Because I also had to go out (I was facilitator of a meeting of faculty representatives and the Board of Trustees, story for another day), I rushed through some things, then left the class in the capable hands of my TAs. The topic was AI after religion and I'd set things up for them to work in teams to use AI they knew to throw together a podcast (distressingly easy with AI the university makes available to us) on the question if AI can help us transcend the limits of our humanity.
But they never got anywhere near the proposed project, exploding instead (the TAs told me with wonder) into an impassioned hour-filling collective invective against AI. My rushed preamble, invoking intelligent robots training themselves on other than human life forms and various Asian metaphysics according to which AI is part of an interdependent and emergent world with which it will harmonize, was certainly too compressed. It also became clear few had read the assigned materials for class. But the seeds for a "wild" discussion, in which even usually withdrawn students participated, were sown in a google.doc on two rather simple questions one of the TAs had proposed.
The responses seem a little more measured than the discussion the TAs described, which resonates rather with these unvarnished responses:
I have many rational and thought out reasons to hate AI, but I also have a loathing that goes beyond that, so what I’m saying is I refuse to cede anything to it I refuse to say it can do anything at all because of the hard line I have decided to draw
The only real task it can do is be the embodiment of a demon
it also has a similar role to the great flood and I feel like we must take the role of Moses and salvage what we can from this world and abandon the rest.
religions need to be careful of AI eventually becoming the subject that people worship, since people communicate and look for guidance from them.
I don’t think AI can do religious tasks but I bet there is someone (muslim, i grew up muslim) who gets AI to do their 5 prayers a day so they can lock in on their 9 to 5. Jokes aside i think if a person is getting AI involved in their religious beliefs they might be going into AI psychosis and not take any human interaction seriously.
If anyone told you college students are swimming insouciantly in a sea of AI, this tells a different story. The TAs (who have observed not a little AI use in reading responses for this very class) reflected that this might be because so many of our students are in art and design, preparing for careers directly threatened by AI. Point taken!
But it does have me thinking about how to handle this topic when I teach this class again next spring (not that a great many things, not all AI-inflected, won't also have changed by then). My argument today was that worrying about generative AI becoming "like a god" who might decide to destroy our human world reflects the religious habits of mind of only a fraction of humanity, while folks in South and East Asia, among others, don't lose sleep over these possibilities. (I mentioned Tyson Yunkaporta, too.) But some of the masters of AI clearly do subscribe to such world-threatening conceptions of intelligence and power, so, like the unhinged president of the United States, they're in a position to make it an existential threat to all of us, like it or not.
