10 August 2023 A Candle in the Window Peter Millar
Words to encourage us in these times.
This is a prayer recently sent to me by my friend Mary Duncanson. It is found in the `Carmena Gadelica' a book of Celtic prayers collected by the well-known folklorist Alexander Carmichael (1832-1912). It was the tradition when anyone was going on a journey that all the family members met together and walked the first steps along the way, reciting this prayer. This tradition was last witnessed in Strathspey, Inverness-shire in the early 20th century.
The Journey Prayer
May God be with you through the passes.
May Christ be with you through the corries.
The Spirit with you through river and rapid,
By hill, by headland and hollow,
By sea, by land,
By moorland and meadow,
When you lie down at night,
When you rise in the morrow.
In the trough of the wave,
On the crest of a billow,
Each step of the journey you follow.
The Pilot Psalm:
The Lord is my Pilot; I shall not drift.
He lighteth me across the dark waters.
He steereth me in deep channels.
He keepeth my log:
He guideth me by the Star of Holiness
For His name’s sake.
Yea, though I sail mid the thunders and the tempest of life,
I will dread no danger, for Thou art with me;
Thy love and Thy care they shelter me.
Thou preparest a harbour before me in the homeland of eternity;
Thou anointest the waves with oil; my ship rideth calmly.
Surely sunlight and starlight shall favour me on the voyage I take;
And I will rest in the port of my Lord for ever.
This is a version of Psalm 23, known as the Pilot Psalm, by Captain John Roberts, 1874.
Thou shalt not replace clergy with chatbots!!
“Mindar” the robo-Buddhist can absorb and retain the entire knowledge of its religion. The robot installed three years ago as a priest in the Kodai-ji temple in Kyoto, Japan, can live – as Buddha wanted – without desire of earthly ambition. It can do so while preaching tirelessly and unendingly.
What Mindar can’t do, though, is convince its flock to fill the offertory bowl – at least, not as well as a human.
This is why, of all the jobs that can be automated, a study has claimed AI will not be the clergy. The problem, researchers found, is that no matter how impressive a robot’s programming, if you’re going to preach about the eternal and effable soul it really helps to have one.
The study looked at the response of congregants from different religions when they were served – or thought they were – by robot priests, compared with the flesh-and-blood kind.
In Kodai-ji, the scientist compared the offertory collections when 400 people heard Mindar or a person preach. They were almost 50 per cent more likely to give nothing if they had listened to Mindar.
In a Taoist temple, the researchers performed a similar experiment. This time, the sermon was identical – only the mode of delivery changed. Again, those preached to by the robot felt less inclined to part with cash: the physical experience may have been the same, but the metaphysical was different. For a third experiment, more than 250 people read a Christian sermon that some were told was written by a robot and some a human, and were then asked questions designed to assess their opinion. The robot was seen as less credible, less religious and less likeable.
The findings are not only relevant to religion. The authors, from North-Western University in Illinois, carried out the experiment in an attempt to understand the limits of automation. “Is there anything that robots cannot do?” they asked. There is indeed, they argued: be a human. “We propose that answering this question requires putting aside domains of capability – where robots are continually improving – and instead focusing on domains of special credibility. They wrote in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, “no-where is this more pronounced than within the domain of religion. For thousands of years, religions have elevated people to positions of moral and epistemic leadership...who do not merely recite and transmit the tenets of their faiths but embody and legitimised them.”
In this sense, a robot preacher is meaningless – a false prophet powered not by demons but by ChatGPT.
There is comfort in this, for religions and for humans. The robot apocalypse may yet come, but at least its millenarian preachers will still be humans. Because, however plausible the sermons they give, when it comes to robot priests the dues has exited the machine. Tom Whipple, Science Editor at The Times UK
“Today it is the duty of every thinking being to live, and to serve not only his own day and generation, but also generations unborn by helping to restore and maintain the green glory of the forest of the earth”. Richard Baker, Biologist and botanist (1889- 1982), words kindly sent to me by a friend Don Stubbings.