"After Religion" is almost done! We have a final session next week, a showcase of student final projects (due and presented in discussion sections this week), but there won't be any more occasions for lecture or discussion. And there wasn't much time for a lecture today, either, as we decided to give some of the lecture time to the discussion sections so students had a decent amount of time to present and receive feedback on their projects... and we're supposed to allot class time for course evaluations, too! So we had an absurd half hour. I decided the best use of it would be a google.doc and discussion, so everyone had a chance to contribute in some way, but I prefaced that with a very quick roundup of inspiring things in the course materials for this week. If I keep the section on transhuman religion next time round, I'll make sure I have time to screen and discuss this video, which was linked to in one of our assigned readings.
It shows a Buddhist ritual for aibo, the first generation of robotic AI puppies, programmed to be companions for human beings young and old, with endearing and even "mischievous" features; these robots are especially widely used for very old people living alone, and produce true joy and comfort. It's traditional in Japan to ritually thank the other-than-human companions which have attended us in life - dolls, tools of various trades, etc. - and it makes sense to do so for aibo too. Their relationships with us are not unreal or meaningless just because they are inanimate - if indeed they aren't animate! The article suggests Shinto and Buddhism undergird a willingness to recognize animacy widely in the land of 鉄腕アトム (Astro Boy).
There's more media attention to robotic priests, like the animatronic Mindar (also in Japan), who teaches about the Heart Sutra, but our capacity to bond with robotic dogs (and to create robotic dogs people can bond with) seems a more interesting way into thinking about religion and new technologies. Coming after a section on the wisdom of traditional indigenous ways of knowing and being, which recognize the animacy of the other-than-human world and the necessity of being in just relation with it, this would raise all sorts of cool human-transcending questions. The dots were there to connect this year, too.
Our discussion today was abbreviated but the google.doc helped students imagine an AI bot which would be an amalgamation of religious teachers/mentors (one student quipped it could be called Baha'i Bot), and which everyone seemed keen and ready to learn from. After Religion indeed!
