April 2025 Blog

International Symposium on Developments in Artificial Intelligence & Humanoid Technology by Job Kozhamthadam   Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), accompanied by humanoid technology, are arguably the greatest achievement of human ingenuity to date. Thanks to these breath-taking breakthroughs, the claim is made that it is only a matter of time when human scientific prowess will have produced in its laboratory not only living beings, including humans, but also superhumans or posthumans. Recent amazing achievements like the humanoid Sophia, which was awarded Saudi citizenship in 2017, the humanoid Ameca, the world’s most advanced robot so far, the Chinese humanoid SEO1 with its ability to have a natural, human-like gait, and many others – each with its own specialties – seem to assure us that contemporary science’s claim is

By |2025-04-16T23:12:48+01:00April 15th, 2025|Categories: Blog|Tags: , , , , , |

October 2023 Blog

Spiritual Conversation with AI The development of Open AI (GPT-3 and its successor), has generated huge public interest in the capacity of AI. There is a mixture of excitement about what AI is now capable of, but also alarm about the consequences of these new capacities. One interesting question, especially for those concerned with the interface between science and religion, is the capacity of AI for spiritual conversation and counselling. Even before the machine learning approach of Open AI, there were indications that automated spiritual conversation might be possible. The early work of Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960s, using a simple Chatbot methodology, suggested that computers could perform passably in providing non-directive counselling. The computer simply picked up verbal cues and responded appropriately. So, for example, if the

By |2023-10-15T15:34:17+01:00October 15th, 2023|Categories: Blog|Tags: , , , , |

February 2023 Blog

Spiritual Intelligence by Fraser Watts The apparently simple little adjective, “spiritual”, is more complicated than it looks, and there are significant issues about what it means. It is currently being used in a variety of contexts. I will focus mainly here on spiritual intelligence, but also briefly note parallel discussions about spiritual healing, and the spiritual turn. There is talk of “spiritual healing”, but what is “spiritual” about such healing? Some years ago Sarah Coakley and I jointly led a consultation on spiritual healing. In subsequent publications we have both grappled with how to conceptualise spiritual healing. In her recent book, Spiritual Healing: Science, Meaning and Disenchantment, Coakley makes a distinction between healing that is not strictly physical and healing that is framed in terms of God. In

By |2023-02-16T15:32:16+00:00February 15th, 2023|Categories: Blog|Tags: , , , , , , |

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