change the way we think about religion?

 


Societies grow and change all the time, but it can be tough to think about big-picture shifts when you’re living through the practical details of the day to day. Take the recent popularity of large language models (LLMs). In the short term, we face important sociological questions about how they fit into the norms of everyday life. Is it cheating to use an LLM to help you write, or to generate new ideas? How will new kinds of automation change work, or will they take jobs away?

These are important questions, but it is also useful to take a step back and think about what rapid developments in technology might do to our foundational social relationships and core beliefs. I was fascinated by a recent set of studies published in PNAS that suggest automated work and LLMs could even change the way we think about religion.

“draw an illustration of a church slowly dissolving into a series of zeros and ones, like computer code in The Matrix”

In the article “Exposure to Automation Explains Religious Declines,” authors Joshua Conrad Jackson, Kai Chi Yam, Pok Man Tang, Chris G. Sibley, and Adam Waytz review the findings from five studies. In one, their analysis of longitudinal data across 68 countries from 2006 to 2019 finds nations with higher stocks of industrial robots also tend to have lower proportions of people who say religion is an important part of their daily lives in surveys.

Figure 1 from Jackson et al. (2023) demonstrating nations with a higher stock of industrial robots also express lower rates of religiosity, on average. You can read the full notes at the open-access article here.

I was most surprised by the results of their fifth study—an experiment teaching people about recent advances in science and AI. Respondents who read about the capabilities of LLMs like ChatGPT showed “greater reductions in religious conviction than learning about scientific advances” (8).

The authors suggest one reason for this pattern is that “people may perceive AI as having capacities that they do not ascribe to traditional sciences and technologies and that are uniquely likely to displace the instrumental roles of religion” (2). This is important for us, whether or not you’re personally religious, because religion is a socially powerful force – people use shared beliefs to accomplish things in the world and solve problems, even to cope with hardships like losing a job.

But these results show that new changes in technology, like the advent of LLMs, might be expanding people’s imaginations about what we can do and achieve, possibly even changing the core beliefs that are central to their lives over the long term.

Evan Stewart is an assistant professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. You can follow his work at his website, or on BlueSky.

bioweapon indeed

 

BREAKING: Indigenous Tribunal's Bioweapon Declaration by Brett Hawes

The Alliance of Indigenous Nations rules that mRNA meets the criteria to be classified as a biological weapon — a conversation with Dr Joseph Sansone

Read on Substack

spooky rod

 

good doctors?

 

The Myth of “Fossil Fuels”

 

...and the Myth US Transitioning Away from Oil to “Green” Energy

Rowan Heals

 he's on substack








no woo woo

 

I've never heard anyone explain how to manifest anything in your life like this before… Listen

- Before It Breaks

Read on Substack

Gates on reducing the population

I FINALLY FOUND THE VIDEO OF BILL GATES ADMITTING IT.

- Stop The Shots

Read on Substack

The Cure

 

The cure for cancer was discovered in 1976

- Organ Vitality Detox

Read on Substack

who was it?

man diapers not working? 

X-files Knowles again

 

Derped with Kurp

 

what's in this shit?

 

The junk they pump through feeding tubes in hospitals isn’t good for you. By design—the longer you stay, the higher the bill.

- Dr. Wojak, M.D.

Read on Substack

nevada earthquake - or nuke test

 good question

That aluminum is not supposed to be there.

 OH FUCK


This is an AI Free Zone: AI is everywhere -- except here. Spaceweather.com is written by Dr. Tony Phillips, a carbon-based lifeform with 30 yrs of forecasting experience. If you find a mistake, rest assured it was made by a real human being.

 

ANTARCTIC TONGUES OF IONIZATION: "Tongues of ionization" sound like alien anatomy, but they come from Earth. They're plasma rivers in our planet's ionosphere. During the great geomagnetic storm of May 2024, a dense tongue swept over Antarctica, scrambling GPS with position errors as large as 28 meters. The remarkable event is described in a new paper just published in the research journal Space Weather. Free: Space Weather Newsletter

A GIANT ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY EXPERIMENT: Every 16 hours, a Starlink satellite falls out of the sky. It's part of the SpaceX business model: Old obsolete satellites re-enter to make way for newer models. This may sound like a good way to keep Earth orbit from becoming too cluttered, but it comes with a cost. Every Starlink that burns up dumps about 30 kg of aluminum oxide into the upper atmosphere.

That aluminum is not supposed to be there.


This histogram of Starlink re-entries is updated daily on Spaceweather.com

So far this year (April 28, 2026), 171 Starlinks have reentered, adding more than 5 metric tons (5,000 kg) of aluminum oxide to the stratosphere and mesosphere. How does this compare to natural sources?

The primary natural source is meteoroids -- the same "shooting stars" that streak across the night sky. As they burn up between roughly 75 and 110 km, they release a faint dusting of metals. Recent studies suggest that meteoroids disperse between 40,000 kg and 58,000 kg of Al₂O₃ into the atmosphere each year. Starlink in 2026 is on track to add between 26% and 39% of that natural total.

39% may not sound too bad, but consider the following: The size of the Starlink constellation is rapidly increasing, and SpaceX's competitors are racing to catch up. A full buildout of planned megaconstellations with corresponding re-entries could inject more than 360,000 kg of Al₂O₃ per year -- a 640% excess above natural meteoroids (Ferreira et al. 2024).

It all adds up to a giant uncontrolled experiment in atmospheric chemistry. Researchers already know that aluminum oxides can destroy ozone in a complex series of steps involving Al₂O₃, HCl, AlCl₃, sunlight, Cl, and O₃. Other side-effects may reveal themselves in time.

Stay informed: Daily updated totals of Starlink launches and reentries are posted here on Spaceweather.com.



just a reminder

  good reminders!  


oh yeah...

oh yeah...

Trace's book