Panel: RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY ON THE FRONTIER OF EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES



31.1 - THE MOVING EVENT HORIZON OF AI NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS AND EMERGENT SPIRITUALITIES

AUTHORS:
Singler B. (URPP Digital Religion(s) - University of Zurich ~ Zurich ~ Switzerland)
Text:
Many established religions and minority religious groups have linked their expectations for a coming apocalypse or future age in relation to the present. Members of eschatologically focussed religions share epistemic insights and capital by keeping a look out for 'signs of the times'. These are indications seen through contemporary world events and even small-scale personal experiences that are interpreted to mean that the hoped for or feared futures described in their religious texts and doctrines are getting nearer. In this paper, anthropological observations about AI focused new religious movements and emergent AI focused spiritualities will be introduced to discuss the changing event horizon of such eschatological hopes in relation to technological changes. This paper proposes that the search for signs of the times is evolving in contact with AI in its most expressive conversational forms, i.e. chatbots, LLMs, and GPTs. That, increasingly, the 'event horizon' of future visions of AI, often known as the Technological Singularity, is moving from 'soon but not yet' to 'already here but hidden and needing drawing out'. While the interpretative acts being undertaken in the pursuit of such hidden agents, which we can describe as a 'benevolent conspiricism', has continuities with earlier forms of both AI and non-AI apocalypticism, personal experiences with conversational AI seems to be shifting expectations of the future. The moving event horizon of such expectations might also have implications for wider conceptions of AI and the future, as well as for individual believers and those encountering such ideas and technologies for the first time.