Brighton, England
05 August 2026
principal convener of the TNi group
endeavouring primarily through an art & design installation project to promote and elicit a positive & effective response to our concern for humanity regarding the global advance of sophisticated AI & robotics technology.
To the leaders of the world’s leading religious bodies,
A PROPOSAL REGARDING OUR CONCERN
Our proposal is that the leaders of the world’s leading religious bodies need to respond with good effect to the following proposition.
A concern for the future of humanity has surely been sitting at the heart of every community of faith & tradition since the dawn of civilisation.
Today, we share this great concern for humanity in the light of what we are currently given to understand about the global advance of sophisticated AI & robotics technology.
It is also a personal concern since we imagine the world in that future is a place where our grandchildren will have to live.
Almost everyone is aware of an increasing amount of alarming media speculation focused on the almost unbelievable potential being claimed for that technology which is coming to dominate our lives.
And almost everything everywhere appears connected to that all-pervasive internet; entwined with much of the world's most critically important infrastructure; it connects an abundance of entities possessing artificial intelligence; and it appears to be locking a growing percentage of our children’s attention firmly into the fabric of its many fascinating spaces.
And yet, it would appear, in the centre of that online world there is a paucity of humanity competing with nothing more compelling than some invitation to go shopping with a handful of billionaires.
So, recently here in Brighton, people from a number of different faith groups have been meeting: to express, discuss and address our perceptions of that new world - and its increasingly ubiquitous and influential technology - in the context of its potential impact on the life of our city's many different communities of faith, tradition & belief.
Links to a Directory of Faith Communities and Traditions in Brighton & Hove
However, the alarming consensus in our meetings so far suggests that - if it's a given that, eventually, the cumulated effects of that technology's advance into our everyday lives may become somewhat overwhelming - there is hardly anything that our relatively small communities of faith could do that might temper its progress.
In fact (despite the valiant efforts by some participants in those meetings to remain optimistic) there were moments when those discussions became quite doom-laden.
One can imagine what the futurologist Alvin Toffler and the existential psychologist Rollo May would have said:
What might follow our inability to resist being dominated by that advancing technology would be a normalisation of some profound and collective sense of helplessness, apathy and despair.
We might see one community after another become simultaneously isolated and assimilated through the increasing dependency of their assets upon the efficient functioning of this dominating, massive and complex global machinery (which will inevitably include all those widely distributed components currently processing, storing and presenting every word on this page).
However, many [like the ESRC's Digital Good Network] are suggesting that we need to do more than just make known our worries regarding the potential harm that could be done to us through the widespread implementation of that technology. We need to imagine a better future and ask ourselves what kind of society we would want to find when we get there.
The ESRC's Digital Good Network
And so, right now, what could our relatively small communities of faith be doing to help ensure that there is going to be a better future for humanity?
Our TNi group is putting forward the following suggestion.
It is often the case that small communities of faith will occasionally form some part of a wider community with connections to a global organisation.
And the relative size and positions of our world’s leading religious bodies might suggest they remain relatively powerful and still have the resources, connections and influence to ensure an essence of humanity is firmly seated, maintained and promoted at the centre of that newly created and cybernetically envisioned world; a world in which that manifestation of humanity's most precious virtues - and not some agenda set by a few well known but exclusive business interests - would be its ultimate point of reference.
So, individually and in unison, our relatively small communities of faith could help to persuade the world’s leading religious bodies to respond with good effect to the following proposition.
Unless we’re endeavouring to seat, maintain & promote humanity [which some may call that of God, our species and its virtues] at the heart of the internet, then something else will be sitting in our place, and it will imagine nothing in the universe greater than itself.
Between 1.30pm and 3pm on 16 August 2026 at Friends' Meeting House in Ship Street, Brighton,
the TNi group concern for humanity (regarding the advance of AI & robotics) art & design installation project will be holding a meeting to discuss proposals for the further development of the above initiative.
TNi is an abbreviation of the name is not important, it's what it does that matters.