Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Contributions from the Science and Religion Forum

THE ARTIFICIALIZATION OF MIND AND WORLD

with Gillian K. Straine, “Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Contributions from the Science and Religion Forum”; Michael S. Burdett, “Personhood and Creation in an Age of Robots and AI: Can We Say “You” to Artifacts?”; Mohammad Yaqub Chaudhary, “The Artificialization of Mind and World”; and David Hipple, “Encounters with Emergent Deities: Artificial Intelligence in Science Fiction Narrative.”

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to renewed ambitions of developing artificial general intelligence. Alongside this has been a resurgence in the development of virtual and augmented reality (V/AR) technologies, which are viewed as “disruptive” technologies and the computing platforms of the future. V/AR effectively bring the digital world of machines, robots, and artificial agents to our senses while entailing the transposition of human activity and presence into the digital world of artificial agents and machine forms of intelligence. The intersection of humans and machines in this shared space brings humans and machines into ontological continuity as informational entities in a totalizing informational environment, which subsumes both cyber and physical space in an artificially constructed virtual world. The reconstruction of mind (through AI) and world (through V/AR) thus has significant epistemological, ontological, and anthropological implications, which constitute the underlying features in the artificialization of mind and world.