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by Ross Pomeroy
August 29,
2023
from
BigThink Website
Annelisa Leinbach
Big
Think; Adobe Stock
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Religion is declining around the globe, especially in
the United States.
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In a
recent paper, researchers argued that automation in the
form of robotics and AI is the real driver of the recent
trend.
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A
series of experiments showed that exposure to automation
at the national and local levels is linked to a
reduction in religiosity.
Wherever
automation rises,
religiosity
falls...
Religion has been
retreating across the world since the beginning of the 21st
century.
According to
results from the
World Value
Survey, conducted between 2007 and 2019, the importance of God
declined on average in 39 of the 44 countries analyzed.
Moreover, the
percentage of people identifying as nonreligious has risen by more
than 10% in nations like,
Singapore, Iceland, Chile, and South Korea
over the past decade...
The decline of
religion is most striking in the United States.
Between 1940 and
2000, church membership hovered around 70%,
according to Gallup.
But as the new
millennium got underway, it fell off a cliff.
By 2020, church
membership had cratered to 47%.
Between 2007 and 2020, the
proportion of Americans
not affiliated with any religion grew from 16% to 30%.
Belief in and
worship of supernatural beings, gods, and deities has been a
fundamental facet of human existence for thousands of years, yet the
decline of religion is playing out in a historical blink of an eye...!
What could explain
this upheaval in global society?
Vanishing religiosity
Technological advancement
attracts a lot of attention from scholars as a potential
explanation.
In the past, people
would turn to religious belief to seek answers and solve problems.
Now we have
technology.
"When people
can use technology to predict the weather, diagnose and treat
illness, and manufacture resources, they may rely less on
religious beliefs and practices",
...an
international team of researchers recently wrote in a
paper (Exposure
to Automation explains Religious Declines)
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
But if technology
is negating the need for religion, then,
Why
didn't we see a massive drop in belief during the Industrial
Revolution, the Space Race, or rise the of personal computers?
Why has the
decline of religion become so widespread and rapid only
recently?
The researchers
offered a hypothesis:
It's not
technology by itself that reduces religiosity, but specifically
automation in the form of robotics and artificial
intelligence,
which only became prominent in the 21st century.
"This claim
is based on recent research on lay perceptions of
automation," they wrote.
"Such
studies show that people ascribe automation technology with
abilities that border on supernatural."
"Historically, people have deferred to supernatural agents
and religious professionals to solve instrumental problems
beyond the scope of human ability.
These
problems may seem more solvable for people working and
living in highly automated spaces."
Automation and the
decline of religion
To test their
supposition, the researchers conducted four experiments.
- In the first, they
tracked religious decline between 2006 and 2019 across 68 countries
via a yes-or-no survey question with more than 2 million
respondents:
"Is religion an
important part of your daily life?"
They then
correlated this data with each nation's yearly operational stock of
industrial robots.
"Robotics
exposure was robustly and negatively associated with religiosity
across the globe," they reported.
The association
held when controlling for GDP per capita, telecom development, and
energy development.
- In the next
experiment, the scientists focused solely on the decline of religion
in the United States, comparing religiosity and robotics growth in
metropolitan areas between 2008 and 2016.
"Metropolitan
areas with higher levels of robotics growth (+1 standard
deviation) experienced an approximately 3% yearly decline in
religion each decade," they reported.
- For the
third experiment, the researchers followed 46,680 individuals in a
community between 2009 and 2020, measuring their self-reported
belief in God and their exposure to automation at their jobs.
They found that
individuals who worked at jobs with higher exposure to AI and
robotics reported significantly greater drops in religiosity over
time.
"People with
jobs that were one standard deviation higher than the mean on
occupational exposure to AI were 45% less likely to believe in
God compared to people in occupations that had a mean level of
exposure to AI," the authors wrote.
- Experiment
four was
conducted at the most local level.
The researchers
followed 238 employees within a single organization over time,
directly measuring their exposure to AI and their religiosity.
AI
exposure was linked to a decrease in religious belief...
All of the
completed studies are correlative and thus do not prove causation.
But taken together,
they strongly support the authors' contention that automation
reduces religious belief.
"Our studies
demonstrate that automation is linked to religious decline
across,
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multiple religious traditions (e.g., Christian, Muslim,
and Buddhist)
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world regions (e.g., North America, South Asia,
and Oceania)
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levels of analysis,
...they commented"...
Their findings line
up with the musings of other scholars, including
Neil McArthur, the Director of the Centre for Professional
and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba.
Writing in The
Conversation earlier this year,
he predicted that some people may soon
worship AI in lieu of gods.
Generative AI like
ChatGPT, for example, already has traits often associated with
deities, such as,
As AI grows in
prominence and power, the global decline of religion may continue
and even accelerate.
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