Our Father, Who art in Algorithm
b'In this episode, we travel to a future where a tech mogul feeds a machine learning system all the religious texts he can find, and asks it to generate a \\u201csuper religion.\\u201d\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0Buckle up because this is a long episode! But it\\u2019s fun, I promise.\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0For the intro of this episode I worked with Janelle Shane to actually train a machine learning algorithm on a big chunk of religious texts that I assembled, and spit something back out. The specifics of the texts and the machine learning algorithm come with a handful of caveats and notes, which you can find at the bottom of this post. Janelle has done of ton of really funny, interesting things with machine learning algorithms that you can find here.\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0To analyze the text that this algorithm generated, and talk about the limitations of this kind of project, I spoke with a big group of people from a variety of backgrounds:\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0Linda Griggs is an Episcopal priest and an assisting priest at St. Martin\'s Episcopal Church in Providence Rhode Island.\\n\\xa0Lauren O\\u2019Neal and Niko Bakulich are the hosts of a podcast called Sunday School Dropouts, whose tagline is: "an ex-Christian (Lauren) and a non-believing sort of Jew (Niko) read all the way through the Bible for the first time."\\n\\xa0Elias Muhanna is the Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University, and director of the Digital Islamic Humanities Project.\\n\\xa0Beth Duckles is a sociologist (who you heard last episode talking about peanut allergies).\\n\\xa0Carol Edelman Warrior is an Assistant Professor of English at Cornell\\u2019s American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program. She is also enrolled with the Ninilchik Village Tribe (Dena\'ina Athabascan / Alutiiq), and is also of A\'aninin (Gros Ventre) descent.\\n\\xa0Mark Harris is a journalist who writes about technology, science and business for places like WIRED, The Guardian and IEEE Spectrum. He wrote a great piece about Anthony Levandowski\\u2019s new religion of artificial intelligence called Way of the Future.\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0Further Reading:\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0Sunday School Dropouts: Robobible\\n\\xa0Inside the First Church of Artificial Intelligence\\n\\xa0God is a Bot and Anthony Levandowski is His Messenger\\n\\xa0Way of the Future\\n\\xa0Nine Billion Names by Arthur C. Clarke\\n\\xa0Dataism + Machine Learning = New Religion\\n\\xa0Machine Learning May Help Determine When the Old Testament Was Written\\n\\xa0Indigenous Writers of Speculative Fiction\\n\\xa0Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion\\n\\xa0The Space NDN\'s Star Map\\n\\xa0Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation\\n\\xa0\\nFor more caveats on the algorithm itself and the source text, see here.\\xa0\\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices'