TEXTO 

Saraivada de balas, de instantes em instantes, retumbam no interior da casa, ameaçando a diversão da mãe de Bica e de Idago. Dona Esterlina levanta irritada e muda de canal de televisão. Lá fora, balas e balas, independente do desejo da mulher, executam continuadamente a mesma e seca sonata. Uma programação mais amena vai entorpecendo os sentidos da mulher.

O que mais gosto na televisão é de novela. Acho a maior bobeira futebol, política, carnaval e show. Bobagem também reportagem, campanha contra a fome, contra o verde, contra a vida, contra-contra. Contra e não. Contra-mão. Ando sentindo dores nas pernas. Também! “Lata d'água na cabeça, lá vai Maria”. Sobe o morro, desce o morro e não se cansa dessa dança.

EVARISTO, Conceição. Olhos D’ Água. Rio de Janeiro: Palias, 2016, p. 101 (Fragmento)

Robot priests can bless you, advise you, and even perform your funeral 

By Sigal Samuel Updated Jan 13, 2020, 11:25am EST

A new priest named Mindar is holding forth at Kodaiji, a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan. Like other clergy members, this priest can deliver sermons and move around to interface with worshippers. Mindar is a robot, designed to look like Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy, and cost $1 million.

As more religious communities begin to incorporate robotics — in some cases, AI-powered — questions arise about how technology could change our religious experiences. Traditionally, those experiences are valuable in part because they leave room for the spontaneous and surprising, the emotional and even the mystical. That could be lost if we mechanize them.  

Another risk has to do with how an AI priest would handle ethical queries. Robots whose algorithms learn from previous data may nudge us toward decisions based on what people have done in the past, incrementally homogenizing answers and narrowing the scope of our spiritual imagination. One could argue, however, that risk also exists with human clergy, since the clergy is bounded too — there’s already a built-in nudging or limiting factor.

AI systems can be particularly problematic in that they often function as black boxes. We typically don’t know what sorts of biases are coded into them or what sorts of human nuance and context they’re failing to understand. A human priest who knows your broader context as a whole person may gather this and give you the right recommendation. 

Human clergy members serve as the anchor for a community, bringing people together. They provide human contact, which is in danger of becoming a luxury good as we create robots to more cheaply do the work of people. Robots, notwithstanding, might be able to transcend some social divides, such as race and gender, to enhance community in a way that’s more liberating. 

Ultimately, in religion as in other domains, robots and humans are perhaps best understood not as competitors but as collaborators. Each offers something the other lacks. 

Injured ape 

Nisha Gaind (Bureau chief, Europe). This X-ray shows a baby Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) with a fractured arm. Conservation workers rescued the animal, named Brenda, from a village on the Indonesian island where she had reportedly been kept illegally as a pet. As editors, we see lots of photographs of conservation, but this image struck me for many reasons: the ‘humanness’ of Brenda’s shape, her innocence and the dedication of the conservation centre, which flew in a surgeon to operate on the animal.

(N. Gaind e E. Callaway. The best science images of the year: 2019 in pictures. Nature, v. 576, n. 7787, p. 354–359, 16/12/2019.)