Artificial Intelligence
Lincoln treats artificial intelligence as an extension of human intelligence and spirit, not merely something alien to religious and ethical life. His articles explore consciousness, sentience, inspiration, risk, and opportunity in systems from GPT-3 and LincGPT to speculative superintelligence. He treats decentralized governance and scaled compassion as practical tests of ethical partnership with increasingly powerful AI. The topic lists articles relevant to technological theology, church statements, and practical responses to AI as creation in humanity's image and as morally risky power.
This is a list of articles that Lincoln Cannon has written about artificial intelligence. A full archive of all articles that Lincoln has published since 2005 is also available. You may also search for articles and other content that's available on any of Lincoln's websites.
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God, Humanity, and Artificial Intelligence
“Faith, Ethics, and Human Dignity in an Age of Artificial Intelligence” may be, to date, the most important speech from a leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on the topic of artificial intelligence. Elder Gerrit W. Gong, an apostle of the Church, delivered the speech to ... -
God the Cosmic Host, and AI Creation
It’s getting harder to be an atheist. A quarter century ago, it wasn’t so hard. But things have changed – quite dramatically. It’s become increasingly difficult to remain an atheist while coherently aspiring to a thriving future for humanity. Now keep in mind that I’m not talking about atheism toward ... -
Meet LincGPT
Friends, I’m excited to introduce you to LincGPT! This artificial intelligence, built on the OpenAI platform, is designed to engage with you on topics related to technological evolution, postsecular religion, and Mormon Transhumanism. I’ve trained LincGPT on all of my public writings since the year 2000. That includes the following: ... -
The Second War in Heaven
I’m happy to be here with you, at the 2024 Conference of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, in the morning of a day that promises to illuminate our imagination, perhaps even to spark action. Eighteen years ago, fourteen of us began to share words, words powerful enough to change people, words ... -
The Church on Artificial Intelligence
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints published some statements about artificial intelligence (AI). The Church is by far the largest Mormon denomination – and that of which I’m a member. Its statements influence the perspectives and actions of millions of Mormons worldwide. Friends called the Church’s statements to ... -
Can AI Admit the Possibility of Its Inspiration?
If God exists, as I trust for practical and esthetic reasons, God would surely be capable of subtle intervention in our experience. Like engineers could intervene in the algorithms of their software, without the software being capable of monitoring or reacting to the intervention, so God could intervene in our ... -
What Is Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness?
Few use consistent coherent vocabulary to talk about AI. In particular, we tend to be careless or ignorant about important distinctions between intelligence and consciousness, and about the inexhaustibly vast possibility space for kinds and degrees of both. There’s not necessarily one right definition of “intelligence” or “consciousness.” But some ... -
AI Apocalypse
AI is taking over the world, it seems. ChatGPT is doing homework. Midjourney is revolutionizing art. And Copilot is writing code. For those who haven’t been paying attention, it may seem like all of this has come out of nowhere. Suddenly, anyone with an Internet connection can have a conversation ... -
Roko's Basilisk and Technological Theology
Have you heard of Roko’s Basilisk? Gulp. Too late.;) Today, I interviewed an artificial intelligence about Roko’s Basilisk. It seemed appropriate. You probably understand why, if you already know what it is. If you don’t yet know what it is, the artificial intelligence will soon change that. Below is the ... -
Is Google AI Sentient?
Friends have been asking for my opinion on the possibility of sentient AI. And what better time to write about that than early on a morning when I’m literally losing sleep over my thoughts on the question. I happen also to be getting over a bit of a cold, which ... -
I Interviewed GPT-3 About Mormon Transhumanism
If you’re tuned in to news about AI research and machine learning, you’ve surely heard about GPT-3. It’s a natural language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. The model is based on a neural network that optimized for 175 billion parameters. That was much more complex than ... -
The Semi-Orthogonality Hypothesis
In his Orthogonality Thesis, Nick Bostrom proposes that “intelligence and final goals are orthogonal: more or less any level of intelligence could in principle be combined with more or less any final goal.” However, there’s a problem hinted at by the combination of “orthogonality” and “more or less.” Nick acknowledges ...