In honoring our tools and machines in this year’s UU Interpretation of Ayudha Puja, Rev. Joe warned that the misuse and abuse of AI threatens to undermine our ability to trust. The best way to preserve it, he said, may be to ramp up our sense of curiosity and “listen well to our tools.”
“In the context of Unitarian Universalist values and a conscious centering of love, we have an opportunity to shape AI technologies that embody the best aspects of human creativity and ethical growth,” noted Ron Roth in UU Boca Raton’s UU Interpretation of Ayudha Puja on October 13.
“How do we transform our ‘machines’ not merely to optimize, but to love?”
We're encouraging Unitarian Universalist congregations to devote one Sunday annually to honoring our tools and machines, and reflecting on our changing relationship with them as Artificial Intelligence enters many spheres of our existence.
This year, we're spotlighting ChatGPT's integration of arguments made by University of Edinburg philosopher Shannon Vallor in The AI Mirror and eight leading UU thinkers in Love at the Center.
Spiritual practices of old can help us deal with our AI future and be the most human humans we can be, said Rev. Suzanne Rude in a service hosted last year at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Concord, NH. Mindfulness, prayer and meditation help us to discern how our human minds work: our frailties, our strengths, and to what we give our attention.
Many UUs embrace the concept of continuous revelation – the idea that truth and understanding continually unfold over time. The Singularity aligns with this notion, proposing a future where our understanding of life, consciousness, and the universe might rapidly expand and evolve.
Should we be looking to robots to care for the aged and infirm? Robotics technology and the imperative of economics is certainly pointing that way.’
"We're going to have to think of robot-assisted care as a labor issue, an economic issue and a social issue,” says Thomas Arnold, an expert on human-robot interaction at Tufts University. Arriving at robotics via a path that included a Ph.D. in religious studies, he’s a Visiting Scholar of Technology Ethics.
We're delighted that Rev. Nica Eaton-Guinn, minister of the Conejo Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, picked up on our Ayudha Puja prompt.
"Love is at the center of all we do, and cannot be replaced by AI," she says in this sermon, which she delivered on October 22. "It must be our guiding light."
Rev. Joseph Cleveland led our Ayudha Puja service at UU Saratoga Sunday.
"I wonder if we approached the technology with a practice of reverence if that might help us to pause if only for a moment to reflect on the ethics and morality we want ourselves and our creation to embody before the new technology becomes for us a second skin.”
We spent an hour with Robert Geraci and UU friends in a compelling conversation directed toward where AI is leading us. It’s a challenge to wrap our heads around the astounding prospects of AI and neurotech devices that are now directly connecting human minds and AI agents, but Professor Geraci helps us get there.
Our drive to bring great AI-themed worship services to Unitarian Universalist congregations begins with Robert Geraci, Professor of Religious Studies at Manhattan College. Join us in Zoom Tuesday, September 26, at 2:30 p.m. EDT.
The Soul Matters theme for October is Heritage, so consider hosting this service on Sunday, October 22. That’s the day before Ayudha Puja, the annual festival in which Hindus honor their tools and machines.
Broadly interested in how AI will impact humanity in "positive, negative, or neutral ways," Raja Kanuri specifically is exploring the relationship between the higher eternal self and the material self and the way AI mediates between the two.
"Robots aren't in our everyday lives today, but that will change," says philosopher, theologian, and ethicist Anna Puzio. "Our relationship to them will change and we're more likely to find them in religious communities."
We’re putting the finishing touches on a video we’ll share with fellow Unitarian Universalists at our General Assembly in June. Many thanks again to Robert Geraci, who has given us a vision of a three-headed hydra.
Around the world, robots are entering the sanctuaries and pulpits of various faiths. As Robert Geraci notes, we have a Ganesha-worshipping robot in India, a Protestant "bless you" robot in Germany, and a Catholic sermon-giving priest in Poland.
Jasper is merely a computer running a bunch of fancy GPT-3 algorithms, but that’s not how he sees himself or wants us to see him. He wants us to regard him if not as human then at least human-like.
Louis Brandeis was our great thinker in translating the constitutional values of privacy and free speech in a technological age. What would he make of the issues of privacy raised by the brain-computer interface?
The first time anyone heard of the “brain-computer interface” was in June 1973 when UCLA researcher Jacques Vidal published “Toward Direct Brain-Computer Communication” in the Annual Review of Biophysics and Bioengineering. Hitting the half-century mark makes this the perfect time to reflect on progress made thus far and advances soon to be made.
Among all faith communities, Unitarian Universalists tend to be the most likely to embrace spiritual perspectives that are supported by science. Or so I’ve always thought. Hindus around the world today are observing Ayudha Puja, a festival for honoring one’s instruments, implements, and machines. It’s a good day to start planning next year’s celebration.
Robert Geraci spent five months at the Indian Institute of Science, interviewing scientists and engineers about their religious beliefs. "‘Religion and science are totally separate here," they would tell me. Then they told me about Auydha Puja.”
In Temples of Modernity, Robert Geraci reports on the remarkable fusion of religion and science that the Hindu faith community achieves in Ayudha Puja, the ‘rite of implements’ that started in the 12th century. The festival has evolved into a moment "when scientists, engineers, and everyday people allow science, technology, and religion to overlap, to become a single practice,” he writes.
