Digital Afterlife and the Spiritual Realm

Digital Afterlife and the Spiritual Realm
Author: Maggi Savin-Baden
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2021-12-09
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1000486400

Few religious leaders have examined the potential for the positive impact of digital media and digital immortality creation in religious contexts. It is evident that there have been recent moves away from traditional funeral services focusing on the transition of the deceased into the future world beyond, towards a rise of memorial content within funerals and commemorative events. This has heralded shifts in afterlife beliefs by replacing them, to all intents and purposes, by attitudes to this life. Digital Afterlife and the Spiritual Realm explores the ways in which digital media and digital afterlife creation affects social and religious understandings of death and the afterlife. Features Understands the impact of digital media on those living and those working with the bereaved Explores the impact of digital memorialisation post death Examines the ways in which digital media may be changing conceptions and theologies of death For many people, digital afterlife and the spiritual realm largely remains an area that is both inchoate and confusing. This book will begin to unravel some of this bafflement.

Limits of Life

Limits of Life
Author: Martin Eggen Mogseth
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2024-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1805395203

New technologies and scientific imagination rearrange the boundary that we identify as the beginning and end of life. New techno-social constellations, such as the ever-increasing presence of digital avatars and genetic screenings, implore us to reconsider and transcend the existing definitions of life and death. Through a multidisciplinary approach, this volume explores how the limitations and perceived finality of life and death are reconstituted through engagements with modern technology.

Postdigital Theologies

Postdigital Theologies
Author: Maggi Savin-Baden
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2022-09-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3031094050

This book is about the relationships between technologies and the content of religious belief and practice. A number of models are now starting to emerge, but each of these depends on the theological or philosophical framework within which the debate is set. At at the same time, there are dilemmas operating at different ends of the spectrum. For example, at one end there is a tendency towards subsuming the digital within the divine, and at the other an instrumental stance relating to how technology is deployed. Either of these stances could be said to ignore rather than acknowledge that the human itself is being changed as a result of the interactions with the digital. The book explores the following areas: · Where is God to be found or present in the postdigital condition? · What are the implications of the postdigital condition for spirituality and indeed for the activity of God through the Holy Spirit? · How do concepts of transhumanism or posthumanism effect understandings of the incarnation? · Does the doctrine of the Trinity need revisiting in the light of the digital as medium of relationship? · Does Creation now include the postdigital? · What of the Kingdom of God now that the kingdom of the Tech giants is so powerful all-consuming?

Digital and Postdigital Learning for Changing Universities

Digital and Postdigital Learning for Changing Universities
Author: Maggi Savin-Baden
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2023-10-27
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000931439

This book explores the purpose, role and function of the university and examines the disconnection between students’ approaches to learning and university strategy. It centres on the idea that it is vital to explore what counts as a university in the twenty-first century, what it is for, and for whom, as well as how it can transcend social divisions. The universities of the twenty-first century need to have larger audiences, a broader voice, a shift away from othering and an effective means of progressing such shifts. What is central to such exploration is the idea that learning needs to be seen as postdigital. With a focus on how the growth of technology has and continues to affect university learning, this book: explores the concepts of the digital and the postdigital promotes just and inclusive pedagogies for higher education considers ways to ensure learning is an ethical and political experience studies how to understand community and collective values through higher education suggests ways of promoting personal and collective responsibility for our world and its peoples presents ways in which the university can challenge ideologies based on capitalist modes of consumption, privilege and exploitation Digital and Postdigital Learning for Changing Universities is essential reading for anyone seeking to reimagine the university in a postdigital age, despite institutional structuration and government intervention. It challenges current assumptions and practices, and encourages new ways of thinking about higher education and learning in the twenty-first century.

The Oxford Handbook of Digital Religion

The Oxford Handbook of Digital Religion
Author: Campbell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 681
Release: 2023-11-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0197549802

"Digital Religion refers to the contemporary practice and understanding of religion in both online and offline contexts, and how these contexts intersect with each other. Scholars in this growing field recognize that religion has been influenced by its engagement with computer-mediated digital spaces, including not only the Internet, but other emerging technologies, such as mobile phones, digital wearables, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. The Oxford Handbook of Digital Religion provides a comprehensive overview of religion as seen and performed through various platforms and cultural spaces created by digital technology. The text covers religious interaction with a wide range of digital media forms (including social media, websites, gaming environments, virtual and augmented realities, and artificial intelligence) and highlights examples of technological engagement and negotiation within the major world religions (i.e., Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism). Additional sections cover the global manifestations of religious community, identity, ethics, and authority, with a final group of chapters addressing emerging technologies and the future of the field. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the project, the Handbook is led by co-editors representing the humanistic and social scientific fields of religious studies and communication, though both also have experience in how those disciplines intersect"--

AI and Society

AI and Society
Author: Christo El Morr
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2023-01-08
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1000800334

AI's impact on human societies is and will be drastic in so many ways. AI is being adopted and implemented around the world, and government and universities are investing in AI studies, research, and development. However, very little research exists about the impact of AI on our lives. This book will address this gap; it will gather reflections from around the world to assess the impact of AI on different aspects of society as well as propose ways in which we can address this impact and the research agendas needed.

AI by Design

AI by Design
Author: Catriona Campbell
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2022-03-13
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1000554929

This book introduces the reader to Artificial Intelligence and its importance to our future. Campbell uses behavioural psychology, explores technology, economics, real-life and historical examples to predict five future scenarios with AI. Illustrating through speculative fiction, she describes possible futures after AI exceeds human capabilities. We are at a tipping point in history and must plan to ensure a successful co-existence with artificial intelligence. This book explains how to design for a future with AI so that, rather than herald our downfall, it helps us achieve a new renaissance.

Meaningful Futures with Robots

Meaningful Futures with Robots
Author: Judith Dörrenbächer
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2022-11-30
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1000630447

Soon, robots will leave the factories and make their way into living rooms, supermarkets, and care facilities. They will cooperate with humans in everyday life, taking on more than just practical tasks. How should they communicate with us? Do they need eyes, a screen, or arms? Should they resemble humans? Or may they enrich social situations precisely because they act so differently from humans? Meaningful Futures with Robots: Designing a New Coexistence provides insight into the opportunities and risks that arise from living with robots in the future, anchored in current research projects on everyday robotics. As well as generating ideas for robot developers and designers, it also critically discusses existing theories and methods for social robotics from different perspectives - ethical, design, artistical and technological – and presents new approaches to meaningful human-robot interaction design. Key Features: Provides insights into current research on robots from different disciplinary angles with a particular focus on a value-driven design. Includes contributions from designers, psychologists, engineers, philosophers, artists, and legal scholars, among others. Licence line: Chapters 1, 3, 12, and 15 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.crcpress.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

An Introduction to Universal Artificial Intelligence

An Introduction to Universal Artificial Intelligence
Author: Marcus Hutter
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 517
Release: 2024-05-28
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1003821979

An Introduction to Universal Artificial Intelligence provides the formal underpinning of what it means for an agent to act intelligently in an unknown environment. First presented in Universal Algorithmic Intelligence (Hutter, 2000), UAI offers a framework in which virtually all AI problems can be formulated, and a theory of how to solve them. UAI unifies ideas from sequential decision theory, Bayesian inference, and algorithmic information theory to construct AIXI, an optimal reinforcement learning agent that learns to act optimally in unknown environments. AIXI is the theoretical gold standard for intelligent behavior. The book covers both the theoretical and practical aspects of UAI. Bayesian updating can be done efficiently with context tree weighting, and planning can be approximated by sampling with Monte Carlo tree search. It provides algorithms for the reader to implement, and experimental results to compare against. These algorithms are used to approximate AIXI. The book ends with a philosophical discussion of Artificial General Intelligence: Can super-intelligent agents even be constructed? Is it inevitable that they will be constructed, and what are the potential consequences? This text is suitable for late undergraduate students. It provides an extensive chapter to fill in the required mathematics, probability, information, and computability theory background.