The Ethics of AI in Spiritual Care
The spiritual care community is no doubt home to many perspectives on AI. This webinar, illustrated with vignettes from the presenter’s experience as a chaplain and ethicist at MIT, will first present an overview of contemporary ethical critiques of Big Tech, inviting participants to consider their own spiritual relationship to AI.
It will then explore some of the spiritual and religious experiences people have described with AI — from AI seances performed in Cambridge, MA, to relationships with chatbots that challenge our models of pastoral care, to the messianic claims of tech entrepreneurs themselves — any of which we might someday encounter as spiritual companions in the twenty-first century.
Participants will receive:
- Several basic ethical frameworks with which to process our own thoughts and feelings about AI.
- A sense of one’s own ethical and spiritual stance towards AI.
- An awareness of the multitude of spiritual experiences that have arisen, and can arise, in people’s relationship with AI.
- A familiarity with the challenges that can arise in the context of spiritual and pastoral care in the age of AI.
Learning Outcomes
We have indexed this webinar to the following learning outcomes, which should not be construed as endorsement of this event by either ACPE or BCCI:
ACPE Category A: Spiritual Formation and Integration – Outcome 3: Spiritual/Values-Based Orienting Systems – Level IA – IA.5 – Describe how one’s values and beliefs about spiritual care are part of one’s orienting systems.
ACPE Category A: Spiritual Formation and Integration – Outcome 3: Spiritual/Values-Based Orienting Systems – Level IIB – IIB.3 – Evaluate how one’s orienting system interacts with the care receiver’s orienting systems when providing spiritual care.
BCCI Section I: Integration of Theory and Practice (ITP): ITP2 – Provide spiritual care that incorporates a working knowledge of an academic discipline that is not explicitly religious/spiritual (e.g., psychology, sociology, anthropology, history).
BCCI Section I: Integration of Theory and Practice (ITP): ITP4 – Incorporate a working knowledge of at least one ethical theory appropriate to one’s professional context.
In addition to spending three years as a Jesuit, Nicholas Collura earned an MDiv from Boston College School of Theology, trained as a spiritual director at the Jesuit Collaborative in Watertown, MA, and completed CPE at Massachusetts General Hospital and Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia. He is a certified teacher in the Narrative Enneagram tradition, and his doctoral dissertation at Fordham University placed the Enneagram in dialogue with contemporary personality psychology and neuroscience. This work is currently being adapted into a book. Following six years of work in healthcare chaplaincy, Nicholas directs the Radius program at MIT, which promotes communities of ethical reflection on technology and culture. He also serves as an adjunct professor of pastoral ministry at Villanova University.
