Source: Quartz
The surge of theologians, ethicists, and faith leaders into AI safety roles shows that tech companies see ethics training and bias audits as insufficient. They're borrowing institutional authority from the one sector with 2,000 years of experience managing human behavior at scale. The move is partly defensive—outsourcing moral legitimacy to religious figures shields companies from criticism—but also reflects a genuine technical problem: abstract principle-based alignment doesn't work, so they're embedding contested value systems directly into model training. The substantive question is whose theology wins: whether Catholic natural law, Protestant individualism, or secular humanism becomes baked into systems that will mediate millions of decisions globally.