Megan Garber: I mean, that is a winning argument if I ever heard one.
Garber: Andrea, when I played with Ouija boards—exclusively at slumber parties, and only to ask this mysterious portal to another world about people we had crushes on—I remember feeling really entranced by it. And also really creeped out by it! And I think I might still be, a little bit, even though I now know the science behind it: It works through something called the ideomotor effect, where thoughts in the players’ minds, in a way that’s pretty unconscious to the players themselves, end up guiding their movements across the board. Which is actually a nice metaphor, I think, for the web—and, really, for so much of what we’ve been talking about in this season of the show. This thing that felt mysterious had been human the whole time.
Garber: Oh, yes. But then also because the web is made by humans, it's also limited in its vision, right? Which is a pretty big flaw, oracle-wise. And the fact that the web can seem omniscient, just like you said, I think can make it even more jarring when, you know, the glitches show up, as they inevitably will. When we think about the reality of the internet, when we consider it in light of how to know what’s real, that hope for omniscience, I think, is also really instructive because many of us do invest tech with a certain spirituality, but I’m really interested in why we do that and, and especially what the consequences might be. So I spoke with Hanna Reichel, who is an associate professor of reformed theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Professor Reichel has a particular interest in what they call theologies of the digital. Which means, basically, that they take one of the core interests of theological thought—questions about how humans interact with a higher power—and apply it to digital technologies like social media and AI. Professor Reichel thinks really expansively, but also with remarkable nuance, about tech as a form of faith. And their insights are clarifying, I think, for anyone who is grappling with technologies that are made by humans—but that can feel, at times, beyond our grasp.
Hanna Reichel: If the 20th century was the century of power, we might say the 21st century is the century of knowledge. People often talk about data as the new oil, the new gold. This whole question of technology and the kind of superhuman power it affords, and how that intersects with human freedom and agency seems super interesting to me, and actually is something that theologians have been thinking about for a long time, right? Centuries, probably going back to Boethius in the sixth century, to think about, like, if there is someone who knows everything about you, what does that do to human freedom? What, how can we still think about the openness of the future? Is everything predetermined or not? And theologians have, of course, thought about these questions in relation to God, and here we have a long tradition of thinking through these questions. That might also serve as a resource to think through some of the versions in which these questions appear in a technological age.
Garber: What are some of those versions, in particular? What are some of the connections you're seeing, right now, between religion and tech?"
Reichel: It’s just in public discourses about technology, how often metaphors of God get invoked, right? Like the all-seeing eye in the sky, the divine puppet master, the idea of eternity and infinity and transcendence. All these ideas that are traditionally associated with God. God as the original creator: Everywhere that we see technology as a creation, people suddenly reflect on what it is like to be a creator. So we’re kind of putting ourself in the position of God as technological makers. And on the other hand, we’re experiencing ourselves as, to some extent, also under the power of technology. To me, one of the very interesting, also early AI applications that I saw was one that was literally called God in a Box. It was a GPT 3.5-powered thing that you could subscribe to on WhatsApp and it was, you know, for a mere 9 dollars a month. And people used it as an oracle. You could ask it anything. And that was so fascinating to me as like, you know, both, it’s the God in a box, so I kind of have this power and now I can consult it at any time. It can give me advice. There’s something, you know, very interesting about that. But also I control it, right? I can; it is in a box and I can put it in my pocket. But also this tendency that people would ask questions to these AI bots that they might not feel comfortable with asking a friend or a pastor or a counselor, which is really interesting. So there’s an almost therapeutic and spiritual function of like, me and my secret, really secret questions that might be too embarrassing. And this, by the way, it goes much further back, earlier, like the earliest versions of AI, you know, when people started coming up with Turing tests to see if it’s this other thing, a person or not. If you put two bots in conversation with one another, what, they would start insulting one another and they would start asking religious questions. Like, interestingly, these were the two things they did to mimic human behavior. But so kind of, I think, right, the idea of God here both often functions as signaling either a utopian promise or the dystopian horror and that which it turns out to be partially hinges on the question who we perceive to be in control. Are we in control of the technologies? Are the technologies in control of us or who, you know, steers them mysteriously in the background? Which corporations, which political interests, and so forth, right?
Garber: You’re reminding me of that great line from Arthur C. Clarke, “Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” Which captures so much—not only about tech itself, but also about the human power dynamics you’re talking about. Because magic is something that, almost by definition, we can’t control. It’s just there. And I think that’s part of why magic is invoked so often almost as a sales pitch with AI—with branding that treats the tech not just as a new consumer experience, but also as a new existential fact. That this is just reality now. So I guess to question the magic—how should we be talking about AI right now? Is it a force? An agent? How do you think about AI, in linguistic terms?
Reichel: That’s a very good question. I think one of the key theological terms that applies would be that of a creature, a created being. And one of the interesting things, right, if in a theological imaginary, we think of God as the ultimate creator and creatorship as a divine quality, we think of ourselves as creatures, as being in our being dependent on that creator, having been generated by that creator, but also kind of continuing to have our being from that source. But then as human beings, we’re in this unique position that we’re kind of created co-creators. The Christian tradition uses the language of the Imago Dei, of kind of seeing our own capacity to create as reflecting something of that divine creativity. But so there’s now an iteration of an iteration where we see ourselves capable of creating beings that now also have the capacity to create things. And so that becomes kind of an uncanny chain, right?
Garber: And there are so many different links in that chain! Because with AI, we are very directly creating other beings in our own images, trying to make these pieces of tech that very self-consciously resemble us as humans, but we’re also doing something similar, in a less direct way, on social media. There’s a kind of aptness to the fact that we talk about “content creators” and the “creator economy”—we talk so explicitly about creation there, except, with our videos and selfies and posts, we’re not creating other beings. We’re just re-creating ourselves.
Reichel: The desire to make oneself transparent and to share everything and to be seen and to be recognized by the big and small others. Maybe in a religious terminology, we could also say, right, to achieve some sort of permanence, right, to write one’s name into the book of life. If I see the sunset and have this meal, did it even happen if it isn’t, you know, written into some sort of record and shared with others? So there’s also almost like a frantic work on fashioning and curating a self and a persona out of these bits of our self-presentation.
by Megan Garber, Andrea Valdez, and Hanna Reichel, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Yana Iskayeva/Getty[ed. Like blogging.]
