a word about my prior research
I've spent the past five to ten years studying the intersections between religion and digital technologies, particularly robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and video games.

I've had the good fortune to spend a summer as Visiting Researcher at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and do ethnographic research in Second Life and World of Warcraft. I have also been a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Researcher and Visiting Scholar at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and been the recipient of a National Science Foundation grant.

Along the way, I published a number of essays (you can see a list at this other page) and a book, Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality.


In my books and essays, I've engaged topics such as mind uploading into robots and virtual reality, the ethics of building intelligent machines, and the Singularity (including its present popularity as seen in publications in Rolling Stone, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the IEEE Spectrum and in the creation of Singularity University). This means extensive reading of authors like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil, among others.

My work has been published in The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, Theology and Science, Implicit Religion, and in edited volumes.
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