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https://theconversation.com/robots-are-performing-hindu-rituals-some-devotees-fear-theyll-replace-worshippers-197504>
"It isn’t just artists and teachers who are losing sleep over advances in
automation and artificial intelligence. Robots are being brought into
Hinduism’s holiest rituals – and not all worshippers are happy about it.
In 2017, a technology firm in India introduced a robotic arm to perform
“aarti,” a ritual in which a devotee offers an oil lamp to the deity to
symbolize the removal of darkness. This particular robot was unveiled at the
Ganpati festival, a yearly gathering of millions of people in which an icon of
Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, is taken out in a procession and immersed in
the Mula-Mutha river in Pune in central India.
Ever since, that robotic aarti arm has inspired several prototypes, a few of
which continue to regularly perform the ritual across India today, along with a
variety of other religious robots throughout East Asia and South Asia. Robotic
rituals even now include an animatronic temple elephant in Kerala on India’s
southern coast.
Yet this kind of religious robotic usage has led to increasing debates about
the use of AI and robotic technology in devotion and worship. Some devotees and
priests feel that this represents a new horizon in human innovation that will
lead to the betterment of society, while others worry that using robots to
replace practitioners is a bad omen for the future.
As an anthropologist who specializes in religion, however, I focus less on the
theology of robotics and more on what people actually say and do when it comes
to their spiritual practices. My current work on religious robots primarily
centers on the notion of “divine object-persons,” where otherwise inanimate
things are viewed as having a living, conscious essence.
My work also looks at the uneasiness Hindus and Buddhists express about
ritual-performing automatons replacing people and whether those automatons
actually might make better devotees."
Via Christoph S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
