Study: Robotic Preachers Reduce Interest in Religious Faith
They are certainly not the answer to declining attendance and involvement that some have hoped they would beHere at Mind Matters News, we’ve covered recent attempts to automate religious practices — for example, the android Mindar (Kannon, a deity in the Buddhist tradition), the robot Pepper performing funeral rites, and proposals for robot Catholic priests. There’s even an AI Jesus out there, spluttering from the King James Bible… Mindar, in particular, has been invested with great hopes: To learn countless things and solve everyone’s problems: Many of us have just assumed that robo-religion — often introduced to combat declining adherence — would not play well with the genuinely devout. But no one had tested that rigorously. Now someone has. Joshua Conrad Jackson, a behavioral science professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, studied the Read More ›
