RT Article
T1 There’s a Basilisk in the Bathwater: AI and the Apocalyptic Imagination
JF Religions
VO 15
IS 5
A1 Isbrücker, Avery
LA English
YR 2024
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1887630929
AB Deciding what to make of secular, religious, and spiritual speculations about AI and digital technologies can be overwhelming, and focusing on the extreme utopic or dystopic outcomes may be obscuring the larger facts. Is this technology a beautiful blessing or a damning curse? What can paying close attention to these technologies and the discourse surrounding them show? How founded are our anxieties? By following the apocalyptic throughline in this rhetoric across fields in recent years, this essay seeks to consider the effect of apocalyptic thought on recent developments in tech, and consider how this worldview orients our future. The deterministically utopic, dystopic, and apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding these technologies obscures their function and efficacy, giving agency to what is functionally still just a tool, the use for which depends on its designers and users.
K1 algorithmic spirituality
K1 Eschatology
K1 Speculation
K1 Roko’s Basilisk
K1 enchanted determinism
K1 Singularity
K1 Superintelligence
K1 Transhumanism
K1 Ai
K1 Apocalypticism
DO 10.3390/rel15050560