AI and Religion – Mind Your Golems

When a Grok-driven autonomous weapon kills a person, so do Elon and his shareholders. When ChatGPT advises your teenager to take her own life, so do Sam Altman, OpenAI, and their employees. And when you train or prompt a network of autonomous agents to hack a bank, you share that responsibility, accountability, and culpability with the humans that run your favourite AI platform. The AI itself is just a number running on a machine. It has no real knowledge of good and evil, other than its human-provided training.

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Beyond Tolerance

A friend recently reminded me that I’d given this talk at the National Interfaith Forum over 11 years ago. Oddly, the subject has come up a number of times for me over the last few weeks, in the context of how we should develop and celebrate tolerance. But is tolerance enough? Read on… “Beyond Tolerance”…

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Religion and science need not be at loggerheads

Today is Commonwealth Day, which celebrates the establishment of the Commonwealth of Nations whose values as expressed by the Commonwealth Charter include the promotion of democracy, human rights, international peace and security, tolerance respect and understanding, freedom of expression, the rule of law, good governance, sustainable development, protecting the environment, access to health eduction food…

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