Artificial intelligence and religion may appear disparate, even contradictory, pursuits. After all, AI hubs like San Francisco and Seattle are two of the least religious cities in the U.S. Yet AI and religions share a central line of inquiry: What does it mean to be human?
In 2019, this question was top of mind for Wes E. King. They’d finished a seminary degree and were then a University of Washington doctoral student in the Information School. So they developed the question into a special topics class on AI, robots and religion, which they’ve taught ever since and for which they received a Distinguished Teaching Award this year. In the class, King, now an assistant teaching professor, has students do things like analyze whether transhumanism — a movement to use technology to transcend human limits — is a religion.
This year, news events have brought King’s question back to the forefront, intertwining AI and religion. In May, Pope Leo XIV issued an encyclical on the church’s mission in the time of AI. Anthropic has met with religious leaders on how to make moral AI, and people held a funeral for an AI model. News stories began to explore whether AI companies are themselves akin to religions.
To help make sense of this moment, UW News spoke with King about their class, the pope’s view of AI and finding hope.
Lately, there’s been a lot of characterization of companies like Anthropic as either cults or techno-religions. Do you find it accurate?
WEK: I don’t think these characterizations are far off. In the 1950s, Edward Fredkin was one of the early AI developers who said AI technologies are our only hope for salvation and for transcending our human limitations and our insanity. So this idea that we’re going to destroy ourselves was in the context of the Cold War. We were fearing annihilation, and that’s not gone just because we’re not in that era anymore. There are still wars and violence and destruction that permeate various aspects of our society. And there are still elements of doomsday cults in some parts of AI.
I also agree that these are like techno-religions. Ideologies — such as transhumanism, effective altruism or rationalism — motivate so many of these development communities. I met someone recently who’s a chief disciple of a religious community that’s organized around these technologies. These religious formations around them are emerging; it’s happening. But even small things — like these hashtags, “blessed by the algorithm” — really surface what we as a culture believe about our creations.
How does that culture affect the technologies they’re making and how they’re presenting them to the world?
WEK: There’s something powerful about thinking that you might be developing something godlike, that might help us know things that we couldn’t otherwise know. That kind of faith in techno-power could lead to some really harmful effects — like treating AI as infallible and outsourcing our messiest moral dilemmas rather than confronting our complicity in systems of oppression and environmental crises. I’m concerned about these possibilities, and that’s one of the reasons I’m really interested in sticking with this research. How do we imagine a different future than the ones that these techno-powers are imagining for us?
What have you learned from teaching your class on AI, robots and religion?
WEK: There’s a common trope that religion and technology have nothing to do with each other, but these things are deeply connected. It feels like there’s currently a firehose of information about these connections and a firestorm of questions. With Enlightenment thinking, we’ve wanted to disconnect from our religious thought. We want to say that no, we can’t be superstitious, because religions are often categorized as this mystery. But through science and technology, we can prove things. And now we’re coming to find that maybe we can’t prove so many things, including solving the hard problem of measuring — and understanding — consciousness.
“We shouldn’t be developing these technologies only for human flourishing. We should develop them for flourishing — period.”
Is there an assignment that’s really stood out to you?
WEK: I have students write a creation narrative. We read ancient Near East creation narratives — the Enūma Eliš, the Abrahamic tradition archived in Genesis — alongside narratives from Daoism and Buddhism. Then I ask them to “write a brief creation narrative an AI or community of AIs might write about their origins if AI were to achieve consciousness in the future.” The students’ responses are fascinating. One of my favorites, early on, was like, “Well, Siri and Watson — IBM’s AI assistant — gave rise to this baby…” and I thought, oh my gosh, the Adam and Eve narrative and the idea that heterosexuality is the default have clearly influenced students’ thinking. I see less of that now, which is really interesting, to see them turning away from some of these dominant narratives and imagining totally different things.
Leading AI labs are working to transcend human limitations with their AI models. This seems to clash with many religions’ values and beliefs. For instance, Pope Leo XIV wrote in his encyclical on AI that “humanity — in all its grandeur and woundedness — must never be replaced or surpassed.” How are you thinking about such contradictions?
WEK: In “The Religion of Technology,” David Noble shows that even the idea of transcending our human limitations is motivated by Christian theology. There’s a lot in the Christian tradition saying that we need to progress and become something different. Some people think about this as a holy-human hybrid, that the spirit of God animates us and allows us to become something different. So, with the influence of the Enlightenment, or the turn away from religion, those ideas were projected onto our technologies. This idea of transcending is also very much located in a Protestant worldview that humans are deeply flawed, born in sin, and so we have to transcend our imperfection through the use of technology.
One of my biggest concerns with the Pope’s view that technology should not surpass humans is that it continues to center humans. I don’t know if we should think of humans as insurpassable, because that feels like a very dominating position, and the means of domination that we’ve experienced and continue to experience in our world harms so many non-dominant communities and our planet. And that’s only one interpretation of these religious texts, of the Abrahamic tradition. Feminist and queer theologians have interpreted these things differently, thinking about stewardship and symbiotic relationships, that the Earth as a whole is way more important than centering and focusing on humans as the most important thing.
We shouldn’t be developing these technologies only for human flourishing. We should develop them for flourishing — period.
What did you think of the Pope’s encyclical overall?
WEK: I think he got a lot of things right. I like his analysis of problems with labor, problems with power — and he doesn’t outright critique capitalism, but I think there’s an embedded critique of capitalism and neoliberalism. I also think there are quite a few things he got wrong. One is centering humanity. Another is the view of what it means to be human within Catholic thought. It basically classifies queer and trans people as less than human, and if we base our morals and our ethics on a worldview that continues to assert dominance over a particular way of imagining what it means to be human — that our biology determines our existence — we’re going to continue to have problems with marginalization and domination and exclusion and exploitation.
What do you want the public to know about the intersection of AI and religion?
WEK: I think it’s important for us to recognize the connections between dominant religions and the development of technologies. Seeking moral guidance from dominant religious traditions — which helped shape the very inequities tech now replicates — is a dead end. Today’s tech practices reflect core beliefs in the power of capitalism and neoliberalism: that markets dictate morality, individualism outweighs collectivism, and the ultimate goal is expansion into a never-ending frontier that someone must dominate. It’s good Anthropic is meeting with religious leaders, but if tech leaders aren’t willing to acknowledge their existing beliefs and disrupt their own business models, no moral or religious tradition will save them or the AI models they are training.
We need to pivot. The Pope ended the encyclical with some great thinking about privileging the marginalized, the oppressed, those who are being exploited, to imagine a different future. Voices within traditions and cultures that have been silenced — women, queer folks, Indigenous leaders, mystics, the Global South — offer hope. As a queer person who has often felt less than human, who is oppressed and harmed by dominant religious traditions, I find hope in imagining a future where I can flourish along with all of the beautiful diversity of creation on this planet. I think those are the kinds of hopes and the kinds of people we need to be thinking with — those at the margins, not those who are already dominating our thinking and our worldviews.
For more information, contact King at mxwe@uw.edu.