The bulk of the debates on religion and science today focus on ethical issues regarding advances in medical science and technology, such as cloning and stem-cell research, while far less attention has been paid to the potentials of computing and artificial intelligence (though this very topic was the subject of early cyberneticist Norbert Wiener’s God and Golem, Inc.).
Oxford University Press, however, has just published Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality, by Robert Geraci, which attempts to articulate what the author calls a “cyber-theology.” In a recent interview with ShelfLife, the University of Texas-Austin Library’s blog, Geraci formulates the term in the following way:
That would be any theology that is grounded in digital technologies. In my own work, the term refers to the ways in which some people hope to address traditional religious claims through advances in computer science. For example, the Apocalyptic AI authors advocate that we will create a transcendent new (digital) world, upload our minds into that world (providing immortality and rejecting the limitations of the earthly body), and even resurrect the dead through high fidelity computer simulation. Those are three things that, for example, Christian theology has promised for two thousand years but that people now hope to receive from technological progress.
Read the full interview with Geraci here.