Understanding Artificial Intelligence and Religion: Theoretical Explorations

 Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly pervasive across many global societies with healthcare often at the leading edge. However, the incentives for technical innovation and financial gain driving efficient AI healthcare automation can interfere with patient care and increase health inequity. Focusing on developing compassionate AI reorients AI development to improve patient care, health outcomes, and well-being. Palliative dementia care by AI raises many issues around memory, identity, suffering, end of life, and dying well that are significant for world religions, religious scholarship, and the intertwined religious and cultural values informing secular societies. I examine three religious and ethical concerns in AI exemplary compassionate care of those with dementia: the value of exemplary compassion by AI instead of typical, human-level compassion; the nature and ethics of human relationship with compassionate AI; and the implications for caregiver stress and burnout, especially in the context of aggressive personality change in dementia.