Lecture: Seeing ourselves as machines – theological and ethical reflections on AI

There is a two-way psychological movement underway - from the machine to the human, and from the human back to the machine

Time and time again, as technology advances forward it brings the question of what it means to be human with a new urgency and a new twist. If you look back through the history of ideas, very often we have understood our humanity by reference to the leading technology of the age. Today, the dominant technology is information processing machines, and so it is the computer which is increasingly seen as the way to understand what it means to be human.

I spoke at the University of Durham on this topic in September 2019, as part of the project Equipping Christian Leaders in an Age of Science. You can watch a video of my lecture below:

You can also find videos of the other panel discussions and talks given at this conference here.

Leave a Reply

Tags
Most read posts
What can we learn from how the early church lived out their faith during their own pandemics?
How are young people different to those who came before, and what can we learn from them?
Navigating the transitions of later life
This Bill is the wrong approach - there is a better way to give individuals and their families dignity at the end of life
Living faithfully as we approach retirement, dependence, dementia and death
Recent posts
Welcome to the science fiction world of endlessly distorting mirrors in which nothing is trustworthy
Why are young people getting back into the weird and the magical?
Exploring the evidence and the explanations for the supposed quiet revival
Have we turned our eyes away from the reality of Satan and spiritual warfare?
The church in an era of AI fakery and misinformation