“Robot Priests Can Bless You, Advise You, and Even Perform Your Funeral”
September 22nd, 2019You head on down to your local Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates franchise, hoping for a pleasant sermon from a robot that looks like it stepped out of Ghost in the Shell, but you find that there have been…
Upgrades.
Here’s Geordie Rose talking about, “These things that we’re summoning into the world now.”
Via: Vox:
A new priest named Mindar is holding forth at Kodaiji, a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan. Like other clergy members, this priest can deliver sermons and move around to interface with worshippers. But Mindar comes with some … unusual traits. A body made of aluminum and silicone, for starters.
Mindar is a robot.
Designed to look like Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy, the $1 million machine is an attempt to reignite people’s passion for their faith in a country where religious affiliation is on the decline.
For now, Mindar is not AI-powered. It just recites the same preprogrammed sermon about the Heart Sutra over and over. But the robot’s creators say they plan to give it machine-learning capabilities that’ll enable it to tailor feedback to worshippers’ specific spiritual and ethical problems.
“This robot will never die; it will just keep updating itself and evolving,” said Tensho Goto, the temple’s chief steward. “With AI, we hope it will grow in wisdom to help people overcome even the most difficult troubles. It’s changing Buddhism.”
