Category: Theology
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Good Friday: the death of gods and living with AI
As you’ll perhaps have picked up from reading the book (grab a signed copy here), or hearing me speak about it at recent launch events, the title ‘God-like’ comes from an article written by the UK government’s AI safety lead who urged for ‘a pause in the race to god-like AI’ in an article for…
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In memory: Peter Stedman
For those who have picked up a copy of the new book, you may have seen that it is dedicated to my cousin Peter Stedman, whose funeral I am going to on Monday. The dedication reads: In memory of my cousin Peter,a truly kind and remarkable soul,a very real intelligence who, in 1981,with a Commodore…
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In Which Mark Zuckerberg Says Facebook is the New Church, and We Are All Its Priests
In a recent speech, Mark Zuckerberg has declared that Facebook is the new Church, and its users should all be like Priests. “Communities give us that sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that we are not alone, that we have something better ahead to work for,” he noted, before adding that…
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Harry Potter and the Death of the Hallowed
In celebration of 20 years since the first Harry Potter book was published, I thought it’d be a good chance to look back to one of my own offerings in which I offered a radical reading of Potter’s relationship to his magical art. During a short speaking tour on Mutiny in the US with Peter Rollins,…
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The Cloud of All-Knowing | Democracy and Demagogues in the Age of Data
“True power is not the strength to force someone into slavery, but to make them happily lock their own manacles, as if chains were adding to their liberty.” Yesterday The Observer published a long and detailed piece that attempted to join (some of) the dots between the ‘big data’ socio-political technology firm Cambridge Analytica, and…
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From Russia, With Chaos
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been re-reading Peter Pomerantsev’s book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, each page pushing me towards the same, slightly counterintuitive conclusion: if you want to understand Trump’s America, you need to look to Putin’s Russia. I first read the book when a colleague – a history teacher I’d…