Boletin Walintonia

Feature article published by Cristian Rodriguez et.al. in Technology, Mind, and Behavior

Editor: Richard Landers

Recent study published by

https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2027-45988-003.html

Abstract

Public attitudes toward artificial intelligence (AI) are beginning to take shape as these technologies become more common. We explored whether and how attitudes toward AI might be associated with religiosity, as well as potential psychological mechanisms underlying this association. Two survey studies explored this relationship. In Study 1, we examined the association between religiosity and AI-related anxiety in a nationally representative Chilean sample (N = 1,021). Study 2 focused on a sample of U.S. religious respondents (N = 411), investigating perceptions of AI as a threat while incorporating refined measures of religiosity and three potential mediators: moral progressivism, belief in creation in the image of God, and aversion to playing God. Through both studies, we found evidence linking higher religiosity to negative attitudes toward AI. These findings suggest that this relationship may be shaped by psychological factors such as social identity and moral attitudes toward interfering with nature.

KEYWORDS:

attitudes toward artificial intelligence, religiosity, acceptance of artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence anxiety, aversion to playing God

In summary, the emerging literature on the relationship between religiosity and attitudes toward AI suggests a tendency for negative responses to AI in religious people. However, the findings do not bolster straightforwardly the secularization theory-based hypotheses; rather, it reveals that the predominantly negative responses are characterized by multiple nuances and domain-specific considerations.

Comment by Quintin Gumucio:
The authors conclude that the perceived negative responses to Intelligent Algorithms defy a simple approach & are rather nuanced. This they have shown convincingly & it is is not my intention to review their arguments, for which I am not qualified, but rather to propose another possible contextualisation from an anthropological perspective.

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By persons who follow a religious perspective I take to signify those who refer the fundamental logical basis of the lived experience to a supernatural & comprehensive agency, and then how this approach inflkuences the response towards Emerging Intelligent Algorithms (EIA)

Is the sudden presence of EIAs maybe something of unknown and even subversive ?

is it perceived as a menace to the Augustinian dispensation according to which men lived before the Savour Chrust in sin and now in hope of redemption until Kingdom comes (Sahlins 1996, p.401)

Where self-interest is the nature of the individual, power is the essence of the social (Sahlins, 1996, p. 405)

somatic and linguistic dispositions as achieved by symbolic means (Sahlins 1996, p. 403)

So another way of interacting with EIAs is through language, inspired from a religious perspective by what is expressed in the chants of Ayvu Rapyta / Origin of Human Speech among the Guarani people in South America.
Having stood, having his engendering knowledge ,
he himself conceived the origin of future speech
from the knowledge in his spirit
and having fostered a minimum of love
he fostered the origin of a minimal chant

Sahlins, Marshall 1996. The Sadness of Sweetness. The Native Anyhrtopology of Western Cosmology. Current Anthropology. Vol. 17, nr.3.