Algorethics: On the Relationship Among Artificial Intelligence, Law and Religion

With the development of the digital age, artificial intelligence is increas- ingly present and pervasive in every aspect of daily life, both personal and social, affecting decision-making processes and stressing the already complicated relation- ship between science, law and religion. Hence the need to build an “algoretic,” understood as ethical reflection about the use of algorithms, in order to avoid their indiscriminate and potentially discriminatory use perhaps to the detriment of the frail and marginalized. Artificial intelligence can, in fact, be distorted through specific commercial and political interests with the risk of focusing algorithms on utility and profit through selection bias or distortion/corruption in data collection and coding prejudices. The analysis of the ethical and moral implications of artificial intelligence is also a challenge and an opportunity for religions, as evidenced by the recent signing (January 2023) of the “Rome Call for AI Ethics” at the Vatican by representatives of the three Abrahamic religions. In this field, religions have the opportunity and obli- gation to engage their teaching, voice and authority regarding the philosophical and anthropological challenges related to artificial intelligence that loom large in their impact on present rights and future opportunities. Indeed, the confrontation with a form of intelligence that is not human, or even biological, raises essential questions for metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political theory. The experience and expertise of religions in all these fields constitute invaluable assets to be used to assist society in adapting artificial intelligence or adapting to it. Religions are, therefore, called upon to listen, reflect and engage by proposing an ethical and spiritual framework within which to metabolize the enormous social impact that algorithm-based technological evolution will have on the universal community in the coming decades. By reasoning on these issues, one hopes to avert the risk of a role reversal typical of the Hegelian dialectic, that is, a subversion of servant-master (in our case algorithm-man) roles based on the servant’s acquired self-awareness (perhaps through the mechanism of machine learning), with an existential-type reversal, by virtue of which the servant, through acquired self-awareness, becomes free and the master becomes a servant.