Earlier this year, hundreds of chief executives and civil society leaders joined over 60 heads of state who gathered in the Swiss enclave of Davos for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting. This year the theme was “Collaboration for the Intelligent Age,” and while the speeches of anti-globalist figures like Argentinian President Javier Milei and President Donald Trump might have been the most watched aspects of the meeting, there was something far more unexpected that took place. The Davos leadership convened an unusual group for the first time. They invited a handful of global religious leaders as full participants in the annual meeting, and among the three urgent issues they were asked to focus on was rebuilding trust in the age of artificial intelligence.
This is because the age of artificial intelligence is emerging at a moment when religion itself is on the ascendancy on multiple fronts throughout the entire world. According to Pew Research, by 2050 only 13 percent of the world will be religiously unaffiliated. This is happening at a time in which religious affiliation is growing the most in countries where the population is increasing, amid a prevailing global trend of declining fertility rates.
Everywhere one looks, even in the United States, religious forces are rising. Take the decades-long trend of America’s young people identifying as “none” when asked about their religious affiliation. This was a trend so solidly entrenched by demographers that it was taken for granted, but in recent surveys we’ve seen a stabilization of the trend and then a decline in the so-called “none” affiliation. Another survey recently found that young men are now more religious than young women and Bible sales rose by 22 percent in a single year, according to The Wall Street Journal. Religiously charged political debates are transforming the European continent, religiously inflamed wars ravage the Middle East, and religiously infused politics animates India and Africa. Religious persecution continues to be at its highest in the world’s most authoritarian regimes, from North Korea to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Religion is on the rise amid the emergence of artificial intelligence, a phenomenon that some are calling the single most significant technological innovation since the printing press, but certainly since the industrial revolution — both of which were followed by terrible periods of conflict.
The age of artificial intelligence is causing a kind of convergence of religion and science that was once inconceivable. One might even say a “peace treaty between religion and science” is emerging. The peace between the two old nemeses has emerged because scientific advance has brought us to the place where questions once reserved for theologians and philosophers are now factors in equations that absolutely must be solved: What is intelligence? What is agency? What can be done versus what should be done? What is a human? Do the ends justify the means or should the greater good always prevail? What is appropriate for all humans versus some?
This moment has brought to the fore a simple fact, and an inconvenient one for many universities and tech entrepreneurs: One doesn’t have to be religious to acknowledge religion’s values. In fact, a totally secular person can appreciate that religious ideas are a type of compounding wisdom over the centuries.
We have rarely needed wisdom more than we will need it now.
A religious zeal
It isn’t that some of our scientists, and the universities and companies they lead, aren’t religious. In fact, you might argue that while not being institutionally religious, they are profoundly religious when it comes to their commitment to ideologies that guide how they engage in this age of intelligence.
In “The Digitalist Papers” published by Stanford University last year, I argued alongside co-authors E. Glen Weyl and Mona Hamdy that two ideological frameworks have emerged that are dominating the way most view this new age of intelligence: libertarianism and technocracy. Each ideology, functioning like a secular religion, has its own clearly defined ideas — you might call it theology — that define rules of engagement for artificial intelligence. When popular venture capitalist and tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen published his so-called “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” he ironically used the phrase “we believe” no less than 100 times as he strived to convince the world that artificial intelligence should be given the permission it needs to transform our world and the people who live in it.
The tools that can emerge from the age of intelligence should be transformative for communities of faith.
The libertarians “believe” in maximal freedom for AI developers, and the technocrats “believe” they deserve deity-like powers that will be confined to a small regulatory class tasked with managing the outcomes for the rest of us. In either case, traditional religious concepts warn us these are dangerous ideas. For the libertarians, religious wisdom asks whether human beings are designed for absolute freedom or whether we need community to provide meaning and infrastructure for life. Similar religious ideas challenge the centralization sought by the technocrats because it risks exacerbating class divides that defy the equal dignity of all humans even as the technocrats brazenly confront ancient warnings about the implications of men who enjoy playing God.
When the forces of technocracy demand the consolidation of authority over AI, to protect us from ourselves, religious wisdom warns against the corrupting power of those who aspire to God-like power, making idols of themselves. When libertarians or technocrats imagine a world where AI makes work, governance and suffering optional, religious wisdom warns against the lessons unlearned by those denied the opportunity to work or to struggle at some point in their lives.
The intelligent age is emerging at a time when our research universities, along with Silicon Valley, have little exposure to religious concepts. So, it seems they have made their own religions often built on the foundation alone of maximizing profit or power.
A tool for faith leaders
It isn’t just much-needed wisdom that religion brings to AI but also a vast multibillion-person market for tools that can contribute to community building. If one wants to build or strengthen communities worldwide, for example, then the best place to start is often a place of worship (or a school).
The tools that can emerge from the age of intelligence should be transformative for communities of faith and for the promotion of values that they share; values which aim alone to build healthy communities and bring compassion to a cruel, unforgiving world.
As a simple example, take the perfunctory challenges of clergy or laypeople who are tasked with ministering to large communities, often spanning multiple generations with various, sometimes intermittent levels of commitment to their communities of faith.
Millions of Christians identify a particular congregation as their “home church” while only actually attending it on Christmas or Easter. Similarly, many Muslims have a local mosque that they attend mainly during festivals like Ramadan. Other communities of faith, like Buddhists or Hindus, may not be linked to individual places of worship at all, but they are connected to one another by theological or philosophical religious rituals that they can practice at any temple. Catholic bishops are often responsible for multiple congregations and schools, and sometimes across many different geographic regions. Then there’s the post-pandemic trend of digital church, where millions of people who call a local congregation their home church also worship regularly online at another congregation, which can be anywhere in the world.
In all of these cases, the age of intelligence presents new opportunities to better connect communities of faith while also deepening those connections. Now, if a congregant loses a loved one, the ability of the congregation’s care team to know it happened at all is based largely upon chance, notification by the family or simply word of mouth. Pastoral care in the age of intelligence can involve a pastor or counselor or life coach arriving at their office every day to a dashboard that has curated relevant data about individual congregants based upon tools the congregants have opted into. The counselor might discover that someone’s grandfather passed away in another state or that a college student studying abroad is posting unusually depressive or out-of-character language on social media. They could see that a member of the congregation received a promotion at work on LinkedIn or lost their job or split from their partner or spouse. These life alerts might prompt the pastor to send an unsolicited note of encouragement or congratulations or to call someone who appears in need.
Corporate boards and universities need to find faith again before the age of intelligence leaves us all to contend with whatever it has decided to create.
Imagine what it will mean to the cohesion of communities, when it’s far harder for individuals — especially those who need connection the most — to fall through the cracks. Imagine what it will mean for the health of a community when every member of a community is given the opportunity for equal care and attention or is given an individualized plan for their development based upon a custom analysis of their spiritual need. The same tools can be used by schools or clubs or other anchors of civil society, and those tools can also be curated on an enterprise level to provide an assessment of a community on a quarterly or annual basis. This can help determine what programs or teachings are benefiting the congregation.
Artificial intelligence will not just be a tool for the care of religious congregations. It is a veritable superpower to advance other concerns of virtually all religious communities to improve the world. There is no limit to what AI will mean for health care, for instance. We may finally find a cure for cancer and many other debilitating diseases. We will have tools to identify future life-altering diseases earlier than ever. AI can bring equity to health care quality, allowing those in the most far-flung places of the world to receive the same expert care as those living within a stone’s throw of a top research hospital.
The age of intelligence will also make one-size-fits-all approaches to all kinds of global humanitarian problems obsolete. Currently, all developed nations provide a certain amount of humanitarian assistance to the world’s most desperate people, but volumes can be written about how such aid is wasted or has unintended consequences. Some aid policies have flooded traditional communities with food that they might have otherwise grown. Other approaches have arbitrarily applied agricultural or other techniques hewn in different climates or cultures to environments where they were alien to begin with. With AI, volumes of data related to agriculture, climate or other unique economic factors can be analyzed in order to produce cost-effective solutions that maximize the return on investment of a country or NGO’s efforts to provide humanitarian assistance.
Then, there’s the relevance of AI to conflict resolution and peacemaking.
At present, the world is inflicted with more active conflicts than at any time since World War II, according to the Global Peace Index. Resolution to these conflicts is often confined to the imagination of whomever is in charge at the moment. However, in the age of intelligence, our digital tools can provide to policymakers, heads of state or others a seemingly limitless array of possible solutions to the most intractable problems, drawing from a total command of all historical and other relevant knowledge. The system can also be made more immune to politics or the influence of ego or other personality factors. Leading up to the historic Abraham Accords, a document commissioned by His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa of Bahrain began with these words: “Ignorance is the enemy of peace.” The king was right.
Then, of course, most of the terrible, black swan events that have afflicted our world have often been similarly attributed to a “lack of imagination.” The age of intelligence will give us all the imagination we could possibly need to make peace or to prepare for the worst.
A guiding hand
When religion has entered the AI conversation, it has often come at the heels of almost conspiratorial warnings about the potential apocalyptic implications of this new technology.
There’s certainly a place for those types of warnings in the age of intelligence, and we do not want AI technology to assume a God-like power over human agency. There is virtually no scenario where this would create anything but blinking red lights for the world.
The apocalyptic scenarios in this case are terrifying, especially since great technological revolutions have almost always brought new weapons of war. This is particularly perilous in a multipolar but interconnected world, where not all countries either enshrine or enforce laws that honor the equal dignity of all humans. The age of intelligence means an age where drone-first warfare could create millions of small weapons that can be fully autonomous and optimized only to kill. AI can give us rapidly produced, customized vaccines or antibiotics, but it can also allow nefarious actors to create customized biological weapons that can be tailor-made to kill whomever the designer determines is an enemy or undesirable (imagine a microscopic biological weapon flown on the tip of a fly-sized drone).
Scientists are profoundly religious in their commitment to ideologies that guide how they engage in this age of intelligence.
There are risks that require moral leaders to demand our political leaders protect us. We want AI to give us new tools to improve the world, maximizing the potential of this technology, but we want those tools always under human control.
At the same time, these religious warnings mustn’t devolve into “the world is flat” pronouncements. No, they would provide a guiding hand, and sometimes a gut check, to those who are leading us into this profound new period of human history.
Simply put: Corporate boards and universities need to find faith again, for their own good, before the age of intelligence leaves us all to contend with whatever it has decided to create for us based upon how we designed it.
“Everything is permissible,” scripture wisely warns, “but not everything is beneficial.”
Johnnie Moore is a contributing author of The Digitalist Papers, a project of Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab. He’s the president of JDA Worldwide and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council for Faith in Action.
This story appears in the April 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.