AI, a Nobel Prize & a Nano-Chapel

 

                                      Geoffrey Hinton, co-winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics

Last week Canadian Geoffrey Hinton, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, along with a colleague. He has been described as the Godfather of AI (Artificial Intelligence) because of his work in "deep learning" stretching back to the 1980s. He isn't actually a physicist but his collaboration on artificial neural networks (I have no idea what those are) led to the award. He admitted that when he was contacted by the Nobel committee he was "flabbergasted." There should be an award for the use of the excellent word flabbergasted which has fallen into sorry disuse. 

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the University of Toronto news release suggesting that Hinton sees AI as a mixed blessing: 

“It’s going to be like the Industrial Revolution – but instead of our physical capabilities, it’s going to exceed our intellectual capabilities," he told the BBC “… but I worry that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control.”...

“I want to emphasize that AI is going to do tremendous good,” Hinton told the Globe and Mail after receiving the news about the win. “In areas like health care, it’s going to be amazing. That’s why its development is never going to be stopped. The real question is can we keep it safe?”

What will the consequences be for communities of faith with the expansion of the use of AI? For fun a couple of ministers I know have used ChatGPT to create a hymn and a sermon and were surprised by the results. Son Isaac used AI to create a poem of the Sunday morning announcements and it was amusing. 

Recently a reader of this blog sent me an article about the use of AI in congregational life which seems rather ominous to me, despite the enthusiasm of the parish priest: 

Poland’s – and possibly the world’s – first “nanochapel” has opened in the city of Poznań. Using a special app, parishioners can access the space 24 hours a day to pray, meet with others, have a coffee, and even talk with a ChatGPT-powered AI assistant about their faith.

“In our parish, we are looking for solutions on how the church can adapt to parishioners and not the other way around,” Radek Rakowski, priest of the Roman Catholic parish of Łacina, told local news service wPoznaniu.

The nanochapel, Rakowski’s brainchild, was born out of a desire to make space available to parishioners outside of Mass or service hours. Initially, the priest provided worshippers with keys to the chapel but soon came to the conclusion that “something more was needed”.

Um, who will be in charge here as AI becomes more sophisticated? Will we end up reading about a cyber-exorcism performed on technology gone rogue? As Hinton points out, AI is already being used in medicine and elsewhere to positive effect and we can celebrate this. We also know that it's being employed for deeply disturbing and nefarious purposes, including fake endorsements by superstars for a certain orange political candidate. 

 Given that many congregations in the United Church can't find clergy, will AP (Artificial Pastors) be next? 

How would you feel about being called a tree-hugger? Today's Groundling blog 

https://groundlingearthyheavenly.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-courageous-witness-of-tree-huggers.html