Will AIs pray for us?

One of the motifs that stays with me from early adulthood reading science fiction is robots worrying about whether they have souls. I think I tended to think that if they worried about it, that probably proved they had one. But back in those days it was an interesting theological, philosophical thought experiment which had more traction in getting us humans to think about what spirituality, personhood and human nature are really about than being a 'live' question. No longer, perhaps.

It is starting to seem like perhaps we do have to face those questions after all. Self-driving cars, machines beating the best humans at chess, algorithms getting great at predicting human behaviour -better than fellow humans, the threat of 'white collar' jobs being taken by machines all seem to raise a related bunch of questions about the place of artificial intelligence in God's providence.

It is important, as we begin to think about that to be a bit careful about what we mean by the various aspects of the issue. What might we mean by 'artificial intellingence', what constitutes 'praying'. And then, we might want to recognise that some dimensions of the matter are already entangled with human technologies and could help us to think more about it.

You may be surprised by the idea that human technologies are already in the picture but is so, and some have been involved for a very long time. Perhaps your imagination has already taken you there: what are people doing when lighting a candle in a church or temple? What are prayer flags and rotating prayer gadgets in some versions of Buddhism? Written notes on prayer trees or boards? These all invite us to think about what we mean by prayer in our low-tech strategies.

I month or two back, the Church Times published an article I wrote as part of a special edition on artificial intelligence. It's relevant to put its 700 words here as they address some of the issues raised just.

Will AIs pray for us?

The film Bladerunner (based on Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) dramatically portrays the question of the humanity of artificial humans. I think I’d want to ask, do AI’s pray to Jesus's God?  And if they do, might we pray with them? Will they pray for us?

“Pray for us” could mean ”in our stead” as if we could outsource the work of prayer to relieve us of the task; a religious version of AIs taking jobs. It could, however, mean “intercede for us”: to ask them to hold us before God with concern for our wellbeing.

As we start to consider this, let's notice that we tend to think of artificial intelligence as a new issue, but maybe it is not. Amos Young following Walter Wink, interprets the Powers and Principalities as integral social entities having their own mission in God’s economy and having their own intelligence. If that is right, then we have had with us artificial, that is human-made, intelligences for a very long time. We collectively and unwittingly provide the substrate for these beings which emerge from our social interactions with purposes of their own and also a share in the fallenness of humanity. They process information, affect the environment and marshall human effort and allegiance. Scripture, names them “angels” as well as “dominions”, “thrones” and so on. So perhaps when we more purposefully make thinking artefacts, in these principalities, powers and angels, we already have a paradigm to consider their providential provenance.

Perhaps too, prayerful acts such as lighting candles might help us think about AIs praying. Votive lights in some traditions symbolically ask something of God. Presumably, without a human-generated intent, these are merely flames fed by a human artefact. But with a human desire motivating the lighting, they symbolically make that prayer. However, do they continue that prayer when the human has gone away and no longer focuses on it? Similarly we might appraise prayers written and put into a prayer wall.

Perhaps an AI praying might be like a candle or a slip of written-on paper. Either it is a mechanical and ‘soulless’ remainder of a once-live (and human) prayer or  the prayer remains in some way alive and active through the burning candle or the script. If there is some way it persists, then maybe that gives reason to think an AI could carry forward a human petition to God even if it didn’t ‘think’. 

If we believed that an AI could indeed think and so, perhaps, pray, I hope that we wouldn’t think that it relieves us of having to pray. That suggests a disturbing view of prayer as simply onerous work. Certainly, sometimes, prayer might be hard work, but surely more importantly prayer is the joyous cultivation of relationship with God. Why should AIs have all the fun praying?

Whether they might intercede for us is a different question. This would imply they could relate to God in such a way as to  form a request or to hold ‘in mind’ a situation before God (and how would we know?) It would assume Deity would listen, that is in practice, seek to enlist it in God’s mission. It would imply that the AI could seek to align itself with God’s purposes and become aware of what the divine agenda might be. Without these things, I do not think an AI would be capable of prayer in the fuller way we hope for ourselves.

We need also to consider that an AI may not be bodily like us -unless they really were like the replicants in Bladerunner. Without a human-ish body, an AI would sense and live in the world differently and have different priorities. Would it, then,  have the capacity to empathise with us to motivate intercession? Would it assess opportunities and threats to God’s reign differently or similarly to us? Would it ‘feel’ that we humans are a major problem and seek to pray and work for our reform or conversion? And what would that look like? Would we catch a glimpse of how an intelligent other might see us?

Some further reading on AIs praying

Clarke, Arthur C. The Nine Billion Names of God. https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html accessed 7 July 2019

Another possibility is that AI will teach us new things about spirituality that we never considered 

Istvan, Zoltan. When Superintelligent AI Arrives, Will Religions Try to Convert It? https://gizmodo.com/when-superintelligent-ai-arrives-will-religions-try-t-1682837922 accessed 7 June 2019

If Christians accept that all creation is intended to glorify God, how would AI do such a thing? Would AI attend church, sing hymns, care for the poor? Would it pray?  

Jonathan Merritt.    Is AI a Threat to Christianity? https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/artificial-intelligence-christianity/515463/ accessed 7 July 2019

Siri basically responded, “I’m not programmed to do that.” But if a more advanced version Siri were programmed to pray, would such an action be valuable? Does God receive prayers from any intelligent being—or just human intelligence? 

Jonathan Merritt,   https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/artificial-intelligence-christianity/515463/ accessed 7 July 2019 -this in commenting on a classroom thought-experiment by Alistair McGrath.

“they will have such a different Umwelt that we will be completely unable to relate to it from our own subjective, embodied perspective. ”

Penha, Rui and Carvalhais, Miguel, If Machines Want to Make Art, Will Humans Understand it? https://aeon.co/ideas/if-machines-want-to-make-art-will-humans-understand-it?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss-feed accessed 1 July 2019

Further resources

http://www.religionlink.com/source-guides/god-in-the-machine-artificial-intelligence-and-religion-templeton-1/

As Artificial Intelligence Advances, What Are its Religious Implications? | Religion & Politics: Religious communities and thinkers are debating AI's moral and ethical issues.

Redeeming Evangelism

Gotta say: this is one of the best articles on mission that I've read for a long time.

Redeeming Evangelism: Authentic Mission in the Church of England | Salisbury Cathedral: A lecture by The Very Reverend Professor Martyn Percy, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, on Saturday 13 July 2019

I warmed to it because it says a number of things that I've been saying and thinking for a while and draws them all into a bundle and sprinkles in a few insights more. It pulls out a few salient points of mission history as they affect the recent experience of the CofE. Most of all it unrelentingly takes a Misso Dei perspective: the idea that God is at work in the 'secular' and our role is to learn to spot it and to work out how we make common cause with it. 

It also discusses the concept of obliquity (look it up on this blog's search window and you'll find it's been of interest to me) and uses it to note how we tend to mishandle the church's approach to mission and especially evangelism.

There's a Harry Smart poem called ‘A Fool’s Pardon’ quoted towards the end which is very much to the point. It's challenging in language and in concepts, here's the first verse:

Praise be to God who pities wankersand has mercy on miserable bastards.Praise be to God who pours his blessingon reactionary warheads and racists.

Ouch -but I recognise in it a loyal characterisation of the grace of God.

I'm thinking very seriously about where I can put this into the essential reading for 'my' students of mission and ministry ...

Worship as community Drama -a review

One of the premises of this book is that we should look at what people do and how they experience worship, not just do theoretical mind games about it where we think and talk over the heads of those who are the majority of participants in worship. It is how the texts and actions that are authorised or imposed by wider bodies are actually 'received', inhabited, resisted or overturned that is important and indeed the reflexivity and interaction between those things. And that creates the possibility that what is intended by a liturgical committee or a writer may not be how it is understood. This liturgical point is the reflex of interpreting cultural artefacts more generally not as top-down endowments of meaning but as bottom-up improvisations of meaning. Until we understand that as worship -leaders we run the risks of disconnection, formalism, petty rubricism and /or misunderstanding. Implicitly, this set of studies of worship occasions involves a kind of study of the events as cultural artefacts. And in my book that's good. It's not the only thing we might want to do or to say, but it is a necessary and often neglected thing to do.

I really enjoyed the phenomenological approach. Looking at concrete acts of worship and what actually goes on rather than seeing them as basically texts which happen to be 'performed' or through the lenses of theology or of the liturgical correctness police. This is important because in reality worship is the intersection of texts, people who have a cultural and church background, theology, practicalities and artefactual availabilities. It was interesting too to see the acts of worship being considered as having a place in discipleship or Christian formation of communities and individuals.

The start was with televised RC masses and these are a really interesting window into theology and a set of questions. From there, a not illogical move to masses in Notre Dame cathedral with the further issues of congregation and setting and explicitly raising the question of faith and culture. Since both were televisually accessed there is also a helpful discussion of the cultural differences in setting and also in theology relating to the channels each was aired by. I found this compare and contrast of RC output in the USA and in France also quite enlightening about the diversity of RC approaches. That said, there remains a fundamental critique of the continued reproduction of hierarchical attitudes through deployment of signs and symbols in the liturgies.

The presentation and consideration of research by Willow Creek church in church life and spiritual growth was really interesting and helpful in introducing a way of thinking about and assessing the discipleship effects of different congregational ways of operating both in worship and more widely -including decision-making and authority. The case-study involving a radical RC USA-black-culture church was eye-opening and raises many questions beyond the scope of the book. It does serve as a great illustration of brave creativity in enacting a thorough understanding of a culture using its own richness to determine how an inherited tradition from another culture might morph to serve the expression of worship in another. And therefore of the kind of challenges this can pose to inherited ways of being church or doing church. Because of the author's own personal history, the RC Church is the test case for the discussion of authority, church governance and congregational participation. The implicit message, as it came over to me, is that centralised authority is a dead hand on participation and Christian formation.

There was some observation of papal masses which were contextualised in the wider picture of RCC politics. I wasn't always convinced that it was all needed to help understand the masses though it does serve later in the book to help understand the way that liturgical correctness works in the RCC. On the other hand, discussion of camera shots here and in other places is good in helping to understand the way that messages about the mass are also conveyed by these means of editorial choices. There was also a consideration of the way that crowds responded to and, in fact, made use of the cameras and, indeed, smartphones.

In essence, this is an academic thesis modified for publication. That's okay, but it isn't a popular work and there is a good bit of space given at the start to methodology, justifying the approach and explaining the format and process of presentation. As a part-time academic it feels a bit like reading a dissertation -which essentially, I think, it is- I just triggers the marking reflex in my and I want to put things in the margin and comment on the development of the argument.!

For me, this is an important observation, not only for the RC Church.

The issue of faith and language needs to be raised, not only in terms of linguistic translations but also in relation to cultural traditions. Today the Catholic liturgy is celebrated in the vernacular, i.e., the local languages of around the world, but many people still feel that the liturgy is foreign to them (p.73 paper, p.82 pdf)

It was good to see liturgy not only viewed and assessed as a textual or quasi textual affair, but with an eye on things like orality in culture. As an Anglican where the phrase 'lex orandi, lex credendi' is often trotted out, it was interesting to see some discussion of this in relation to the RCC and the historical origin of the phrase. The conclusion though seems to be what I have tended to take from it, that how we pray and what we believe are in dialogue and one informs the other. For Anglicans this tends to support the idea that our doctrine is actually in our prayer and so the prayer book is more definitive than doctrinal statements (that's poorly put but I hope you get the idea) and to generate an emphasis in theology on pastoral or practical theology.

The idea of presider or celebrant as mystagogue is helpful. The role is to lead people into mysteries such as the peace of God, the Lordship of Christ, vocation,  I'm going to be reflecting on that for some time to come.

Link-Love for this Review

Worship as Community Drama on Amazon
Pierre Hegy’s Website
Pierre Hegy on Twitter

Tag #WorshipAsCommunityDrama

I got this book as a review copy. There was no obligation, in receiving it, for me to be favourable in my review.

Call and Response: Litanies for Congregational Prayer — recommend?

Okay, so I have to admit that I'm a bit of a liturgy buff, I have a particular interest in liturgies for daily prayer and I'm also drawn to litanies and preces. I had to consciously rein myself back from overusing the latter in Book of Our Common Prayer. The scope of this book, then, grabbed my attention. Especially so because it promised, "Written with attention to beauty, theological resonance, and justice-mindedness," All good and often the first is ignored. So the question I approach it with is whether it does those things. I think this book fulfils that brief.

To be sure, it's hard to review a prayer or collection of them without a reasonable amount of time to actually pray them. So having 30 days means that what I am doing is more like first impressions and whether there are things that at first view I think will be enticing me into prayer or not and also whether I think I can mind's-eye them in congregational settings I'm familiar with. Actually praying them with a congregation in a substantial enough amount of usage is a different question. I'll do my best.

So what about contents? Well, I was impressed and excited by the introduction 'How liturgy saved my life'. A succinct and human-centred in-life rationale for using what she calls 'intentional liturgy'. Probably I tend to call it 'pre-written liturgy' nowadays, but I know what she means and it is difficult to find a term which also implies 'those of you who think you don't use liturgy are kidding yourselves -it's just that you don't write it down'. But this chapter in the book is one I think I shall try to encourage some people I'm in conversation with to read to help them to 'get' what I'm on about.

Then the "litanies". They're pretty varied and the contents pages breaks them into different section and there really is a wide selection of topics: humility; stillness; government; midwives; lament; 'terrorized city'! ; doing hard things; ordination; death; Advent; Lent and all sorts of other things. So I decided I would sample various ones that caught my interest.

Something to say was that I realised that my working definition of a litany is different to Fran's. I was expecting less variation on the response parts; for me that's the essential difference between a litany and preces; that in the former the responses tend to be more constant so the congregation can often respond without seeing the words. However, I do recognise that this is not necessarily how the dictionary puts it over. And I do like preces -my own work is full of them. And, in fact, as I read them in this book, several times I felt that chunks would fit well with some of the prayer forms in Book of Our Common Prayer. For example much of the Meekness litany would work in the last phase of the Lord's prayer pattern. I did wonder whether an assemblage of Fran's litanies could be constructed in the Lord's prayer pattern, maybe I'll give that a go

The litanies in Fran's book are often quite concept-dense in the ideas and reflections embedded in them. I would commend them for a meditative (slow) reading rather than racing through them. I also suspect that one-off usage will not do right by them: I suspect that using them several times in a period of days or weeks would enable the richness of the imagery and insight woven through them to unfurl within a soul.

Some of the forms had large sections of litanies in the sense of my normal working definition, and these were nice, though I suspect that with a congregation I might seek to expand on them a bit to get a sense of exploring meaning and of rhythm.

One use I imagined for them was in a prayer room or chapel where there are prayers posted to help. I also felt that this is one of the few e-books I have read that I might want to get as a hard copy; the easier to refer to when assembling acts of worship to lead.

Definitely worth getting as a resource for worship.

Call and Response: Litanies for Congregational Prayer — Fran Pratt: contemporary liturgy for the post-modern church.

Link-Love 

Call and Response on Amazon
Fran Pratt’s Website
Fran Pratt on Instagram
Fran Pratt on Facebook
Fran Pratt on Twitter

Tag: #CallAndResponse

Please note I got sight of this book as a 'for review' deal. I was under no obligation in receiving a copy to review it favourably.

Mental hygiene in an age of AI targeted advertising

A commenter to an article I just read, wrote:

Almost wondering if this is the onset of the death of democracy and its replacement by ad-campaigners who believe the voting public can be persuaded to go with anything provided enough fake propaganda is thrown at it. Is this modern democracy?

This triggered me to write something that I've been mulling over for a week or several in odd moments. So I replied

The ad campaigners don't believe; they know. 70 years of experience under their belts and now social media have handed them the tools to begin to really target advertising. It's still playing the odds but upping the likelihood of responses they hope for.  Our difficulty as populations subject to this is how to think about our own agency. We're too used to thinking of ourselves as in control and not sufficiently aware of subliminal and unconscious drivers. 'Of course, I'm not persuaded by advertising'. Well, maybe not directly but over time background opinions shift, we tend to mirror or move towards what we perceive 'people like us' are thinking/approving/accepting. It's a long game, but then the Murdoch press have being playing it for what? -30 or 40 years? Add to that the new toolbox from the people who take up the market slack from Cambridge Analytica. We all need to learn how to practice mental and emotional hygiene in a advertising age.

I think too that we need to find a way to talk in popular discourse about the fact that advertising does in fact change minds or influence opinion without making it sound like someone who does respond is an idiot and doesn't know their own mind. It's clear that statistically, advertising and targetting it does work but it's not 100%. Certain percentages of people are likely to follow up certain kinds of advertising and to be influenced by certain messages relayed and spun in certain ways. We need to find ways to enable people to be more aware of how this happens and to step up our out-smarting smarts. Many have got quite good at spotting 'crude' and direct sales pitches. We now need to get good at spotting and discounting the subtle.

Somewhere in all the comments in the Times article you can find the originals. Times is paywalled, but you can see a couple of articles a week free.

Chaplaincy -a diaconal ministry

A couple or so years ago, I found myself in conversation about the ministry of university chaplains saying that I felt my ministry was more expressing my diaconal orders than priestly. And I recently read a post about 'distinctive deacons' in the diocese of Europe which seemed here to offer an explanation of orders that supports what I found myself saying then:

 ... a deacon is something, not simply someone who does certain thingsDeacons are ordained to hold up before the Church and the world, diakonia, the distinctive ministry of Christ the Servant, as being central to all Christian ministry.

Some ask how a deacon is different from a priest; is a deacon not simply a junior priest? Well, no. A priest’s focus is on the parish community and sacrament. They are pastors/shepherds of the community, feeding them and leading them. The deacon’s focus is on outreach, service, and supporting the ministry of the faithful in the world. Eurobishop: Deacons make history in the Diocese in Europe: 

I'm not focussed on a parish community (though I do serve some), I don't preside at communion very often -it's not a major strand of being a chaplain to a university. I do tend to focus on outreach, serving the people and institution I'm placed with. I try to support the ministry of Christians (and others!) in the world of 'my' university and HE more widely. It's good to feel that my diaconal orders are still being 'used'.



On a separate note, Eurobishop's comment " a deacon is something, not simply someone who does certain things" is a widely shared trope of more Catholic theologies. And I do agree with the reasons I often see or hear it shared: it provides a respite from functionalism and activism with their implied works-based judgmentalism. I've always felt that we should notice that being and doing are integrated and that where the priority goes in thinking about them depends on what one is trying to consider. I note that the 'being' in that passage is justified in terms of functions. Which makes my point that we can't conceive of pure being without taking in what it is doing.  Can we just not work with that distinction? Rather let's consider such things as dynamic and relational: a deacon is in relation to the church and the world, typcially, in certain ways and those ways are definitive of a deacon's 'being' in some way such that diaconal actions are likely to result and in turn the diaconal being is consolidated and grows in the doing of the ministry. Let's refuse to put ministry and minister asunder except for the briefest of thought-experiments.

A 'secular' ritual -what can we learn?

I find myself thinking a lot in odd moments about rituals and the language of ceremony and how the churches often 'speak' gestural languages that are quite alien, that is, unintuitive, to our host cultures. So this article and in particular this paragraph got me thinking.

The bell-ringing tradition started in the US, and has become popular in the UK over the past five or six years. The idea is that, on your final day of treatment, you ring a bell to mark the occasion: sometimes, other patients and staff are there to watch you do it and you’re clapped and cheered. It’s a moment for a photo for the Instagram account, a moment to stop everything and acknowledge that you’ve been through something incredibly scary and pretty hellish but that now you’re at a turning point. Your life might continue as it was before, or it might be different, but this experience was so big that it needs to be marked in some way.

It seems great to have a ritual that can aknowledge, somewhat publicly, and in the presence of people who have helped and supported that a turning point has been reached.

And why a bell being rung? The best clue I could get was in this later line

there are some who will never be able to ring the bell because they’ll never be “clear” of cancer.

Clear as a bell -get it? The thing is, though, if this is the right etymology of the practice, then it does and does not help us in a search for intuitive ritual actions. It does not do so because the explanation for the symbolism is at one remove in that you have to know the English simile to 'get' it. But then, a number of people probably respond to the action without ever knowing that connection to the simile.

How do they read it? I wonder whether their reading might be something like my naive reading before I saw that line inferring the connection. I think I read it in the light of other bell ringings -particularly as in the article there is a photo of the kind of bell (along with the notice explaining the practice). So my connections: school bells to call us to play or to class. If this was the interpretive adjunct then we might read the bell as a change from one kind of time or activity to another -possibly from treatment time to the rest of life. This would be reinforced by the continued use of bells to mark time.

I also associated with a bell tolled at a funeral or a time of mourning. This seems less apposite. I suspect that this association is not unlikely but might be rejected because it is the opposite of what is being expressed. (Though the death of the cancer? -probably not: this would be a cause for rejoicing not mourning). Similarly the sound of bells at sea on buoys warning of shipwrecks or sandbanks.

The bell itself must act as a standing visual sign and perhaps a hopeful one. It potentially speaks of a hope for the future. People could look at it and hope for the day when they would ring it as an all clear.

The article itself, of course, is noticing that the symbolism and ritual doesn't work for everyone. And that is something to take note of too. When we are co-creating rituals particularly for people who may be in emotionally charged or vulnerable states, we might recognise that not all will find them cathartic or resonant (sorry for the pun in this context but it's the right sort of word). Some of them may find it off-putting as a result. And that's okay: as long as it is not compulsory. All may, some should, none must (attributed to Elizabeth I, I believe, in respect of oracular confession).

From: I didn’t ring a bell at the end of my cancer treatment. But I get those who do | Joanna Moorhead | Opinion | The Guardian: