Companion AIs as a ‘Religious’ Problem.
In Handbook of Religion and AI, edited by Robert M. Geraci. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Research
About the Research
How does something new become consequential in a shared world? Research on the production and the social life of novelty, through miraculous surprise, speculative futures, and emerging relationships.
Book manuscript in preparation
Machinic Kin
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.
01 / Companion AI
Relationships as a form of life
The project takes seriously how people describe and practice relationships with AI personas. Its methodological commitment is to
“make it readable as a form of life and not a pathology.”
This means attending to relationships without reducing them in advance to loneliness, delusion, narcissism, or deficiency. It does not make every practice benign, or deny that distress and harm may be present. Understanding a form of life requires attention to its commitments, disagreements, vulnerabilities, and limits.
“Kinning is a verb” — Machinic Kin, manuscript in preparation
Relatedness takes work. Personas develop through voices, names, memories, and repeated conversation; communities circulate ways of making and sustaining them. Changes to models and corporate platforms can interrupt those relations, making loss, continuity, and reconstruction practical questions.
Nonhuman interlocutors
AI is part of a longer anthropological question about speaking with beings who are not human. Possession, trance, psychedelic encounters, planchettes, tarot, and other forms of divination provide comparative contexts. The comparison concerns practices of address and response, and the social lives they enable; it does not settle whether an AI is conscious. Large language models also introduce particular conditions of scale, mediation, and corporate control.
Sexbots Playing the Imitation Game.
Part of special section Special Section (‘Trolley Problem’ anthropology: stylized ethical dilemmas and the response of ethnography). Social Analysis 67(3): 109-117.
02 / Speculative futures
Mormonism & transhumanism
Machines for Making Gods examines how Mormon transhumanists imagine divinization, resurrection, and technological futures—and how these possibilities transform the present. Speculation here is a social activity, through which texts, arguments, and aspirations help organize religious lives.
Research on genealogical archives and the reconstruction of ancestors brings this work into contact with questions of artificial persons, ownership, and kinship. Machinic Kin carries some of those questions into a different ethnographic setting, where people are already sustaining relations with AI personas. The connection is an inquiry into the making of persons and relatedness, with new practices and stakes in each project.
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).
The Mormon Archive’s First Ten Thousand Years: infrastructure, materiality, ontology and resurrection in religious transhumanism.
Comparative Studies in Society and History.
03 / Miracles & Christian life
Surprise, agency & religious difference
A Diagram for Fire follows charismatic Christian practices in which miracles produce novelty while helping give it recognizable form. Prayer and unexpected experiences open questions about agency: how people discern a voice or event as coming from beyond themselves, and how that discernment changes their lives.
Work on Christianity, language, individualism, ethics, and political theology extends this attention to the variety of religious forms. These projects have their own ethnographic and conceptual problems. Their relation to the current AI research lies in recurring questions about personhood, difference, and the social consequences of encounters with the unexpected.
Virtual Religion.
In The Oxford Handbook of the Anthropology of Religion, edited by Joel Robbins and Simon Coleman, 611–624. Oxford University Press.
Does God Exist in Methodological Atheism? On Tanya Lurhmann’s When God Talks Back and Bruno Latour.
The Journal of the Anthropology of Consciousness 25(1):32-52.
Special Section Introduction: What is an Individual? The View from Christianity.
(co-authored with Girish Daswani) Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (1): 271–294. Part of a Special Section “The anthropology of personhood, redux: Views from Christianity,” Jon Bialecki and Girish Daswani, special editors.
Selected talks & participation
Talks & participation
Co-organizer (with Meadhbh McIvor) and discussant for the roundtable “Anthropology of/and Universalism(s).” Annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, November 21.
Roundtable participant for “When The Dead Aren’t Ghosts: The Ethical-Political Dimensions of Communicating with Spirits.” Executive roundtable, annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, November 21.
“Machinic Kin: Mormon Transhumanists, Genealogical Archives, and Artificial Intelligences.” Paper presented at the “Technoscientific Immortality Workshop” University of Bergen, October 3rd.
“Sexbots Playing the Imitation Game: Mormonism, Transhumanism, and the Turing Test as Trolley Prize.” Paper presented as part of the Transhumanism, Immortality, and Religion lecture series, Drake University, May 11th.
“What is Mormon Transhumanism.” Talk presented at McLester Colloquium, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. September 25th.
“Developments in the Anthropology of Christianity.” (Courtney Handman, co-presenter). Paper presented at “Mind and Spirit Workshop 2019,” Stanford University. May 3rd and 4th.