This chapter examines the various trajectories of Christian reflection on current and potential developments in artificial intelligence (AI). It reviews the theological questions generated by the emergence of intelligent machines and explores some of the most interesting solutions proposed in response to these quandaries. The first part is dedicated to inquiries about hypothetical AI developments and their potential implications for Christian theology. Could intelligent machines become authentic selves? If so, could they also partake in the image of God? Could the Christian imaginary envisage a future where robots develop their own religiosity and robotheologies? Could robots also aspire to be saved? The second section adopts a theological anthropological angle of inquiry, considering how insights gained from AI may contribute to refining this approach. What do our fascination with AI and our deep desire to create an intelligent other reveal about human nature? How would our theological self-understanding change if intelligent machines became ubiquitous?

Viability is a capacity an organism’s constituents have – the ability to engage in various such as nutrition in an integrated way. It is what makes things compose an organism and what makes an organism alive. To die is to lose that capacity. So things come alive by coming to be organisms, and they die when they cease to be organisms. But in theory an object that dies while it is an organism might later be brought back to life. Since dying is the loss of viability, and nothing is viable while nonexistent, any object that ceases to exist while it is alive dies. Nor may anything be a corpse while it is still an organism. Yet objects that die while they are organisms may continue to exist – they may become corpses. So the dead may exist. Personhood is a phase objects go through while they are organisms that can think. When you and I use the term “I,” we refer to an object that is currently both an organism and a person, but the property of being a person is contingent to organisms, and the property of being an organism is contingent to us.

Chapter 1 demonstrates that in his De legibus William of Auvergne emphasised the differences between animals and humans, regarding them chiefly as tools. God used them to shape human behaviour, both by demanding sacrifice and by granting them symbolic meaning. Demons used them in natural magic. Humans used them as valuable and sometimes necessary property in pursuit of survival, and to ensure proper relations with God. In the De universo, however, William noted significant similarities between animals and humans. Some animals knew and thought in very similar ways to humans. The power of their wills was similar to that of humans. These similarities were most likely to receive attention when William discussed providence or when he analysed animals in order to work out the nature of higher beings on the grounds that if something of lower standing in the hierarchy of being had a power or quality, beings higher up must also possess that same power or quality, though to a greater degree and perhaps with other powers in addition. This last approach meant that William treated animals as a profoundly valuable learning resource, one predicated on the existence of meaningful similarities across the boundaries that structured the hierarchy.