Regarding that warning
Peter Sharrock writes,
Whilst on this journey (of personal & therapeutic expeditionary art & design through places of inspiring art & science, silent contemplation, meditation & prayer) I’m curating the following responses.
Current response
Back in the 1990s, I spent quite some time trying to convince various religious and humanitarian organisations that they should be preparing for this new world by establishing themselves as a presence on this new thing called the internet.
Unfortunately [since they're now trying to catch up and be noticed by a much younger and uninterested audience] most of their administrators had probably seen me as just another harmless mad person who can safely be ignored. Their most common response tended to be something like, “Yes, that’s all very interesting but we very much doubt that anyone apart from the odd tech-enthusiast will ever have an actual computer in their home. Not in our lifetime.”
Now in this third decade of the twenty-first century, whilst international corporations are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the development and deployment of artificial intelligence and its related robotics technologies, the United Nations Security Council and governments worldwide have begun commissioning well-placed industrial and scientific bodies to advise them on the potential risks and benefits of that technology.
And not a day seems to go by without some new advance or application for that technology being brought to our attention through media outlets which appear inordinately fond of interviewing experts regarding their own AI-related existential fears.
Even Wallace & Gromit (in Vengeance Most Fowl, broadcast by the BBC on Christmas Day 2024) appear to be getting in on the act.
But what (apart from issuing the occasional homily) are the world’s religious bodies saying about these things? Surely, a concern for the future of humanity must sit at the heart of every faith community.
In January 2018, following a presentation in November 2017 to Quakers at their Sussex West Area Meeting, Peter Cheng (writing from his background in Mechanical Engineering, his PhD research into AI, and his university teaching work in Cognitive Science) expressed the widely-held view that popular media coverage about the creation of super intelligent robots surpassing human intelligence was just science fiction.
And if claims that something is an existential threat are to be taken seriously, he said, “certain pre-conditions must apply simultaneously: (a) there should be a single (or small number of) recognised means for wide harm to be caused; (b) the potential harm should be at a global scale; (c) the process of harm at a particular location cannot be stopped by actions at that location. Robotics and AI", he said, "do not appear to meet any of the conditions, let alone all three.”
In 2020, our world got a taste (during the Covid-19 pandemic) of one type of catastrophic global disruption that most of us had only ever experienced from our seats in a cinema. And that’s what we’d said to each other in those days, whenever a stranger had appeared in the distance, “It’s like living in a science fiction movie”.
In February 2023, I addressed a letter to the Bishop of Chichester - whose diocesan webpage declared the Church's pledge to be a presence in every community. I wanted to suggest to him that he might consider helping to appoint a virtual bishop to watch over cyberspace since so much of our world is now dominated by an overwhelming amount of stuff which only comes into being through the internet – which has been locking an increasingly worrying amount of our children’s attention firmly into the fabric of its fascinating spaces. And so, in my opinion, if our churches do not also make themselves present in those spaces (and especially in those online communities) then our children will become increasingly lost.
In March 2024, the Bishop of Chichester replied to me with an email stating that (in his opinion) new forms of communication have always been important for the Church, “even when they have challenged existing expectations”.
He said that it was his expectation “that episcopal ministry has to be embodied and exercised in material form. Touch, taste and the use of sacramental signs, like water and oil, are essential to its character. The virtual dimension of episcopal ministry is derived from that and it is difficult to see how it could be any different.”
In April 2025, Time Magazine had reported that until recently scientists were speculating that the arrival of AGI (artificial general intelligence - systems that can think in similar but superior ways to human beings) was a possibility although probably still decades away.
However, Time reported, Demis Hassabis (a government adviser and the CEO of Google’s DeepMind laboratories) is now forecasting that AGI will have arrived by 2035; while Sam Altman (the CEO of OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT) has been predicting that AGI will have arrived even earlier - possibly sometime before the end of Donald Trump’s second term in office as US President in January 2029.
On Good Friday in 2025, I had been sitting alone in St Mary's Church in Surrenden Rd, Brighton, wondering what to do next. Did God have a plan?
In May 2025, Pope Leo XIV laid out a vision of his papacy, identifying artificial intelligence as one of the most critical matters facing humanity.
The next step on this journey - to one of those places of silent contemplation, meditation & prayer (listed in the publication below)
The next step on this journey - to a place of inspiring art & science (listed in the publication below)
