Seeking Alignment: Religious Imaginaries in the Past and Future of AI – Apr. 8, 2026

Session Description

As part of the 2025–2026 50th anniversary program of the Department for the Study of Religion, the Department, together with the Schwartz‑Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and the Data Sciences Institute, is pleased to present: Seeking Alignment: Religious Imaginaries in the Past and Future of AI.

The Seeking Alignment panel brings together scholars working in the study of religion, history of science, media theory, and computer science 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.”