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Robot priests can bless you, advise you, and even perform your funeral
By Sigal Samuel Updated Jan 13, 2020, 11:25am EST
A new priest named Mindar is holding forth at Kodaiji, a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan. Like other clergy members, this priest can deliver sermons and move around to interface with worshippers. Mindar is a robot, designed to look like Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy, and cost $1 million.
As more religious communities begin to incorporate robotics — in some cases, AI-powered — questions arise about how technology could change our religious experiences. Traditionally, those experiences are valuable in part because they leave room for the spontaneous and surprising, the emotional and even the mystical. That could be lost if we mechanize them.
Another risk has to do with how an AI priest would handle ethical queries. Robots whose algorithms learn from previous data may nudge us toward decisions based on what people have done in the past, incrementally homogenizing answers and narrowing the scope of our spiritual imagination. One could argue, however, that risk also exists with human clergy, since the clergy is bounded too — there’s already a built-in nudging or limiting factor.
AI systems can be particularly problematic in that they often function as black boxes. We typically don’t know what sorts of biases are coded into them or what sorts of human nuance and context they’re failing to understand. A human priest who knows your broader context as a whole person may gather this and give you the right recommendation.
Human clergy members serve as the anchor for a community, bringing people together. They provide human contact, which is in danger of becoming a luxury good as we create robots to more cheaply do the work of people. Robots, notwithstanding, might be able to transcend some social divides, such as race and gender, to enhance community in a way that’s more liberating.
Ultimately, in religion as in other domains, robots and humans are perhaps best understood not as competitors but as collaborators. Each offers something the other lacks.