Seeking Alignment: Religious Imaginaries in the Past and Future of AI

The Seeking Alignment panel brings together scholars working in the study of religion, computer science, media theory, and law to consider how the religious pasts of AI shape the foretelling of its future. From “spiritual bliss attractors” to worries about a “god-like” AI, the genesis and consequences of AI—how its history is told and its future is prophesied—are steeped in religious imaginaries that require scholarly analysis. In the mid-twentieth-century, cybernetic and neural network theories grew out of spiritual convictions about relations among humans, animals, and machines “of loving grace.” Today, some people worry that AI may come to have an omnipotent “galaxy brain,” while others want to make sure that AI is infused with a specifically Christian God, as in tech billionaires who seek to “align” AI tools to hasten the "second coming of Christ."

The panel will focus on the concept of “alignment,” or efforts to align Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with human values, as well as “misalignment,” when AGI and human values diverge. The panelists will ask what we can learn about AGI by considering a longer history of “religious” practices that train, prompt, or discipline human beings to live and think in alignment with higher powers and potent systems. What can past visions of religious alignment tell us about our visions for living in an AI future? And what might we learn from the people discarded and “corrected” in the pursuit of such success?