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Philip Reed-Butler, Black AI and the future of healing

(RNS) — A theologian and technologist is building Black AI for the inner life, where healing begins with imagination.
Philip Reed-Butler, Black AI and the future of healing
Complexified

(RNS) — What if AI’s deepest promise is not better answers, but better questions — the kind that help us become whole?

For the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about artificial intelligence. We’ve talked Vatican positioning, Silicon Valley philosophers, Catholic ethics, corporate power, doomsday language, all circling the question of who gets to shape the future these machines are confining us in.

But most of those conversations begin from the same assumption: AI is a tool built somewhere else, by someone else, to give us answers.


Productivity. Efficiency. Surveillance. Profit. 

Today’s conversation starts somewhere else.

Philip Reed-Butler is a scholar, theologian and technologist at Iliff School of Theology, where he directs the AI Institute and teaches Theology and Black Posthuman Artificial Intelligence Systems. He is also the founder of the Seekr Project, a distinctly Black conversational AI project designed around introspection, healing and mental-health capacities.

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