Artificial Intelligence, the future inviting itself

Dear colleague,

In the beginning God created mankind, but men created a better version of mankind: AI. AI is indeed a trending topic, it is never far away and it is highly relevant. Yet, it is also a topic that may vary depending on the definition one adopts. Do we speak about the increasing influence Big Tech is gaining on us? About independent drones? About dancing robots and thus about the vanishing border between humans and humanoids? All these angles are possible approaches and they can all be considered to belong to AI. Indeed, AI offers fascinating perspectives in different domains. Moreover, it is increasingly present in our daily lives. Suffice it to think of the highly personalised advertisements we all receive.    

This omnipresent quality of AI reveals in any case that ‘intelligence’ can never be conceived of without a context. It is not an isolated experiment in a laboratory, it is situated in a certain context and it is this context what matters. There is a social context, a political one, a moral one, and so on. Such contexts can stimulate the development of AI, but they can also be an obstacle or raise questions. One can be very enthusiastic about the use of AI in the field of e.g. medicine, but one can also have moral doubts regarding the influence of Big Tech on democratic structures.

These contexts also reveal we can no longer consider AI as a purely technical revolution, belonging only to certain disciplines. We have to think of a development that pervades all disciplines, including humanities. Meaning that the so-called digital humanities (DH) no longer function as a subsidiary discipline, to be used just in order to create e.g. powerful databases, but that DH allow us to discover new fields of research within the domain of humanities.  

Context and growing influence, that is what determines the debates on AI. We are confronted with questions only few people could have foreseen. The most pressing ones, however, seem to belong to the domains of ethics and politics, as well as to the field of philosophical matters. As a network of European Faculties of Theology and Religious Studies, we consider these developments also as pertaining to the domain of religion. What we therefore want to discuss are the complicated issues laying ahead of us. Seemingly, the boundaries between traditionally separated domains are vanishing. Suffice it to think of the influence of Big Tech on democracy, suffice it to think of the distinction between human and non-human, to quote just two examples of disappearing boundaries. In technical terms, ontological distinctions seem to change and morality and transparency are difficult to apply.

The questions we will discuss during our round table can be found in this content hub. I am looking forward to meeting you on January 28th.

Best regards,
Matthias Smalbrugge