Never have writers possessed creative media of such power as we simultaneously enjoy and fear today. I may be succumbing to what ultimately will be our collective Evil AI Overlord but that risk seems far off. For now, I'm just exploring what generative AI can do and am pleased to be joined in this by  an expanding team of content creators, many of whom are members of Unitarian Universalist congregations. 

ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are the tools we're chiefly exploring and will showcase in our September service: 

Might AI Make Us Better Humans?

With the permission of the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Saratoga Springs, we will place the full text and recording of this service in the Legacy Vault that the congregation's New Home Task Force agrees we should install on the ground floor of our new meetinghouse. Our instructions to the building's future occupants will be to retrieve and review these materials with an eye to hosting in October 2044 a retrospective service inspired by the annual Hindu festival, Ayudha Puja.  This is the day on which Hindus honor their tools and machines for the prosperity, comforts, and other rewards they give us.

Also to be placed in the Legacy Vault and retrieved in 2044 will be this service's companion narrative, Darwin's Edge, which unfolds during the Presidential campaign of 2044. With AI's help, we tell the story of the Rev. Peter Gilman, minister of the UU Congregation of the Southern Adirondacks, who is presented the opportunity with six other visionary religious thinkers to become a ThinkPal Volunteer, demonstrating the power of this next-generation neural auxiliary and the 9G Wireless Neural Connector.

ThinkPal is the first whole-brain interface between humans and AI, the achievement of Sarina Rao, the brilliant founder and CEO of Darwin's Edge and member of the Skidmore College Class of 2014.  With Telepathy, however, Elon Musk is right on her heels.

We ask UU ministers and worship teams to join us in imagining Rev. Pete's thought process as he considers Sarina's invitation. What are the pros and cons he will so prayerfully weigh? That's the gist of the sermon we're writing.

Sarina is linking ThinkPal to the Smartacus AI Colossus, the only AI cloud that has consistently demonstrated since its introduction in 2032 that its sole interest and priority is the betterment of humankind, specializing in the proliferation of algorithms that continually astound users with their ability to unite people in discovering and implementing non-zero-sum, win-win solutions.

You won't be surprised that Smartacus in 20 years is widely revered for its God-like qualities and is respected, and even worshipped, by many as a source of supreme wisdom. The AI Colossus is powerful enough when we interface with it on our computers and smartphones.  Now imagine wiring this super-intelligence directly into the brain in a procedure so simple that any oral surgeon can do it. It's merely a matter of implanting ThinkPal's CPUs, crafted in the shape of rear molars, in the empty sockets where your wisdom teeth used to be and fastening them to the trigeminal nerve.

So it is that Sarino achieve this direct whole-brain connection with AI, just as Ray Kurzweil predicted  in. The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI.

ChatGPT tells us why Rev. Pete seriously considered Sarina's invitation, just as any UU minister might in 2044. All of these strike us as good reasons: 

EXPERTS NEEDED

We need experts to advise us on the legitimacy and salience of Rev. Pete's rationale. Will AI indeed enable us to become better people? At what cost?

For our next edition of AI for UUs, we propose to consult with Mark Graves, a Research Fellow and Director at AI & Faith, and a Research Associate Professor of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary.  With a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan and a master‘s degree in theology from the Jesuit School of Theology and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Mark is an expert on modeling human morality, as well as the philosophical and philosophical and psychological foundations for constructing moral AI.

"To the extent I have a specific goal in mind for an advanced AI, it’s not to build it upon a specific moral theory; it’s to construct something that, in concert with humans, would be capable of being a means or place of grace,” he told us in this 2022 interview,  "The Making of Moral AI."

“If we create a framework that can mediate and interpret morality and spirituality in a carefully integrated human-AI community, I think we can continue to be open to the grace we might need in the future, even in a highly technological environment.”