Live data from Hacker News

Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

pnas.org

51–60 of 83 posts

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#53

In the game Deus Ex (2000) you can find a secret room that contains an artificial intelligence you can talk to. The dialogue tries to make connections between religious deities and artificial intelligences. https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1glq98/deus_ex2000_a... Morpheus: "The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.…

In India ISRO top scienntists go to Tirupathi temple befor Every launch of satellites or Mars or moon probe and seek blessings for success.They use AI algorithms in guiding all such probes.

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#54

"Priming" was the poster child of the replicability crisis, so I'd take it with a grain of salt[0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)

This is one of those "we don't know what we're doing, nor how we could explain it, nor what it means, but it sounds cool" studies. They have no reason to assume the two are in any way related. It's probably another fluke, forgotten in a few weeks time.

I can't read the full text, but the materials has this at the end: "Finally, we examined the impact of God salience on respondents’ propensity to use technologically new and/or innovative products." They find a significant effect ("God salience was associated with greater early adoption attitudes") there, too. Why?

My take is that the effect is the other way around: early adoption attitude explains AI acceptance.

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#56
post #41

I feel like what was once called magic, then became God and now becomes AI. An all-encompassing term for all things inexplicable and complex and a handy backdoor to give up the burden of decision making and critical thinking. I fear it will soon, like God, become an ultimate, unquestionable instance: "Chatgpt tone me so, so it must be true "

That's not really an accurate history of the concept called magic. Magic was very prevalent during the Christian Middle Ages, long after the concept of God. Magic was "removed" from the world by the process of disenchantment (a translation of Entzauberung, literally "de-magicification" in German.)

https://intotheclarities.com/2014/08/23/charles-taylor-on-di...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disenchantment

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#57

Entirely separate from the truth value or consequences of religious belief: I think this paper makes sense. If you think of the God concept as a kind of externalized decision-making system that enables “cognitive work” that is beyond human capabilities - or the perception of human capabilities- then acceptance of AI is a similar phenomenon. On a similar note, I haven’t done the research myself, but I have a solid fee…

"The simplest explanation is usually the best one." - William of Occam (English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, apologist, and Catholic theologian.)

I'm not sure what you mean by invoking this quote. Could you elaborate?

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#58
post #15

What does thinking about god mean? I think he doesn't exist, is that also thinking about god?

"when God is salient" presumably means the participants both believed in God and it played an important/active part in their daily life. > Eight preregistered experiments (n = 2,462) reveal that when God is salient, people are more willing to consider AI-based recommendations than when God is not salient

No, it means that these subjects took the survey with the instruction to think or write about God, the Quran, or some other related thing.

It's not about their beliefs, it's about the instruction.

Re: Thinking about God increases acceptance of AI in decision-making

#59
post #9
post #3

Looks like the article is behind a paywall, so I only read the abstract, but it looks that there is a significant flaw in this study. There are really many really various religions out there, and the results _might_ depend heavily on the choice of religion. As a thought experiment, consider a fictional example religion where A.I. is treated as a god, compared to the religions of the Dune universe (where A.I. is a tab…

I also only read the abstract. The argument seems to be: Belief in God implies a belief in the fallibility of humans, which leads to a reduced reliance on humans and therefore increased willingness to accept AI recommendations. Most of the logic in that argument checks out. I just don't understand the last step in the logic. How do decreased reliance on humans lead to increased willingness to accept AI? I'm a religio…

> I'm a religious person myself, and my argument would be to not trust AI all that much. It is a creation by fallible human beings trained on fallible human data.

Good point. How is A.I. different (in this respect, and possibly in some other ones, too) from a really huge, partially pseudo-random spreadsheet?

We need to remember, though, that we live in a relatively small bubble where A.I. is perceived as (more or less) what it is. For a layman, both an A.I. and a huge spreadsheet may be similarly beyond comprehension.

I will always remember talking to a very nice old lady (it could have been about 25 years ago), who told me that computers can read people's minds. She saw someone type a few characters on a computer and suddenly a whole page appeared. Since she had a mental model of a typewriter (which has no memory), the logical conclusion of text appearing without a person physically typing it was that the machine read his mind. In fact, that made perfect sense!

We often have no idea how weird (from our POV) the people's mental models of computers are.

Post reply on HN