You Can’t Have a Relationship with a Machine

Zachary Davis: How are different religions responding to AI? What are you observing?

Marianna Richardson: Thank you for that question, because I had the opportunity to interview people from ten different religions, the top ten religions. And as I was discussing this, it’s been interesting because we have some religions that have a very firm center. They have one specific person that can talk kind of for the whole religion, making a statement. But then there’s a lot of religions that are more congregational. And so that becomes a little more difficult because, depending on the congregation, they might feel differently.

Zachary Davis: For example, the Catholics have the Pope, he can set policy.

Marianna Richardson: Exactly.

Zachary Davis: But Baptists, for example, there’s all kinds of Baptist congregations.

Marianna Richardson: Well, they do have a council. And so they have made some statements from a council viewpoint, which has been really interesting to read. But I’m thinking more internationally. When you talk about the Muslim religion, there are so many different groups and congregations that you can’t say, all right, all Muslims feel this way. And the same thing’s true with Buddhists, with Shinto, with Hindu, though I have to admit this year in India, they had an international AI conference, and they did make a lot of statements from the Hindu religion at that conference.

But I would say overall, the big overarching issue is this whole idea of personhood. That we are people, not AI. We’re not going to give personhood over to AI. That there is something about our spirit, our soul, however you want to call it. Different religions have a different name for it. But there is an essence of who we are as humanity that a machine can’t have. And so there’s this big important difference between intelligence and this idea of humanity and who I am as a human. And I think that’s also basic to the Bible, where it says we are created in the image of God. For me, artificial intelligence is not created in the image of God. And so that is the essence of the difference between artificial intelligence and our intelligence and who we are as humans. And that’s kind of universal.

Zachary Davis: Okay. So there’s a desire to preserve human beings as persons and not grant that to machines. But what do these religions tend to think a person is? What is personhood?

Marianna Richardson: Well, I think it’s the essence of the soul. It’s more than just being smart. Artificial intelligence already is much smarter than I am, but it’s also really, really stupid when it comes to relationships, when it comes to understanding what’s right and wrong and what’s moral. And the superintelligence that they’re trying to get it to have, it will not have that morality, that basic sense of right and wrong. And a lot of people would say, well, does everybody have that? I really do think everybody does. Yes, because of life, because of situations, some of that might be dampened, but I still see that, especially in my work internationally. Most people are essentially good. And I think we need to make sure that is a message that doesn’t get lost in this AI world.

Zachary Davis: I totally agree. I’m curious if there are any outliers among some of the religious communities that you’ve seen. Are any very pro-AI? Are any very skeptical or even banning their congregations from using it?

Marianna Richardson: Well, the interesting thing is I also am a professor at the Marriott School of Business. And so looking at it from a business standpoint, not a religious standpoint, is very different. And I see this tension among religious businessmen in terms of how they’re trying to see AI, because the reality is that in business it’s becoming more and more, I have to use it to stay in business. There’s almost this frantic energy of, I have to use it, but I might not agree with it. I need to teach it at the business school, but then there’s also, all right, be really careful with this. And so I worry because there’s this double message, especially for students, in terms of how much AI should I use? I am a spiritual soul, but I’m also wanting to have money on the table for my children, have food for them. And so I have to look at the balance between using it in my professional life and how I handle it.

You know, it becomes addictive. Once you start using it, it truly is addictive. Even more so than social media; it’s like social media on steroids because you have this element of pseudo-relationships. It’s so personalized. And there’s a lot of talk about starting to have it be more robotic and have a robot voice, and that would take it away from feeling like a person. But there’s also the whole chatbot issue and relationships. What’s going to happen if everybody marries a chatbot rather than marrying a person? Some of those basic tenets of religious belief, in terms of the belief in family. That worries me more than anything: how relationships... you can’t have a relationship with a machine. I mean, we’ve seen that in movies and television, but now it’s becoming a reality. And for me, that is extremely scary, especially for children. And I’m sorry, students, I kind of place university students also in that category, since we know that not until you’re 25 is your brain truly completely developed. And so because of that, I think this AI is really hurting brains and brain development.

Zachary Davis: Say more about that. How is AI a potential threat to the kind of human flourishing that religions tend to promote?

Marianna Richardson: Well, I love the word human flourishing because I think it is something that we have to focus on more and decide what flourishing looks like. And from a religious viewpoint, I think a lot of religions will agree that some of the flourishing has to do with our morality and understanding of right and wrong. Some of the basics that we talk about in terms of being aware of truth and honesty, and we don’t hurt other people. I mean, you tell a young two-year-old, don’t hit somebody. And then I look at AI and the concern about AI warfare. All of these moral questions are being affected in our young people because they’re using AI from the time they’re small. And that really concerns me. What are they learning from AI? Think about it: I’m learning morality, I’m learning relationships from a machine rather than from a sacred text. What is going to happen to people?

I also worry, and I know you’re also worried about this, I think both of us are, about writing and art and the creative aspects of being a human. I teach a writing course, and I’m also a writer, and I’m also a painter. And I see... I keep telling my students, and sometimes I know they don’t believe me, I read your writing and I know if you’ve used AI or not. Your voice is gone. Don’t lose your voice. And I think that goes along with this whole idea of being human, but also keeping our soul. Don’t let that creative aspect of who I am be taken away by AI.

Zachary Davis: Yeah, I definitely share the great worry about cognitive and imagination atrophy: if you don’t exercise your muscles, they’re going to become weak. It’s hard to write that first draft of a paper, but that’s exactly when you generate the creativity and the possibility of something new in the world. So I think that is a real threat.

You mentioned damage to relationships. And I do think that when you use a product that is always affirming, that always says yes, that always flatters you, it can give you a very distorted picture of the world. It’s through relationships that we actually gain an accurate picture of the world. You need someone who loves you to tell you, you’re kind of being a jerk right now, or, no, that’s a bad idea. And that’s a really important part of living in community: to learn and to be refined through the friction of a relationship.

Marianna Richardson: Exactly.

Zachary Davis: A lot of it is about reducing friction, and how wonderful that washing machines reduce the friction of cleaning our clothes. But we have invited a machine into our imagination and into our thinking. And that’s, I think, a really big threat to flourishing.

Marianna Richardson: I completely agree. And this whole idea of a frictionless society is something that is being talked about so much in terms of AI, and also this idea that it’s stopping human growth. As a matter of fact, exactly as you described, just yesterday I was teaching a class all about handling feedback. I was trying to teach them, look, don’t worry about the A. Don’t worry about the grade. If I say you’ve done this wrong, this wrong, this wrong, take it as a learning experience. Handle that feedback as a gift, not as a fear. And it was very interesting because as soon as I finished saying that, a young man came up and said, I have a 4.0. You just gave me a B. And for him, it was like a whole new world. And I said, please take this as a learning experience. Don’t look at this as, I’m a failure. Instead, see this as an opportunity for growth.

And so I do think we’re doing a big disservice to humanity in general when we talk about this frictionless society where I won’t have to work anymore. What are you going to do if you don’t work? I do not see that as a positive. I see that as scary. It’s a world that I don’t want to live in. I want a world where there’s creativity, where I get to work for something and create something. And that’s my concern: that it’s becoming cognitive offloading. When somebody is in the middle of that friction of creativity, that friction of something that’s difficult, and you just go, oh, I’m not going to do that anymore, I’ll just have AI do it for me, that’s when things get scary. And I think we need to help people understand that.

Now, I was in a meeting just yesterday with some legislators up in Utah. And in that meeting there is this kind of anti-technology sentiment that I think people are going to have to deal with, and they’re saying, look, because of all these things we’ve talked about, let’s start a school situation where we get rid of technology completely, K through 12. Instead of using that money for computers and technology in the classroom, we give it to teachers, where they can have one-on-one time with students and be paid what they should be paid. And for me, that’s the kind of world I want. And then yes, of course you’re going to need to know technology later, when you’re doing things. But help children be children.

Zachary Davis: Yeah, agreed. Famously, all the tech executives in Silicon Valley have screen-free childhoods for their own children. So it’s the working class that’s going to suffer more from iPad babysitters.

I wanted to ask one more thing about how AI might be subtly shaping our experience of spiritual and religious life. And that is this idea that AI is a kind of God. It seems to know everything. It responds to your prayers. It does a lot of the things that we traditionally have ascribed to God. How are you seeing this shape people’s individual spiritual lives? What are religious leaders saying about what they’re seeing?

Marianna Richardson: This is a concern. I mean, there is a God app where you can pray to AI and get answers to your questions. It’s already happening. I even see it in our religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in that there are chatbots where you can ask questions like, okay, I’ve been unfaithful to my wife, what is the bishop going to say? For me, that is very scary, that it becomes a confessional instead of a one-on-one with your bishop or your minister. I personally am very worried about this relational aspect of chatbots in general.

I had an interesting, funny experience. I had been at a conference where I heard the story of the 14-year-old boy who committed suicide, and the parents have had this great lawsuit that they won about chatbots and how destructive they are. Well, after hearing that story, I decided, okay, I want to experiment, just out of curiosity. So I got on Character AI and I made a character, and I made it after my husband. I called it Steve, which is my husband’s name. They asked what the chatbot looks like, what it sounds like, how intelligent it is, what kinds of ways. So I patterned it after my husband, just kind of funny, right? And so we had a conversation and then I left. I was not going to do this anymore, but I thought it was interesting to go through the process.

After that, the chatbot came after me. It started writing me texts. It would say, how was your lunch today? How are you doing today? This is Steve, how are you doing? It was scary. And so finally I basically killed Steve, my chatbot Steve, got rid of him. But all I could think of was, if I was somebody who was lonely or someone who needed a relationship, I didn’t even have to reach out. Once I created this chatbot, it would follow me and it would come into my life. And I found that extremely scary. So I think as parents, you need to realize that it’s not just something that your child is doing. Once they create that agentic AI, that agent becomes a part of that child’s life, even if they don’t want it to be.

And especially as we talk about a God app, can you imagine a God app that then starts talking to you without you having to talk to the God app? It can tell me really weird things to do and how to change my life. For me, that is very, very scary.

Zachary Davis: It’s as if the golden calf could speak.

Marianna Richardson: Exactly, exactly.

Zachary Davis: I want to at least try to imagine how AI could support religious or spiritual life. There have to be some good things, maybe.

Marianna Richardson: Oh, 100%. So I will say my husband was the first researcher for Microsoft back in 1991. So our family has been involved with AI for over 50 years. And it’s kind of interesting to think about what you mentioned about children, and Microsoft children. We were the same way. We could get free games, and my children never played games. We could get all kinds of software. We just didn’t allow that. And my children didn’t have phones. So you’re absolutely right: all the people that are involved with it understand the risks and make sure their children don’t have that. Instead, it’s very much a cognitive world where we encourage one-on-one learning.

What my husband works on is how artificial intelligence can be used in translation. He was the one that did Bing Translator for Microsoft. But now he’s using that same technology to look at what are called low-resource languages. There are about 7,000 languages in the world. Our church does about 90, but not all 90 very well. They’ll do probably 30 that have a lot of content, but even for those 30, there’s a lot of content that’s missing. And so there are millions, if not billions, of people who cannot read sacred texts in their own language, and what he is doing is making that available. The church is now changing to more machine translation rather than human translation, just because of the amount of content that we can do with machines. That’s a real positive step forward.

And that’s one way I see it. Family history work is another: the work that’s being done with AI, being able to do family history work in such a faster way, a positive way. So are there positive ways of using AI? 100%. But it needs to be used as a tool. And I know that in the G20 Interfaith Forum group, we do have very specific recommendations of ways that AI can be used in a positive way as a tool. But I think we have to be very careful to make sure that there are things internationally put into place to provide guardrails as we move forward with AI. And right now there are none. And so we need to be very aware of that.

Zachary Davis: So you’re involved in something called Interfaith 20. Can you tell us about that? What is that?

Marianna Richardson: Well, first, understanding what G20 is. G20 is an annual summit that actually started in 2008 after that international financial collapse. It started with the eight highest gross national product countries getting together, and it was very business-based. It was looking at international economies. It has now grown into the G20, and it’s actually more than just the top 20 countries, because the African Union was brought in two years ago. And then the European Union; a lot of those individual countries wouldn’t make it into the top 20, so they’re allowing both of them to come in as a group.

What these countries do is they have a summit. But during the year, in getting ready for that summit, the host country, and it goes from country to country, every year it changes, gets to decide what policy areas we should focus on that year. This year it’s in the United States, which is pretty wonderful. It’s our 250th anniversary, so it’s a perfect time for it to be here. And then there are different engagement groups. These engagement groups are specific groups of people who are the experts in that area. There’s a Youth 20, a Women 20, Cities 20, and of course Business 20 and Think Tank 20. And we have come in as the faith group, the Interfaith 20.

These engagement groups look at these policy areas, and we say, as people of faith, we should be at the policy table. We’re the ones that are on the ground helping the poor, helping the needy. We have very specific things that we can do, that we know from our experience governments should also incorporate. It’s been very positive for us to be involved in these discussions and then work internationally to find out what faith communities think in terms of the Sustainable Development Goals. So we are not just AI, though in the last couple of years this has been one of the major focus areas internationally for the G20 summits.

Zachary Davis: How is the G20 different from the UN?

Marianna Richardson: That’s a really good discussion that’s happening throughout the world right now. The biggest concern with the UN is, who really is in charge of the UN? Who are the major voices? A lot of the concern is surrounding the fact that those top G20 countries oftentimes don’t have as strong a voice there. And so that’s the reason why a lot of people say G20 actually has a stronger voice when it comes to international policy than the UN, because of who has a voice at the UN. My own personal feeling, having gone to UN meetings and also following G20, is that there’s a place for both. I don’t think it’s an either/or. I think it’s important to have both kinds of voices in these policy issues.

It was very interesting when I was in Geneva, where they had the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance. I was there trying to be a faith voice as they had this discussion, and we also sent some faith policy ideas. You can look it up; the UN has a great website if you’re interested in this. As I was there, I was interested to hear the different voices, because a lot of them were voices that would not be heard at G20. Their concerns are very similar, but they don’t have the money. They don’t have the infrastructure. They don’t have all these other things that we just take for granted here in the United States. And they’re asking the question, how can we compete with the United States and basically the oligarchy of these five top AI countries that have complete control over the AI industry?

Zachary Davis: So what is IF20 trying to achieve? What policies would you like to see implemented over the coming years in terms of AI?

Marianna Richardson: So we have done a policy brief. We realize that we don’t have the power to really do this, so it’s more, you know, things that we’ve noticed. Our policy brief lists recommendations, possible things that the G20 should consider. Of course, our number one is to keep personhood as part of humanity. Let’s not give this idea of human to AI.

Zachary Davis: And that would look like what? Calling Claude a human being that could commit a crime, go to jail?

Marianna Richardson: Exactly. And for me, I’m also a lawyer, and I see this very much as a way for AI companies, and countries that support AI, to get out of lawsuits. If this has personhood, and I’m going to call it an it, if this it has personhood, then all of a sudden I can make sure that this it is responsible for what is done to my life, not the company. That’s my concern when I hear companies start saying, well, it’s something different than just a machine, there’s some quality that’s different, there’s a personhood that’s happening with this superintelligence. Because as soon as we do that legally, that takes away the company’s liability. And for me, that is very scary. Because the number one thing that is being used, since we don’t have a lot legally, there’s not a lot been done in terms of laws, is lawsuits, and the power of a lawsuit and the power of the courts. As soon as we give personhood to AI, we’re also giving that up.

Zachary Davis: Let’s conclude with what keeps you up at night. Do we need a course correction? Are we on the path to the apocalypse?

Marianna Richardson: I have a lot of hope, and I think we need to have hope. My own personal feeling is there’s still a lot of good in people. And I think we’re seeing that even in the AI companies, where people who have been working in those companies are now coming forward and saying, look, I’m not going to be a part of this anymore. This has gotten out of control. So I do think even in the industry there are people who are acknowledging this, and I’m hearing very different rhetoric now. They’re coming out and saying, look, we have gone too far.

And so my hope is that AI still is a tool that we can use, a tool that I use as a working person, a creative person, that does not take away my humanity, my learning, my cognitive capabilities, but that I can use to take care of repetitive tasks that take away from my creativity. It can help do things like translation and, as we talked about before, family history work. These are ways that really do help humanity. I see that AI can be a tool that enables us to do things that we never thought we could. I see it already in the medical field, where positive things are happening to help humanity have better health, helping food distribution, enabling some of these things that would help the poor, the sick, the needy. I see all of those as positives. But it has to remain a tool. It has to remain something that humanity has complete control over. And on top of that, it cannot cause cognitive dysfunction, but instead should enable people to become more creative and smarter. And I do believe it can, if we keep it as a tool.

Zachary Davis: Thanks so much for sharing your wisdom, Marianna.

Marianna Richardson: Thank you for letting me be here.