Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagCatholicism

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Stained glass collage of stores from the Bible

AI as Refashioned Religion

How AI fits into the transhumanist utopian dream, and where that dream might have come from

You can see it in the discourse surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) over the last year: AI is going to change everything. Some think it’s going to do this for the better. Others think it’s a technological handmaiden for world destruction if its programming goes awry — or worse: AI becomes self-determining and sentient. An insightful article at Vox by Sigal Samuel considers this doomsday/salvific kind of rhetoric and points out that AI developers sound a whole lot like religious priests, prophesying doom, promising salvation, warning the populace to heed the coming armageddon. He writes, These technologists propose cheating death by uploading our minds to the cloud, where we can live digitally for all eternity. They talk about AI as a Read More ›

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Conceptual art, concept of problem mind psychology freedom and solution, surreal painting,  jigsaw puzzle on human head.

Kenneth Miller on Consciousness and Evolution

Despite Miller's claims, neither human reason nor free will evolved because neither are generated by material processes

Kenneth Miller is a biologist at Brown University who has been very active in his written and vocal support for Darwin’s theory of evolution. He’s neither a materialist nor an atheist – he is a Catholic, and in being one of the rare Darwinists who doesn’t subscribe wholeheartedly to the materialist/atheist paradigm, he allows himself to be used as a token theist by the Darwinists. It helps his career, no doubt, but doesn’t advance the truth. Not an admirable place to be. Miller’s New Book and What it Misses In his 2018 book The Human Instinct: How We Evolved To Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will, Miller manages a feat uncommon even for Darwinists – even the title of the Read More ›

Panoramic aerial view of St Peter's square in Vatican, Rome Italy

Why Does the Vatican Need Microsoft?

Should the Church really partner with IBM and Microsoft to make pronouncements on tech regulation?

When giant corporate actors like IBM and Microsoft promote “transparency and compliance with ethical principles?”, we run the risk that they are helping to craft regulations that hinder future competitors (“regulatory capture”). Rather than partner with them in making statements, the Church should stay clear.

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COSM-3104

Tech Entrepreneur Peter Thiel says Silicon Valley is losing its touch

Peter Thiel also compared universities today to the Catholic Church at its worst

About the Big Tech companies, he says, “The story is not that they have done a lot of bad things but that they have not done enough good things. That remains the core challenge of Silicon Valley.”

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Are Robot Pastors the Answer to Religion’s Decline?

Many Christians say no. Some Buddhists say yes. What is expected of the pastor?
Perhaps it comes down to what we believe is the ultimate reality and what we expect from that ultimate reality. Read More ›