Panel: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND (IN)EQUALITIES: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THEOLOGY AND RELIGION



511.8 - A PNEUMATOLOGICAL EQUALITIES ADDRESSING AI INEQUALITIES

AUTHORS:
Buck R.A. (Mesa Global ~ Oxford, UK ~ United States of America)
Text:
AI is poised to radically transform various elements of society with applications that have some kind of economic impact, including self-driving cars, drug development, artistic renderings, and agentic AI systems. In this way, AI is accelerating and expanding a new wave of automations, challenging the continued availability of work and its dignity, e.g. AI has already reduced entry-level roles. AI will concentrate power and heighten a variety of inequalities. As AI reduces available jobs and increases economic inequality, it will also bar many from feeling personal dignity and purpose through work. Yet, even more surreptitiously by qualifying much human work and skill as "less than" AI capabilities, AI imposes a perceived inequality between humans and machines. To address these inequalities we will turn to the radical equalities of value, economics, and empowerment ushered in through the gift of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps overlooked in theological considerations of AI, the Person and Work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian counters the inequalities that AI is likely to increase. Not only does the gift of the Holy Spirit challenge some assumptions about the nature of AI, but it also contests AI narratives that devalue the uniqueness and worth of humanity. The Holy Spirit also moves the theological contributions to the discussion of AI from punctiliar acts in the past and/or future. Instead, pneumatology interfaces questions about AI and the inequities it will impose with the ongoing salvific work of God in individuals and in society. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit originally brought about a transformation from economic, psychological, and spiritual inequalities to equalities. Thus, a more robust engagement with pneumatology in Christian Scripture and in the church fathers not only provides a prophetic critique of the nature and inequalities of AI, it offers a vision of transformation towards Spirit-conferred and -empowered equalities.