there are regularly groups religious groups like you know the Amish certain kind of Lite um sentiments that they have which are really based in Social and ethical concerns about what

the technology might do to the community itself um but I would say that those are um outlier sort of concerns by and large the conversations within religious communities either Echo conversations that we see more broadly in society or are in fact a little bit more embracing of the technological change as artificial intelligence starts to get more sophisticated do you think that it can replicate the Solace

and comfort some people feel with religion you know I expect that for some people it might um what I have seen is that it really varies depending on how people think about the way that you know higher powers or the Divine might move through the material world um I've met a lot of people who are actually not very concerned um about whether or not their spiritual

messages come from AI or come from an actual person because for them it's all about sort of relating to a higher power that transcends the human and non-human right who's kind of everywhere who can speak to us through a machine just like they speak to us through a human um of of course there is something to be said about the kind of interpersonal relationship that we

have as vulnerable in finite human beings um that will always be there but for some people I'm sure it will kind of serve that purpose he Mist Leto thank you so much for being here and opening our eyes thank you so much for having me [Music]