Anne Foerst, theologian and expert on artificial intelligence

Since the European Enlightenment, people in the Western world have understood themselves increasingly as individual minds capable of rationality and reason though hampered by their bodies and emotions. This understanding has been challenged by many different movements such as feminism, civil rights movements, inter-cultural dialogues etc. In my talk, I will contribute two additional refutations of this reduced view of humanity, one from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and one from a Biblical perspective. As strange as it might seem to combine these seemingly unconnected views I will argue that the cutting edge technology developed in Embodied AI is based on anthropological assumptions that are key for the Biblical view of humanity: our deeply embodied self, our fundamental sociability and our need to judge and create differences among ourselves.