Robert Geraci

Robots and AI technologies have changed the way we live, from mapping car routes to providing home assistants. AI is used in surveillance, machine learning, and natural language processing and will become increasingly important to education, law, governance, and more. Some advocates of AI technology even believe that AI will equal human intelligence, and someday attain greater-than-human intelligence. Robots may become our helpers, our companions, or our superiors. The idea that godlike machines will replace humanity is either a nightmare or a cause for celebration depending on who you ask, and it has become increasingly commonplace. In the 21st century it has spread throughout the world, with Indian and American scientists, engineers, and even the general public paying attention to such futuristic speculation. Ideas about AI arise from cultural and religious beliefs, and they affect how we design and use the technology. This book traces perspectives on history and technology in India and the United States, and applies these to how we think about AI. Futures of Artificial Intelligence suggests that the global use of AI will benefit from incorporating perspectives from around the world, showing that India has a powerful role to play in the future of humanity.

Based on fieldwork conducted while a Fulbright-Nehru scholar in 2012-13, this book uses ethnographic data to investigate the presence of religious ideas and practices in Indian science and engineering. Geraci shows 1) how the integration of religion, science and technology undergirds pre- and post-independence Indian nationalism, 2) that traditional icons and rituals remain relevant in elite scientific communities, and 3) that transhumanist ideas now percolate within Indian visions of science and technology. This work identifies the intersection of religion, science, and technology as a worldwide phenomenon and suggests that the study of such interactions should be enriched through attention to the real experiences of people across the globe.

As we collectively devote enormous resources (especially time and money) to life in virtual worlds, we are reshaping the religious landscape. While the advent of virtual worlds will not produce a religious utopia or overwhelm traditional religious institutions, virtual worlds nevertheless create new opportunities for religious expression. This book describes 1) how World of Warcraft can operate as an "authentic fake" (a secular institution that does genuine religious work by providing communities, opportunities for ethical reflection, meaning and purpose, and even transcendent experiences) and 2) how Second Life provides both a location for religious migration from the conventional world and an opportunity to express transhumanist values and choices. Quantitative and qualitative data reveal that these virtual worlds are already a part of contemporary religion, and force us to rethink what religion is and what role it plays in the world.

Some pretty important people believe we will soon upload our minds into robots or virtual reality and then live forever. This is a book about that idea and, more importantly, about how it operates in our scientific, religious, and media cultures. There are chapters about the influence of Apocalyptic AI in academic robotics, the virtual world of Second Life, and political/moral life (including theology, law, robot rights, & empathy).

The study of religion arose as a tool of empire but also stands as a possible counterpoint to that colonizing project should technological progress ever lead to artificial general intelligence (AGI) in a machine. Not only will the existence of religion constitute a defining element in identifying AGI, but the lessons gleaned from analyzing religion among human communities can help guide the acceptance of machines into what Isaac Asimov called a C-Fe society, a community of human beings and intelligent machines. Drawing on the history of religion and twentyfirst century inquiries into the religious implications of artificial intelligence, this article makes two fundamental contributions. First, it argues for the relevance, if not primacy, of religion in the recognition of AGI. Second, it reflects upon the need for humanity to overcome the self-serving techniques of imperial domination to welcome AGI, should such sophisticated technology arise.

Scholarship has grown increasingly nuanced in its grappling with the intersections of religion, science, and technology but requires a new paradigm. Contemporary approaches to specific technologies reveal a wide variety of perspectives but remain too often committed to typological classification. To be vigilant of our obligation to understand and reveal, scholars in the study of religion, science, and technology can adopt a hydra-logical stance: we can recognize that there are cultural monsters possessing scientific, technological, and religious heads. These heads may work with a common agenda or they might not. They might disagree, pulling their shared body back and forth in a public commotion that lays waste to their surroundings. They might see past one another or move in tandempurposively or not. Evaluations of climate response and AI benefit from seeing how the various heads are inseparable: indeed, cutting one off simply promotes the growth of new heads. Methodological and analytical clarity, therefore, emerges in the transition from schemes of classification to the recognition of hydras.

Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, made headlines in 2014 by claiming that Indians had mastered genetic engineering and plastic surgery during Vedic times. This claim, made at the opening of a new research hospital in Mumbai, is in keeping with similar claims about the invention of rockets and powered flight, as “described” in the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Despite academic and public silence on the subject until Modi’s remarks, the underlying idea—that Vedic technology prefigured many 20th century advancements—has considerable cachet in Indian conversations about science, and is credible in the minds of many Indian scientists and educated members of the public. Using data from interviews with scientists and engineers in Bangalore, India and from online responses to Modi’s remarks, this essay shows that Modi’s remarks have a wide audience in contemporary India and that his comments reflect a common stream in Indian visions of technology. The comments show that the politics of religion and technology are inextricably bound to the politics of nation-building and contemporary reflections upon Hindu religious traditions.

An ethnographic approach to the South Indian festival Ayudha Puja reveals that the celebration plays a role in the construction of scientific communities. Ayudha Puja has the ability to absorb westerners, non-Hindus, and non-Brahmins into Indian science and engineering communities and is thus widely practiced in South Indian industry and academia. The practice of Ayudha Puja thus parallels what M. N. Srinivas labels “Sanskritization.” Within India, the process of Sanskritization refers to the adoption of high-caste habits and diet by upwardly mobile lower-caste communities. While not actually an example of Sanskritization, participation in Ayudha Puja is analogous to that process: by joining a Hindu rite within the scientific and professional workspace, outsiders become part of local laboratory, department, or office culture. Such practices reveal the need for scholars to investigate scientific community building outside the domain of how scientists reveal new facts about the world.

Popular science publications in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) reveal a striking merger between apocalyptic religious thought and scientific research. Three major elements characterize early Jewish and Christian apocalypticism: alienation within the world, desire for the establishment of a heavenly new world, and the transformation of human beings so that they may live in that world in purified bodies. In Apocalyptic AI, these characteristics are attributed scientific authority. Apocalyptic AI advocates, frustrated by the limitations of bodily life, look forward to a virtual world inhabited by intelligent machines and human beings who have left their bodies. Having downloaded their consciousnesses into machines, human beings will possess enhanced mental abilities and, through their infinite replicability, immortality.

Different religions have strikingly different views of history; but the emergence of modern technology offers promises of salvation that can draw equally on Christian views of time in the US and Hindu views of time in India. For centuries, Christian theologians incorporated technological progress into their linear vision of history, which will end with an eschatological conflict and the rise of the New Jerusalem. In the US today, techno-enthusiasts have adopted the claim that we are fast approaching the end of the world as we know it, though the salvation they expect no longer references Christianity. A 'Singularity' will occur, they say, leading to the transformation of biological life into an eternal new world of machine intelligence. In India, however, history is cyclical and the end of the world has long been expected to be a return to the first age. Although presently mired in the misery of the kali yuga, we should anticipate an end to this period and a return to the glorious satya yuga. Based upon popular Indian understandings of science and technology, we should expect that both will be crucial to this process. Interviews and observations made in the US and in India reveal how technological progress is now the critical component in cultural expectations about the end of the world and the emergence of a new world to come.

Science fiction—as a literature of the fantastic—has become a part of the religious landscape of modernity. In a secular world, not all of religious activity is explicitly so; indeed, much contemporary religious thought and practice happens implicitly, in ostensibly secular arenas. Yet the human need for meaning and enchantment has gone undiminished in the age of secularism, and science fiction is a powerful route for fulfilling such desires. In China Miéville’s _Perdido Street Station_, we see how traditionally religious themes are woven into a science fiction story, but also how the book itself illustrates a religious goal of divine creation. Using actor-network theory, this essay contributes to the building of a sociology of religion that acknowledges the powerful ways in which science fiction texts like Perdido Street Station offer transformative experiences for readers and for culture.

Popular science and science-fiction depictions of immortality through uploading minds are “authentic fakes”: secular practices that do authentic religious work for transhumanist communities. Although in the 1980s, science fiction departed from this practice and rejected transhuman promises of “mind uploading” and immortality through technology, in the twenty-first century science fiction has rejoined pop science as a genre advocating transhumanist salvation. Accelerando by Charles Stross and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow illustrate the powerful way in which science fiction once again normalizes radical visions of our future and thereby encourages belief in key transhuman concepts such as a scarcity-free economy, the Singularity, and immortality obtained by uploading human consciousnesses into machines.

This volume documents many ways in which theological language permeates modern media, an omnipresence of the sacred which applies even when scien- tists take part in media life. Even atheist and agnostic scientists have absorbed religious language from broader culture and use the terms and conditions of that language in popular science publications to establish their social authority. In particular, roboticists and artificial intelligence (AI) advocates reconfigure the religious categories of jewish and christian apocalyptic traditions, combining those categories with the credence leant by technological success to justify their claims to popular authority.1 This hybridization of religion and science creates a new public role, one with prestige grounded in both of its fundamental elements but which aspires to be more than either.

Videogames and virtual worlds that provoke dread and horror have grown in popularity throughout the twenty-first century. Based on the online games Requiem: Memento Mori and DayZ, this article shows how players relish such dread and enjoy landscapes of the monstrous and the grotesque in order to engage with and tentatively conquer inner fears and anxieties. As such, the game worlds continue the age-old work of horror—to exorcise one’s inner fears and demons—but do so with the viscerality that is the hallmark of gaming. Using theoretical analysis, “textual” interpretation, and empirical data garnered through interviews and surveys, we show that Requiem and DayZ produce cathartic experiences associated with long traditions of popular and religious approaches to human fear and sin. It is this visceral engagement with the horrific and monstrous that connects the games and their environments to long-standing folk traditions in pop culture.

The article includes a link to the publicly available spreadsheet of survey data for DayZ (n=7000). Usage of the survey data should cite this essay's authors (Geraci, Recine, & Fox) and this essay as the first analysis of the data.

This is a quick essay (in French) for the Musée du Quai Branly, an anthropological museum in Paris. It notes the way in which technology acts upon modern people, pushing them towards faith in a transhuman future.

Citation style:

Geraci, Robert M. 2016. L'évangélisme Transhumaniste. _PERSONA: Étrangement Humain_, ed. Emmanuel Grimaud, pp. 212-13. Paris: Musée du Quai Branly and Actes Sud.

Abstract Video games and virtual worlds play substantial roles in contemporary transhumanism. Many transhumanists appreciate the freedom and power that accompany these digital landscapes and recognize that they can promote transhumanist ways of thinking beyond the borders of explicitly transhumanist groups. Video games and virtual worlds enable transcendence through their design and contribute to transhumanism through the options they enable and the influence they have. Because of their significant place in transhumanism, video games and virtual worlds are thus important to the study of religion and science in the twenty-first century.

In considering how to best deploy robotic systems in public and private sectors, we must consider what individuals will expect from the robots with which they interact. Public awareness of robotics—as both military machines and domestic helpers—emerges out of a braided stream composed of science fiction and popular science. These two genres influence news media, government and corporate spending, and public expectations. In the Euro-American West, both science fiction and popular science are ambivalent about the military applications for robotics, and thus we can expect their readers to fear the dangers posed by advanced robotics while still eagerly anticipating the benefits to be accrued through them. The chief pop science authors in robotics and artificial intelligence have a decidedly apocalyptic bent and have thus been described as leaders in a social movement called "Apocalyptic AI." In one form or another, such authors look forward to a transcendent future in which machine life succeeds human life, thanks to the march of evolutionary progress. The apocalyptic promises of popular robotics presume that presently exponential growth in computing will continue indefinitely, producing a "Singularity." During the Singularity, technological progress will be so rapid that undreamt of changes will take place on earth, the most important of which will be the evolutionary succession of human beings by massively intelligent robots and the "uploading" of human consciousness into computer bodies. This supposedly inevitable transition into post-biological life looms across the entire scope of pop robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), and it is from beneath that shadow that all popular books engage the military and the ethics of warfare. Creating a just future will require that we transcend the apocalyptic discourse of pop science and establish an ethical approach to researching and deploying robots, one that emphasizes human rather than robot welfare; doing so will require the collaboration of social scientists, humanists, and scientists.

The belief that computers will soon become transcendently intelligent and that human beings will “upload” their minds into machines has become ubiquitous in public discussions of robotics and artificial intelligence in western cultures. Such beliefs are the result of pervasive Judeo-Christian apocalyptic beliefs and they have rapidly spread through modern pop and technological culture, including such varied and influential sources as Rolling Stone, the IEEE Spectrum and official U.S. government reports. They have even gained sufficient credibility to enable the construction of Singularity University in California. While different approaches are possible (and, indeed, are common in Japan and possibly elsewhere), this particular vision of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics has gained ground in the West, through the influence of figures such as Hans Moravec and, especially, Ray Kurzweil. Because pop science books help frame public discussion of new sciences and technologies (for individuals, corporations, and governments alike), the integration of religious and technoscientific claims made by their authors should be clear and open for public and scientific debate. As we move forward into an increasingly robotic future, we should do so aware of the ways in which a group’s religious environment can help set the tone for public acceptance and use of robotic technologies.

In science-fiction literature and film, human beings simultaneously feel fear and allure in the presence of intelligent ma- chines, an experience that approximates the numinous experience as described in 1917 by Rudolph Otto. Otto believed that two chief elements characterize the numinous experience: the mysterium tremen- dum and the fascinans. Briefly, the mysterium tremendum is the fear of God’s wholly other nature and the fascinans is the allure of God’s saving grace. Science-fiction representations of robots and artificially intelligent computers follow this logic of threatening otherness and soteriological promise. Science fiction offers empirical support for Anne Foerst’s claim that human beings experience fear and fascina- tion in the presence of advanced robots from the Massachusetts In- stitute of Technology AI Lab. The human reaction to intelligent machines shows that human beings in many respects have elevated those machines to divine status. This machine apotheosis, an inter- esting cultural event for the history of religions, may—despite Foerst’s rosy interpretation—threaten traditional Christian theologies.

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