I had this random thought while writing my piece on web 3.0 and the changing geo-political landscape as seen through the lens of web technology: could you build an AI which was a perfect Christian, or at least operated according to purely Christian philosophy and ethics?

Not twenty minutes later, I got an email from Garrett linking to a boingBoing article about someone who is trying to create a virtual “evil” chatbot (original SciAm link).

This synchronous event is a great example of the sort of computer-mediated phenomenon I wanted to cover in more depth under the “distributed intelligence and collective identity” category of that last article. But I didn’t want to turn the article into metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. But I do think the notion of the Jungian collective unconscious and collective consciousness fits in very neatly with the internet as it now stands, nevermind its next iteration. How do these invisible links between people work and can they be explored, strengthened and manipulated by technology?

We may end up needing some kind of wholly good AI to eventually help us figure out whether its really a good idea to begin messing around with this kind of stuff… Just because we can do certain things, doesn’t mean that we should. Any exploration of future technology which doesn’t explore those kinds of ethical questions - in my opinion - isn’t worth getting involved with.