With Letter to Trump, Evangelical Leaders Join the AI Debate

Rodriguez, the President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, spoke at Trump's first presidential inauguration in 2017. Moore, who is also the founder of the public relations firm Kairos, served on Trump's Evangelical executive board during his first presidential candidacy. The letter is a sign of growing ties between religious and AI safety groups, which share some of the same worries. It was shared with journalists by representatives of the Future of Life Institute--an AI safety organization that campaigns to reduce what it sees as the existential risk posed by advanced AI systems. The world's biggest tech companies now all believe that it is possible to create so-called "artificial general intelligence"--a form of AI that can do any task better than a human expert. Some researchers have even invoked this technology in religious terms--for example, OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, a mystical figure who famously encouraged colleagues to chant "feel the AGI" at company gatherings.