Levi Checketts broke new theological ground with his Ph.D. thesis focused on the ethics of consciousness uploading. Now he advises the Vatican on big AI issues.
AI and Faith founder David Brenner has asked Levi Checketts to take on a networking role for the organization. Our goal, as David put it, is to "develop really good AI that promotes human flourishing and not human destruction."
Levi just joined Hong Kong Baptist University as an assistant professor of religion and philosophy. Up to a few months ago, he had been living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where between 2012 and 2018 he earned his Ph.D. at the Graduate Theological Union. As a grad student, he started teaching at Holy Names University in Oakland, Santa Clara University in Santa Clara and St. Mary's College in Moraga. His work focuses on Catholic ethics of new technologies, especially AI.
In the excerpts that follow, Levi provides a simple definition of transhumanism that will be helpful in all of our conversations going forward. He describes his journey from Mormonism to Catholicism and explains why he picked consciousness uploading as the focus of his Ph.D. thesis. And he tells us how AI may someday become an advocate for the voiceless, poor, marginalized and disenfranchised.
You may view our entire conversation here.
Please describe your spiritual evolution, beginning with your earliest "aha" moment.
"I grew up in a very Mormon family. My parents are still very active members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I was raised to be very active. I'm the third of six children, which gives me severe middle child syndrome along with my my sister, who's number four. Both of us tried to get the attention of our parents by performing admirably in school and in other areas. My sister and I tried to deepen our faith life.
"From a young age, I can say that I had always been interested in in spiritual questions. I had always and maybe that was psychological. Maybe it was just cultural. It's hard to say, but from a very young age, I'd always had this this keen interest."
When it was time to consider colleges, Levi decided he wanted to go anywhere outside of Utah. He picked Notre Dame.
"My mother was fine with me going there, at least at first. When I began studying theology, I was very excited because I had always been interested in questions of salvation and how we ought to be.
"The thinking of various Catholic saints throughout the ages challenged what I had been taught as a child. And so more than a first "aha moment," I had a first crisis around my sophomore year of college. I totally had lost faith in what I grew up in the faith I grew up in.I didn't lose my faith in God. I lost my faith in the faith tradition I grew up in.
”So that spring, I went on a week long, silent retreat that was hosted by the Office of Campus Ministry. That sounded intense to me, and it was. They told me from the beginning, "The first thing you should do is pray for whatever you want from God. Don't be ashamed of asking.
”So I said, ‘God, what do you want me to do?’ For the first time in my life, I felt I received an answer. God wanted me to to become Catholic. Then I prayed: How do I tell my parents this? That's another story.
A friend told Levi he'd make a great teacher. That got him thinking about becoming a professor of social ethics. When he read Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker, that cemented his decision and he began working on toward his masters and Ph.D.
"I needed something to write about, and I saw that technology had not been well addressed. So I focused on that for my dissertation."
How did you come to transhumanism as a subject of interest?
"I was interested in technology and I realized there was really nothing that was well-adapted for Catholic theological ethics of technology. I took the most dramatic example I could think of and see if it worked within existing Catholic theological frameworks.
“The most dramatic example I could find was the case of consciousness uploading. Talking about consciousness uploading is more dramatic than genetic engineering because it's the idea of technological immortality. With genetic engineering, we're still mortal. To understand consciousness uploading, you have to read the literature, which is mostly transhumanist literature."
How do you define transhumanism? Do you consider yourself a transhumanist?
"Transhumanism is a challenging topic for faith communities because you get different answers from different people. Sometimes they have biased opinions about what a transhumanist is or isn't. The best definition I've come across and which I think encapsulates the most ideas is that transhumanism is the idea of self-directed evolution through science and technology.
"I don't consider myself a transhumanist because I don't agree with the idea of self-directed evolution. I certainly agree we have a telos that we ought to pursue, that there is some goal. There's some ideal that we ought to strive for. But my worry is that if we too carefully define that, or if we too carefully assume that there is or too close to assume there's one particular way to achieve that goal, then we will really close off the possibilities that are open to us."
Why are so many UUs interested in transhumanism?
"In Humanity 2.0, Steve Fuller articulates the clearest defense of transhumanism from a UU perspective. Ray Kurzweil, the chief engineer at Google who is famous for his writings on consciousness uploading and the goal of a unified universe, grew up in a UU family and credits his UU background as provoking him into interesting questions about the greater meaning of life and the role of rationality and science and technology.
"James Hughes is another transhumanist who talks about growing up UU. He converted to Buddhism and so his major book is Cyborg Buddha. In 2005, he delivered this sermon, "Transhumanism and Unitarian Universalism: Beginning the Dialogue," at a UU congregation in Connecticut.
As a sociologist, Hughes is interested in the demographics of transhumanism. In a survey of Humanity+ -- formerly known as the World Transhumanist Association -- he found that there were as many UUs among its members as Catholics, which is surprising because Catholics outnumber UUs in the world by about a million to one.
"That struck me as suggesting the transhumanist perspective is more appealing to UUs than to many other religious groups. I think a lot of Protestants are very leery of transhumanism because it seems like some sort of idolatry. For Catholics, I think there's a theological anthropology that doesn't fit with a lot of transhumanist ideals.
"I see a natural fit between having a religious belief that emphasizes the human with a rationality that's pluralistic and universalist, and a scientific promise of the future."
Would you describe transhumanism as a religion? What does it teach us?
"People have been talking about transhumanism as religion now for about 20 years. Theologians have been interested in transhumanism much longer than philosophers. I think this is because transhumanism functions as religion in many ways, as I argued in a recent paper at the American Academy for Religion.
"Religion helps us understand what it means to be mortal. It often does this by promising salvation or eternal life. If it doesn't do that, it helps us to make sense of why death happens. For many transhumanists, the goal is immortality.
"Nick Bostrom and Max More talk about transhumanism originating with Enlightenment thinkers like Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes and others who, while nominally Christian, emphasized science as a rational field that could help us understand everything. We now understand everything through science and we believe everything can be explained rationally. That means we can no long put our faith in the traditional trappings of religion. Because people no longer have the expectation of eternal life or of a God that will reach out and save them, they look for something else.
"It's terrifying to confront the reality of death as final, so terrifying that Albert Camus concluded we must make Sisyphus happy because there's nothing beyond. It's absurdity all the way down -- or just total nihilism. Nothing matters and it doesn't matter that nothing matters.
"Transhumanists aren't nihilists and they're not absurdists. They want an answer and the answer they provide is the promise of immortality through technological means.
"What this tells us is that there's a need for us to make sense of something that's very challenging. Hans Jonas writes that all modern theories of life are to be understood against the backdrop of an ontology of death. 'The universe is more dead than alive, from which each single life must coax or bully its lease, only to be swallowed up by it in the end,' he wrote.
"Transhumanism helps us to really see this and think about our lives in a world where people don't believe that anything comes after them."
Is AI a 'Supreme Intelligence"?
”The story of the Tower of Babel sounds funny to us today because we send planes higher than the Tower was. We send rockets higher than the Tower. We don't see God up there getting mad at us for sending people to the Moon. But the idea of this story in the Book of Genesis is that these people thought they could grasp something that was ungraspable. They thought God was within their reach. But that's not God. We may be tempted to call AI a superhuman demigod, but God in the Abrahamic sense is ineffable. When God reveals God's self to Moses, Moses says, "What do I tell the Israelites? Who do I say sent me?" God gives a non-answer. God says, "I am who I am. Tell them that I am who sent you."
What potentials posed by AI make you most hopeful?
"By engaging the voiceless, the marginalized, the poor, and the disenfranchised in creating AI models that drive public policy, we might see AI in the long run articulating perspectives in support of the marginalized. Because AI is trusted as an accurate tool, arguments based on the models will be harder to dismiss."
"For example, black women's health care in the United States is the worst for any demographic because doctors have implicit bias in distrusting the reports they're getting. But what if I can say with certitude that this is what these women are experiencing? I think this is one of our great opportunities: We may be able to use AI to articulate and lift up voices that are otherwise not listened to." (See Levi's article in AI Theology.)
What potentials posed by AI most concern you -- and should concern all of us?
"My worry is that with AI being shiny and new and expensive and very efficient and being able to process massive amounts of data very quickly, we begin to assume that this intelligence is like us. What is morally valuable is what is most efficient and those who are least efficient are least valuable.
"I see this as a moment for us to pause and reflect. We see these these technologies rolling out. We see what they're capable of and not capable of. Even people who are not deeply diving into these questions begin to realize, 'well, that's not quite a human being.' And when you talk about something like the so-called Uncanny Valley, where a machine moves from being too much other to being too much like us, but yet not us, this gives us a moment to reflect on what is it that makes us 'us'? And what makes not us, 'not us'?"
"In a talk hosted here at Hong Kong Baptist University a few months age, an AI researcher gave a talk in which he explained everything through the lens of computer programing. It was very shocking to me because he talked about religions as 'operating systems.' I thought, "That's an interesting metaphor." It makes sense, but it shortchanges the experience of religion. It tells the believer who has an experience of God, or a relationship with God, that the relationship is only a particular frame and not their experience of being in the world made by God.
"We need to have these conversations in a way that allows for epistemic humility. That means understanding that this very complicated and very intense work.
"What I hope happens is that these conversations begin to take place in a way that nobody thinks of themselves as the smartest person in the room. That's challenging because we all want to assume that we have expertise in something, and we do. But we have expertise that's different from each other's and there are different ways of knowing.
"AI researchers need to understand that theologians have a world view about what is valuable for human beings. Theologians and religious people need to understand that AI isn't the Terminator. It's not God coming in. It is very intelligent and we all need to understand what it does and doesn't do. That's a big challenge for religious thinkers.
"It will help to achieve a better understanding of our own limitations. This will both dispel some of the fear surrounding AI and also give AI researchers and evangelists an understanding of their own limitations and what their technology is good for and what it's maybe not good for."
