When and Where
Wednesday, April 8, 2026
Speakers
Suzanne van Geuns (University of Wisconsin)
John Modern (Franklin and Marshall College)
Sarah Sharma (University of Toronto)
Anna Su (University of Toronto)
Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed (University of Toronto)
Description
The Seeking Alignment panel brings together scholars working in the study of religion, computer science, media theory, and law to consider how the religious pasts of AI shape the foretelling of its future. From “spiritual bliss attractors” to worries about a “god-like” AI, the genesis and consequences of AI—how its history is told and its future is prophesied—are steeped in religious imaginaries that require scholarly analysis. In the mid-twentieth-century, cybernetic and neural network theories grew out of spiritual convictions about relations among humans, animals, and machines “of loving grace.” Today, some people worry that AI may come to have an omnipotent “galaxy brain,” while others want to make sure that AI is infused with a specifically Christian God, as in tech billionaires who seek to “align” AI tools to hasten the "second coming of Christ."
The panel will focus on the concept of “alignment,” or efforts to align Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with human values, as well as “misalignment,” when AGI and human values diverge. The panelists will ask what we can learn about AGI by considering a longer history of “religious” practices that train, prompt, or discipline human beings to live and think in alignment with higher powers and potent systems. What can past visions of religious alignment tell us about our visions for living in an AI future? And what might we learn from the people discarded and “corrected” in the pursuit of such success?
Panelists
Professor Suzanne van Geuns, University of Wisconsin Madison, author of Seductive Methods: Sexual Success in the Computational Imagination, U Chicago Press (under contract).
Professor John Modern, Franklin and Marshall College, author of Neuromatic, or; A Particular History of Religion and the Brain, U Chicago Press.
Professor Sarah Sharma, University of Toronto, author of Insufferable Tools: Feminism against Big Tech, Duke UP (forthcoming).
Professor Anna Su, University of Toronto, author of “A Right to Reality: Human Dignity and Generative AI”, Nordic Journal of Human Rights (forthcoming).
Professor Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, University of Toronto, co-author of "Data, Annotation, and Meaning-Making: The Politics of Categorization in Annotating a Dataset of Faith-based Communal Violence", Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (2024).
Moderator
Professor Pamela Klassen, Chair & Graduate Chair, Department fot the Study of Religion, University of Toronto.Cross-appointed to Anthropology, Klassen teaches graduate and undergraduate students in the anthropology and history of Christianity and colonialism in North America and Turtle Island, religion and public memory, and religion, law, media, and gender.
Sponsors
- Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society
- Department for the Study of Religion
- Data Sciences Institute
