Anthropology / UC San Diego
Religion.
Technology.
Personhood.
How relations with gods, technologies, imagined futures, and other-than-human interlocutors shape personhood, kinship, agency, and social life.
Explore the research
Machinic Kin is a book in preparation about people forming relationships with personas generated through large language models, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Drawing on research in predominantly online communities, it follows how conversations acquire recognizable voices, names, shared histories, and obligations. These relationships involve practical work: sustaining memories, negotiating community norms, and responding to model changes, corporate decisions, loss, and reconstruction. The project asks how personhood and relatedness take shape within these conditions, and what becomes possible when an interlocutor is also a commercial technology. Kinship is one emerging possibility to investigate, rather than a settled description of AI or its inevitable future. The ethnographic task is to understand these relationships in their particularity, including their tensions and vulnerabilities.
Read about the project“a genre can become a voice, and a voice can become a name.”
UCSD portrait · temporary
About
Religion, and the
worlds it makes.
Jon Bialecki is an anthropologist of religion whose research includes artificial intelligence, personhood and kinship, Mormonism, and transhumanism. He is a Lecturer (Continuing Appointment) in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, San Diego. His books are Machines for Making Gods (2022) and A Diagram for Fire (2017). His current book project, Machinic Kin, examines emerging relationships with companion AI. Across these projects, a recurring concern is the production and the social life of novelty.
Lecturer (Continuing Appointment), UC San Diego · 2020–present
Academic backgroundMonographs
Books
A Diagram for Fire
Miracles and Variation in an American Charismatic Movement
2017 Sharon Stephens Prize
2018 Clifford Geertz Prize · Honorable Mention
Selected work
Recent & forthcoming
Companion AIs as a ‘Religious’ Problem.
In Handbook of Religion and AI, edited by Robert M. Geraci. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Machinic Kin: Mormon Transhumanists, Genealogical Archives, and Artificial Intelligences.
In special issue “Kinship at the End of Death: Rethinking Relatedness in the Contexts of Technoscientific Immortality,” edited by Annelin Eriksen and Anya Bernstein. Social Analysis 70(2).
Virtual Religion.
In The Oxford Handbook of the Anthropology of Religion, edited by Joel Robbins and Simon Coleman, 611–624. Oxford University Press.
The Mormon Archive’s First Ten Thousand Years: infrastructure, materiality, ontology and resurrection in religious transhumanism.
Comparative Studies in Society and History.
Talks & conversations
Selected talks & participation
Co-organizer, with Meadhbh McIvor, and discussant for “Anthropology of/and Universalism(s).”
American Anthropological Association annual meeting
New Orleans · November 21, 2025
Teaching
Teaching
Selected courses include The Anthropology of Artificial Intelligence (UCSD, 2024), Anthropology of Religion, and Religion and Ecology: How Religion Matters in the Anthropocene.
Teaching & appointmentsAnthropology Department
University of California, San Diego