Belief in the Future is coming back. Subscribe on Spotify or Apple or anywhere else.
Transcript:
Hi, I’m DZ Kalman and this is Belief in the Future, Season 2.
This isn’t a brand new podcast, but also it kind of is. If you’ve listened to the show before, you’ll know that we’ve been on hiatus for almost a year. From the perspective of a world religion, a year isn’t much, but for technology, especially technology like AI, it feels like an eternity.
The show is going to relaunch in a few weeks, but before it does, I want to say a word about what I think the show’s mission is supposed to be, and how that mission has changed since it first launched back in 2024, and why you think you should listen to this show in a podcast environment that’s pretty highly saturated already.
Back when I started Belief in the Future, I said that the show needed to exist because there’s a public perception that religion and technology don’t have much to say to each other, even though they’ve actually been crossing paths for centuries. The tech sector often treated the technology as antiquated and irrelevant, and religious communities just didn’t know how to keep pace with modern technology. Because each camp treated the other as marginal, the coverage you’d see in the media tended to treat the oddity as the story, sort of like how you might write an article about a dog that plays chess because it’s just sort of strange that a dog is playing chess in the first place. When I saw articles about robotic monks or AI Jesuses, it just seemed so obvious that the media didn’t know what to do with these things other than highlight their strangeness.
So that’s where things landed. But that is definitely not where we are anymore.
In the last two years there’s been a series of changes that have brought religion and technology into direct conversation in a way that’s made it clear that this is no longer a sideshow. The obvious reason for this change is artificial intelligence, but within AI there’s really three different things going on. And since I’ve been watching all this happen and haven’t really seen it explained anywhere else, let me take a second to unpack it for you.
First, there’s been a change in the religions of the world, which, mostly in the last year, have really fully understood that AI is something that they need to organize around. And really, I’ve seen so many denominations have formal working groups developed and conferences created for dealing with AI both within themselves and for the broader world. There’s increasingly a sense that whatever playbook religions have been using to deal with technology in the past just isn’t working, that it demands serious self-examination to understand what it means for your faith to meet this particular moment. And at the same time, there’s a huge amount of diversity in what different faiths are trying to do because no two religions have the same structure. In other words, while the Catholics and the Muslims and the Jews and the Mormons are all thinking seriously about AI and have the same basic concerns, their approaches could not be more different. So that’s one thing that’s changed.
The second thing is the world of AI safety, which has been shouting about the dangers of this technology for years, but has only recently come to the understanding that religious wisdom and religious communities really need to be part of their coalitions if they’re serious about changing the culture or passing laws. Because religious leaders carry a moral authority that still matters, and because religious communities are places where people talk seriously about what it means to live a good life. I have been in so many rooms now where religion is just understood to be a part of the coalition to keep AI safe, and I think their presence in that coalition is going to matter in fields other than the AI too.
Lastly, and really to me most surprisingly, there are the AI companies themselves. Anthropic, at least, has started to make direct overtures to religious leaders and religious communities both because I think there’s a genuine interest in understanding how to take this new power that they’ve found themselves holding and to figure out how to use it effectively and safely, and also because some AI developers are pretty self-aware that the language they use to talk about their technology is already semi-religious. I won’t say that I fully understand how the tech sector thinks its relationship with religion is going to grow. There’s a lot of weird stuff happening, like Peter Thiel talking about the Antichrist. But it is a real connection. And I think it’s important to understand how, let’s say, the religious curiosity of the tech sector is changing the way it develops and deploys its products.
Together, I think you could say that these three shifts represent a series of earthquakes. If you think about religion and technology as being two neighboring landmasses, they’re earthquakes that have basically shoved them together. For this show, what that means really specifically is that while it started out as being a kind of bridge between two places that aren’t touching, it’s now a survey of a new landscape that is changing in real time. And really practically, this means that I don’t think I have to make the case anymore that religion and AI deserve to be in conversation. I think the world itself, the changes themselves, they’re making that case directly. I do think it’s important to provide a roadmap for this new reality that we find ourselves in because right now it’s really a huge jumble. And I don’t know that even the various players who are participating in this new era of rich conversation really understand the landscape that they’re sitting in.
What this all means is that my job here now is to show you that conversation. I want you to see how AI is forcing religious communities to confront questions that they thought they had the answers to but actually maybe don’t. I want you to see how debates about AI consciousness and welfare are getting refracted through ideas about mind and the soul that religions have been cultivating for a very long time. I want you to see how religions are adopting AI for things like sermon writing and religious education and also the places where they’re pushing back. I want you to see what it means for a parade of tech leaders to have conversations with the Vatican. Basically, I want you to understand that the conversation happening now is big and new and exciting, and I want this to be a space that you can come to when you want to understand it all.
So that’s the show I hope to give you.
On a technical level, we’re also changing to a weekly schedule, which is designed to keep the show a little bit more in line with what’s happening in the news. We’re also going to be experimenting with video podcasting in addition to audio podcasting, although I can’t promise it’s going to be more than an experiment given the additional time and cost.
Lastly—and I think really getting to the way that the landscape has changed, this show is now affiliated with the Family Faith Technology Network, which didn’t exist when the show first launch and which has been doing a huge amount of work over the last year to bridge the gap between faith-based perspectives on AI and policy centers and legislatures. We remain, as ever, a production of Sign and Synapses—and the show, just like in Season 1, is sponsored by the Templeton World Charity Foundation.
So, that’s what you should expect. I think the conversation happening now is really exciting and you’re going to get a front row seat to it. And I’m excited to share with you.
That’s all I’ve got for now, but thanks for listening. I’ll see you very soon.
