AI and religion. There's more overlap than you might think. From American public

media this is marketplace tech. I'm Lily Dramale. Artificial intelligence, it can all feel so abstract, and so we've come to depend on certain

narratives to try and make sense of it all.

In case you hadn't noticed some of the language we use to describe AI and our interactions with it

is rooted in religious ideas. Bracing for the apocalypse? Have you been

blessed by the algorithm or consulted with a robo-rabi lately?

The deification of AI, whether it's done consciously or not, is something Beth Singler has made

a career of studying. She's a professor of digital religions at the

University of Zurich in Switzerland. She says religious thinking about

technology might just be us projecting.

The kind of existential fears that people have

about the development of AI,

where it's going, where it might go out of control in particular ways.

Those sorts of ideas, those

imaginaries, they replicate sometimes religious

narratives and tropes. So we've already seen quite

mainstream articles talking about the dangers of god-like AI.

Figures like Elon Musk talk about with AI, we're really summoning the demon.

There's this thing that could get out of control and the language that's used

pulls on those existing religious ideas.

Quite often the sort of monotheistic ones,

so the ones we're familiar with from Christianity or Islam or Judaism,

...