“Virtuous AI?: Cultural Evolution, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtue”

Virtuous AI?: Cultural Evolution, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtue hosted by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) and funded by the Templeton Foundation will be held in webinar format:

Each conference will be entirely remote, thus maximizing the number of outstanding participants without requiring them to travel to an event site. Participants will reside within three time zones of the event site in either direction.

Our approach is new in three crucial ways: 

1. The conferences will be interdisciplinary. Our goal is to place scientists who will present the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence into dialogue from the scientfic perspectives and their interaction with humanities scholars who specialize in the study of culture, philosophy, theology, and virtue theory, thus making the outcomes distinctly interdisciplinary.

2. These conferences will be located in three different regions of the world to ensure they will represent cross-cultural and inter-religious perspectives. We will select scientists and humanities scholars who represent Eastern and/or Western cultures, philosophies, and religions. We expect these scholars to present from their own personal traditions and the cultures where they live and work.

3. We encouraged submissions from people from underrepresented perspectives, particularly scholars for whom AI and its implications are not their past specialization, and scholars from underrepresented regions and other world religions such as Islam, Confucianism, and Buddhism. We feel strongly that these three features of our approach will ensure the success of our project: bringing together the latest AI research and situating it in a wide interdisciplinary and intercultural environment so that its striking implications for cultural evolution and virtue will be explored through a diversity of perspectives.

Times and events are preliminary and subject to change.