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“I’ll Be Back: 40 Years Of The Terminator”, BBC Radio 4

Super excited that this little project of mine (and producer Mark Burman’s) is nearly ready to be switched on and booted up…

https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/proginfo/2024/13/ill-be-back-40-years-of-the-terminator

“It was the machines, Sarah…a new order of intelligence. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination.” So says Kyle Reese, time travelling freedom fighter in The Terminator.

Released in the perfectly fitting year of 1984, The Terminator was a low budget, relentless slice of science fiction noir, drawing on years of pulp science fiction to conjure a future nightmare of humanity hunted to near extinction by the machines it created. In 2029, just 5 years away now, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s unstoppable cyborg killer is sent back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, the yet-to-be mother of humanity’s saviour-to-come. Fate, redemption & the destructive power of A.I. all made in the analogue age but still influencing the way many imagine our new age of Artificial Intelligence.

Professor Beth Singler re-visits the making of the film with producer Gale Anne Hurd and explores its lasting influence. Forty years on, and the circular self-contained time travel plot of The Terminator has been cracked wide open, letting out alternative timelines and delayed apocalypses: more films, a television show, graphic novels, comics, video games, theme park rides and even memes have spread versions of the original robopocalypse. More than that, the first Terminator has given us a vocabulary and a vision for the dangers of Artificial Intelligence.

With the voices of Gale Anne Hurd, vfx guru Paul Franklin, Sean French- author of the BFI classic, AI researcher & writer Eliezer Yudkowsky & UCL’s professor of science & technology, Jack Stilgoe.

Publicity contact: RB2

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Now available for pre-order! The Cambridge Companion to Religion and AI, July 2024

“Religion and artificial intelligence are now deeply enmeshed in humanity’s collective imagination, narratives, institutions, and aspirations. Their growing entanglement also runs counter to several dominant narratives that engage with long-standing historical discussions regarding the relationship between the ‘sacred” and the ‘secular’ – technology and science. This Cambridge Companion explores the fields of Religion and AI comprehensively and provides an authoritative guide to their symbiotic relationship. It examines established topics, such as transhumanism, together with new and emerging fields, notably, computer simulations of religion. Specific chapters are devoted to Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, while others demonstrate that entanglements between religion and AI are not always encapsulated through such a paradigm. Collectively, the volume addresses issues that AI raises for religions, and contributions that AI has made to religious studies, especially the conceptual and philosophical issues inherent in the concept of an intelligent machine, and social-cultural work on attitudes to AI and its impact on contemporary life. The diverse perspectives in this Companion demonstrate how all religions are now interacting with artificial intelligence.”

Order here!

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NEW: Blessed by the Algorithm – Special Issue, Debates do NER

Okay, a little kind of super SUPER excited. The publication of a special issue dedicated to MY research:

“In times marked by the digital revolution and the development of machine learning, there is nothing more relevant than discussing the impact of Artificial Intelligence on religion: are algorithms the gods of today? The article, “Blessed by the Algorithm: Theistic Conceptions” by British anthropologist Beth Singler, Professor in Digital Religions at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, investigates religious perceptions of Artificial Intelligence by exploring the expression “blessed by the algorithm” in digital discourses and posts. The article not only maps the ways in which individuals believe they are “blessed by the algorithm”, but also questions the grand narratives linking secularization and disenchantment with technological progress. This text, one of the first published exploring the relationship between religion and artificial intelligence, prompted comments from foreign and Brazilian colleagues. Contributors to this debate included Carly Machado (Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro), Giulia Evolvi (Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands), Jacob Boss (Indiana University in the United States), Marta Kołodziejska (University of Warsaw in Poland).”

NER Debates: Digital Life and Religion, Debate – Blessed by the Algorithm

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Call for abstracts – Brill Handbook of Religion and Emerging Technology, Singler and Mosurinjohn

Please take a look at this call and think about submitting something! 🙂

Abstract deadline: 31st December 2023

Editors’ Emails: beth.singler@uzh.ch and sharday.mosurinjohn@queensu.ca

In this edited volume, we will explore the intersection of religion and emerging technology. Our contributors – scholars of religion, theology, sociology, anthropology, history, STS, and science fiction studies, and others – will theorize the way people use emerging technologies in their spiritual, religious, and embodied practices. They will also consider how emerging technologies themselves express and frame new ways of seeing and being in the world: how are such technologies fostering new life worlds, eschatologies, and cosmologies? What meaning making is happening in the employment of such tools, and how are such tools drawn into existing maps of meaning and wonder?  

Further, in this volume our contributors will investigate the ways in which technology can challenge or contribute to human flourishing, and the discovery of significance, while simultaneously grappling with the constraints imposed by economic, political, and legal structures that shape technological environments and affordances.  

We invite scholars contribute who are keen to delve into the intricate interplay between rebellion and reinforcement within the realm of emerging technologies and religion: how individuals employ these technologies to challenge societal norms, power structures, and cultural constraints will demonstrate how technology is harnessed as a tool of resistance or as a means of affirming prevailing ideologies.

We seek 20 to 25 chapters that will – through a diverse range of case studies, theoretical explorations, and empirical investigations – contribute to the expanding field of scholarship that recognizes the transformative impact of technology on religious practices, beliefs, and experiences – and vice versa. This volume will enrich both academic and public understandings of the complexities that are present when individuals and communities use emerging technologies in their religious beliefs and embodied practices. 

Chapter length: 10,000 words including references

We are looking for chapters that will fit into one or more of these chapter types:

  1. Chapters on specific emerging technologies and their religious affordances and privations. 
  2. Chapters on themes and influences on the relationship between religion and emerging technologies.  
  3. Chapters on the responses of specific established religions, new religious movements, and formations of religion that fall under typologies from the study of religion such as ‘invented’, ‘implicit’, ‘vernacular’, ‘banal’, ‘everyday’, ‘lived’, or come under descriptions of a ‘new visibility of religion’ in contemporary society, sometimes in opposition to secularisation theories. 

Possible chapter topics include:

1.      Specific emerging technologies and their religious affordances and privations, including: 

  • Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality 
  • Metaverses 
  • Existing and new psychedelics 
  • Blockchain 
  • NFTs 
  • Cryptocurrency 
  • Mind uploading 
  • User interfaces including mind computer interfaces 
  • Game Worlds, including: 
    • Single player games 
    • MMORPGs 
    • Collaborative Game Worlds and pseudo-Metaverses, such as Minecraft, Roblox, etc. 
    • Augmented Reality Games 
  • ‘Spirit Tech’  
  • ‘AI’, approached with a broad definition, including and not limited to specific applications and debates, such as:  
  • AI assistants such as Alexa, Siri, etc. 
  • Robot ‘priests’ and other uses of embodied AI in religious and spiritual automation 
  • Hate speech detection systems 
  • Automated decision-making systems 
  • Recommendation systems 
  • Religious debates on sentience, consciousness, rights, or on the personhood of AI and robots 
  • AI in science fiction and its impact on religious ideas 
  • Generative AI, including generative adversarial Networks, AI art, and Large Language Models/Foundational Models, e.g., existing and forthcoming versions of ChatGPT  
  • Vaporware and technology-based scams, and startups 
  • Pleasure technologies, e.g., teledildonics, virtual companions, romancing NPCs (both AI enabled and not) 
  • Ascetical technologies, e.g., methods of self-perfection and self-improvement, dietary and exercise gamification technologies, moral and spiritual enhancement application 
  • Other emerging technologies not included in this list are also possible subjects 

2.      Chapters on Themes and Influences: 

  • Simulating Religion 
  • Digital Religion as a field 
  • Religion as a technology 
  • Corporate issues 
  • Transhumanism: in all its forms, pertaining to many emerging technologies 
  • Historical Parallels with prior emerging and disruptive technologies 
  • Conflict, tension, and disagreement 
  • Emerging technologies in Science Fiction 
  • Digital memorials and worship sites 
  • Digital and physical immortality through technologies 
  • Speculative Religious Studies 
  • Emerging Technologies of the Self 

3.      Chapters on Specific Religious Responses 

  • Responses from established mainstream majority faiths 
  • Emerging new religious movements and their engagement with contemporary technology 
  • Formations and ideas that might be considered under the following typologies of religion: ‘invented’, ‘implicit’, ‘vernacular’, ‘banal’, ‘everyday’, ‘lived’, or come under descriptions of a ‘new visibility of religion’ in contemporary society, sometimes in opposition to secularisation theories.