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The currency of interfaith work.

It's not hard to understand why, in the words of the deputy director of the St. Philip's Centre, the interfaith centre in Leicester, the currency of interfaith work is food.

What anthropologists call commensality is the practice of eating together, and it's where the natural and the cultural meet.

By natural, I mean that the need for food is universal.

No human being is exempt from hunger.

But what we eat, when we eat it, and how we eat it are shaped by culture and, for the majority of the world's people, by faith.

But then you might find someone, Bishop, who says, you know, maybe that's an indictment of the church, because if people are turning to chatbots for advice, what does that say about the traditional moral and spiritual leaders?

Well, yeah, it's a fair question, but I think it's part of a much larger question, which is that actually within society generally, we know that there is something of an epidemic of loneliness and people therefore turning to chatbots for a whole range of things, companionship, even intimate relationships.

It's something that is taking off particularly among young people.

So I think it's actually it's a broader crisis of how we relate to one another and the need actually, as I would want to argue, for a genuine face to face contact between humans.

So the more we have that, the less need actually there is for AI to be filling any sort of gap.

Is there a danger that faith leaders may be sounding a bit like Luddites, like every generation that fears a new technology coming along?

You're right in the sense of, yes, we've always had this with new technology.

And in a sense, the technology itself is neutral.

Um, but we have to be careful, don't we, of not seeing AI in entirely negative light because it's already played a big role in scientific research, in medicine.

I'm completely with you on that.

Even within the church, I think there's this huge potential actually.

I think the danger, obviously, within it is that, a-again, talking from a religious perspective, you know, we are already seeing online chat box which are replicating, if you like, what a human priest would do within a religious community.

I, I would want to argue that's extraordinarily dangerous.

People think they are interacting with a human being, but they are not.

What do you think the role of the church is in all of that?

The particular question I think that this really pushes to the fore is going to be the question of what is it to be human? So when we start having machines that have a form of intelligence and that can do a lot of the things that we do as human beings, what then is the purpose? What then is the meaning? And, and I do think we have answers to that, that actually, uh, within the Christian understanding of the human being created in the image of God, whoever they are, whatever their capabilities or whatever their background, whatever the opportunities they have or haven't had in life, actually, there is meaning and purpose to each and every human being, and it's how we guard that within, uh, this debate.