Talk by Iliff School of Theology’s Dr. Philip Butler launches ‘Faithful Futures’ gathering
Attendees gather online and at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis to learn more about artificial intelligence
LOUISVILLE — Dr. Philip Butler of the Iliff School of Theology officially got the ecumenical Faithful Futures: Guiding AI with Wisdom and Witness summit going Tuesday evening with a talk during which he invited those attending online and at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis to do what he does. In the case of artificial intelligence, that’s to imagine a space and reverse engineer it to decide “what might need to happen in order to make this a thing.”
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Office of Innovation is joining the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, The Episcopal Church and the United Methodist Church to put on the summit, which continues through Friday. Register to attend online here.
Butler is an international scholar whose work primarily focuses on the intersections of neuroscience, technology, spirituality and Blackness. He’s the director of Iliff’s AI Institute and founder of the Seekr Project, which explores the iterative connections between generative AI, mental health and critical Black consciousness.
His talk Thursday included a brief discussion on transhumanism, which he defined for the Claremont School of Theology, where Butler earned his doctorate, as “any use of technology to augment human psychological, intellectual, or physical capabilities.”
He noted that today’s sociopolitical realities include these developments:
- From May through July, 300,000 Black women left the workforce.
- Armed National Guard troops are patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C., and could soon be doing the same in Chicago and Baltimore.
- Black history has been scrubbed from museum websites.
- Along with student loan forgiveness, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs have largely come to an end.
- The proposed budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement work has been tripled.
- AI surveillance has been focused on what Butler calls “already over-policed populations.”
“This is a confluence of factors,” he said. “They’re not happening in a vacuum.”
That led Butler to a discussion of “who counts as a human? Who must conform/contort themselves to even be considered human?”
“The human serves as the lynchpin of realities of domination,” he said, and “difference threatens humanity’s grasp of reality. As a matter of formation, it shapes your core and base beliefs and shapes how you behave in the world.”
Butler held up the work of Aimé Césaire, a poet and playwright and the former president of the Regional Council of Martinique. In 1950, Césaire was writing about the Holocaust, but what he wrote also applies to what Butler calls TCA, the current administration. Adolf Hitler once said, “We aspire not to equality but to domination,” Césaire noted in “Discourse on Colonialism.” Hitler added, “The country of a foreign race must become once again a country of serfs, of agricultural laborers, or industrial workers. It is not a question of eliminating the inequalities among men but of widening them and making them into a law.”
Then Césaire wrote these words: “What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization — and therefore force — is already a sick civilization, a civilization that is morally diseased, that irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one repudiation to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.”
Butler then offered those in attendance an invitation. “Here is where it gets lighter,” he said. The invitation is to “reject humanity as the single universal prescription.”
“People are local and complex beings,” he said, a statement so important he placed it twice on a slide, like an echo. That “allows them to be connected to lands, genealogies, cultures and DNA. These are things that can’t be taken away and ought to be explored in a fuller and richer sense.”
“What are you going to do? What creativity can you muster? What kind of deep reflection can you engage in to allow you to come out of this different?” Butler asked attendees. “It’s not a simple test. It’s an ongoing commitment and invitation to practice this on a regular basis.”
During a question-and-answer session, Butler was asked where human dignity comes from. “I think dignity comes from refusal. I refuse to be treated this way and to interact in a certain way,” Butler said. “It requires you to have a decent relationship with yourself, and I don’t think that’s something we’re taught.”
“At one point, I thought the more I got to know about God, the more I got to know myself,” Butler said. “We arrive at dignity from self-observation.”
After Butler’s talk, Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall, Deputy Executive Director in the PC(USA)’s Interim Unified Agency, said part of his hope for the summit is that through connecting and planning for it, “we do more than just learn” and “just grow greater capacity and competence with AI tools.“ In addition, “we start to step into it far enough that we can cooperate with each other in order to … help shape the future of how humanity interacts with artificial intelligence.”
“That’s my hope and desire, and it sounds like that’s a lot of people’s hopes and desires in these places,” he said. “The energy in that room and the energy in the people coming here to anticipate this is pretty rich and strong. It’s pretty cool to see. …”
Randy Hobson, Manager of Design and Multimedia in the Interim Unified Agency, contributed to this report.
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