The CPX team freaks out about AI, explores stories of “efficiency” run amok, and probes our tech utopias.
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The apocalypse will be ... boring.
Or so says Charlie Warzel, tech journalist for The Atlantic. He means that AI won’t put you out of a job or take over the world, so much as overstuff your inbox and give you more mind-numbing tasks to complete.
Other people in the know about AI are less optimistic. Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather” of AI who resigned from Google in May, Sam Altman, the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT, and others have sounded the alarm: AI is progressing too quickly, no one knows exactly how it works, and without careful regulation it will upend life as we know it.
There are a lot of unknowns where technology is concerned. One thing we do know, though, is it makes for great TV, and stories and books.
In this edition of Seen & Heard, the CPX team debriefs on what they’ve been watching and reading.
Natasha takes us through the twists and turns of Amazon Prime’s Mrs Davis, a “bonkers” show about a nun facing off against Mrs Davis, the all-knowing algorithm against whom she has a grudge.
Simon looks at the way George Saunders’ short story “Escape from Spiderhead” (and the Spiderhead film based on it) explores how “the greater good” is used to justify all kinds of evils.
Justine looks closer at the digital utopia on offer in Grace Chan’s speculative novel Every Version of You, and finds that its promise of agelessness, no death, no suffering, and no body is basically heaven without God.
Explore:
ABC article on Replika
Every Version of You by Grace Chan
Escape From Spiderhead by George Saunders (via The New Yorker)
Mrs Davis trailer
Her and a Disembodied Future by Mark Stephens
Andy Crouch’s Richard Johnson Lecture on why technology keeps disappointing us and Q&A
Charlie Warzel: Here’s how AI will come for your job
Life and Faith: Pete Schaffler
Life and Faith: Armageddon
Can we trust the Bible?
Women in the World of the Earliest Christians
Professor Iain Provan
Mad Bastards: Brendan Fletcher
Religion and politics: the search for balance
Dr Scott Rae: medical and business ethics
Professor Richard Swinburne
Professor Stanley Hauerwas
Professor John Gascoigne: Christianity, science and the Enlightenment
What does Easter mean to you?
Melinda Tankard Reist: the sexualisation of girls
Revolutionary Christianity and its alternatives - David Bentley Hart Interview
Why The Road matters
Professor Harold Koenig: Spirituality and Health
David Marr - Religious Belief in Australia
A Hard Cell - Science and Theology with Dr Graeme Finlay
Worlds Apart? Report from the Parliament of World Religions
Alvin Plantinga: God, Richard Dawkins and Personal Faith
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