Why should someone who is religious worry about AI existential risk?
The problem of AI existential risk
A risk of human extinction or the destruction of humanity’s long-term potential.
One possible reason why someone religious might not worry is that they trust that God won’t allow human extinction to happen. Even if this is the case, we still know that the world has seen many tragedies and that human choice can be a factor in such tragedies, even if God would never allow complete extinction. If working on solutions for AI risk would prevent billions of people from dying, that would also be worthwhile.
Similarly, one might think that the existence of an afterlife would make the physical extinction of mankind less bad, since it wouldn’t mean the end of all conscious beings. However, we don’t view murder as being good because “the victim is now with God”; rather, the shortening or destruction of human life in this world is itself seen to be a grave harm.
Another possible concern among religious people could be the secular materialist worldview dominant in AI safety
A research field about how to prevent risks from advanced artificial intelligence.
Even if you are aren’t satisfied with any proposed values for an advanced superintelligence and think it is better to not build any powerful AIs, there are specific policies which religious and secular people could likely agree on, including: supporting government regulation, pressuring AI companies not to deploy potentially dangerous systems, and researching interpretability so that we understand what the AI systems are actually doing.