As part of the 2025–2026 50th anniversary program of the Department for the Study of Religion, the Department, together with the Schwartz‑Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and the Data Sciences Institute, is pleased to present: Seeking Alignment: Religious Imaginaries in the Past and Future of AI.
The Seeking Alignment panel brings together scholars working in the study of religion, history of science, media theory, and computer science to consider how the religious pasts of AI shape the foretelling of its future. From “spiritual bliss attractors” to worries about a “god-like” AI, the genesis and consequences of AI—how its history is told and its future is prophesied—are steeped in religious imaginaries that require scholarly analysis. In the mid-twentieth-century, cybernetic and neural network theories grew out of spiritual convictions about relations among humans, animals, and machines “of loving grace.” Today, some people worry that AI may come to have an omnipotent “galaxy brain,” while others want to make sure that AI is infused with a specifically Christian God, as in tech billionaires who seek to “align” AI tools to hasten the "second coming of Christ."
The panel will focus on the concept of “alignment,” or efforts to align Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with human values, as well as “misalignment,” when AGI and human values diverge. The panelists will ask what we can learn about AGI by considering a longer history of “religious” practices that train, prompt, or discipline human beings to live and think in “alignment” with higher powers and potent systems. What can past visions of religious alignment tell us about our visions for an AI future? And what might we learn from the people discarded and “corrected” in the pursuit of such success?
Moderator: Professor Pamela Klassen, FRSC, University of Toronto
Venue: Campbell Conference Facility, 1 Devonshire Pl, Toronto, ON M5S 3K7
Date: April 8, 2026 | 5:30 – 7:30 PM ET
Format: In-person only
Seeking Alignment Panelists
Professor Suzanne van Geuns, University of Wisconsin Madison, author of Seductive Methods: Sexual Success in the Computational Imagination, U Chicago Press (under contract).
Professor John Modern, Franklin and Marshall College, author of Neuromatic, or; A Particular History of Religion and the Brain, U Chicago Press.
Professor Sarah Sharma, University of Toronto, author of Insufferable Tools: Feminism against Big Tech, Duke UP (forthcoming).
Professor Anna Su, University of Toronto, author of “A Right to Reality: Human Dignity and Generative AI”, Nordic Journal of Human Rights (forthcoming).
Professor Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, University of Toronto, co-author of "Data, Annotation, and Meaning-Making: The Politics of Categorization in Annotating a Dataset of Faith-based Communal Violence", Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (2024).
About the Department for the Study of Religion
The Department for the Study of Religion is home to one of the largest and most diverse undergraduate and graduate religion programs in the world. Our interdisciplinary faculty create an intellectually stimulating environment in which to explore how religions have grown and developed, how they have been understood, and how we can think about them in our pluralistic society. The department is highly regarded internationally for a range of strengths, especially:
Anthropology of Religion
Buddhist Studies
Global Christianities
Islamic Studies
Jewish Studies
Philosophy of Religion
Religion, Culture, and Politics
Religions of the Americas and Turtle Island
Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity
South Asian Religions
About the Data Sciences Institute
The Data Sciences Institute (DSI) at the University of Toronto is a hub and incubator for data science research, training, and partnerships. Data Sciences is defined as the science of collecting, manipulating, storing, visualizing, learning from, and extracting useful information from data in a reproducible, fair and ethical way. In 2021 the University of Toronto launched the DSI to unify data sciences research across the University, its affiliated research institutes, and external partners. The DSI leverages the University’s leadership and expertise in the foundational and emergent fields of data sciences. Our programming and initiatives are designed to facilitate collaboration, as well as the development and application of new data science methodologies and tools in a training-focused environment.
About the Schwartz Reisman Institute
Located at the University of Toronto, the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society’s mission is to deepen our knowledge of technologies, societies, and what it means to be human by integrating research across traditional boundaries and building human-centred solutions that really make a difference. The integrative research we conduct rethinks technology’s role in society, the contemporary needs of human communities, and the systems that govern them. We’re investigating how best to align technology with human values and deploy it accordingly. The human-centred solutions we build are actionable and practical, highlighting the potential of emerging technologies to serve the public good while protecting citizens and societies from their misuse. We want to make sure powerful technologies truly make the world a better place—for everyone.