Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol
Eurocentric theories of humans and societies that inform the design of AI/ML systems, cybernetic organisms, and robotics, often draw upon religiously-rooted universalizing norms and assumptions. Scholarly work has examined the ethics and potential impacts of AI, Cyborgs, and Robots on society, but less has been done to examine the assumptions of world religions that inform such innovations and whether such assumptions lead to outcomes that promote human flourishing or not. This panel explores the influences of religious paradigms of the human and religious visions of the future on the design and use of intelligent technologies.
Dinerstein (2006) positions technology design and use as influenced by ideas of “progress, religion, the future, modernity, masculinity, and Whiteness.” Scholars have addressed masculinity and whiteness as features of technoculture and are working to make explicit universalizing norms and assumptions related to race and gender that continue to privilege dominant populations (Wajcman, 2010; D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020; Noble, 2018; Brock, 2020). Foucault (1975/1995, 1979, 1988) traced European religious roots leading to societies of discipline, a concept that is oft used to interrogate and analyze intelligent systems.
However, Deleuze (1992) posits that we are transitioning from societies of discipline to societies of control, which Cheney-Lippold (2011) argues can be seen through algorithmic inferences. In Deleuze’s societies of control, humans no longer imagine themselves as individuals in relation to populations, but as “dividuals” in relation to data. Yet, other religiously-rooted assumptions and norms of what it means to be human are encoded in the design of AI/ML systems, cybernetic organisms, and robotics. David F. Noble (1999) in The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention, and Robert M. Geraci (2010) in Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality explore how Judeo-Christian roots have been embedded in the rhetoric of technological progress as well as apocalyptic futures. This panel expands on these works and seeks to facilitate further dialogue about religion as a feature of technoculture globally.
We invite papers examining religious aspects of AI, Cyborgs, and Robots broadly construed and imagined, as well as the social and ethical implications and paradigms for understanding what it means to be human.
We are particularly interested in work exploring world religions outside of Eurocentric traditions.
