Robotic Religion

I attended the discussion about robotic religion last week, and was intrigued by some of the topics that were discussed. First off, I liked the format in which the lecture was presented and how it was free flowing and very open to discussion in fact it was mainly a discussion. I have never really though about robots and religion merging together they just seem like opposite sides of the spectrum to me. On the other hand, it is 2019 (almost 2020) and this type of technology is becoming more accessible and accepted in society. Coming into the lecture I was a little skeptic of the whole thing, but after leaving I was convinced that it was possible. The issue for me was that robots don’t have free will and are programmed to have responses to things, which would make it hard for a robot to be a priest for example because the priest wouldn’t be giving genuine responses. I was thinking about this further when I remembered an article that I read in the past that talked about the evolution of ai and how far it has come. The article discussed that ai now is not programed to have exact responses, but has the ability to analyze situations and come up with a response on their own. This technology I think would be useful to a church or any other religious domination in order to perform ritualistic tasks. Though this technology is kind of scary in general for me for a robot to be free thinking, also kind of cool. Overall, I enjoyed this lecture and it made me think about new ideas .