No other faith community is as enthused by the potential of improving the human than Unitarian Universalists, a calling that extends back to the Enlightenment. Mostly agnostics and atheists, we trust the promises of science more than those of deities. Unencumbered by limiting notions of God, we're more inclined to imagine the potential of genetic engineering, synthetic biology and neuroscience for bettering the human condition.
That's why -- in addition to such great Transcendentalist philosophers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and Mary Elizabeth Peabody -- we can count as members of our faith such distinguished transhumanist thinkers as Ray Kurzweil, Steve Fuller, and James Hughes.
Alas, we also must remember Unitarians like David Star Jordan, a pacifist raised in a Universalist household, who believed that war is a biological evil because it kills off the physically and mentally fit and leaves behind the less fit. He declared that poverty, dirt, and crime produced poor human material.
The founding president of Stanford University, Jordan published The Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races Through the Survival of the Unfit.
We’re prompted to ask: Is there a throughline from eugenics to transhumanism?
Also:
Who gets to define this advanced form of “human”? Who gets to become it?
Is it possible to write AI algorithms that support the Great Virtues? Will there be a market for them? What if there isn’t?
Introducing AI and Faith
Founded four years ago by David Brenner, a Seattle-based attorney who works in high tech, AI and Faith is an expert community assembled to help faith communities confront such questions. The group now counts 90 technologists, ethicists, and philosophers as resources to further the discussion.
"We can be quiet cogs or we can be actively thinking about what we want from AI," said David at the outset of our first AI and the Human conversation. "Our main opportunity is to work at the creator level, right there at ground zero. If we're informed and can work together, we can have a substantial say about what we want and and what's good for the world."
The first in our series is Levi Checketts, a newly named member of the Religion and Philosophy faculty at Hong Kong Baptist University. Seeing a big hole in Catholic theology on technological issues, Levi wrote his Ph.D thesis on consciousness uploading, a feat Kurzweil predicts we'll achieve by 2045. That's around the same time Elon Musk says we'll achieve a whole-brain interface with AI.
David has asked Levi to take on a networking role for AI and Faith. Our goal, as David put it, is to "develop really good AI that promotes human flourishing and not human destruction."
