Social Issues

Will Freeman, fellow for Latin America studies at CFR, discusses the political landscape in Latin America and its implications for migration trends, the opioid crisis, and trade relations with the United States. TRANSCRIPT FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations State and Local Officials Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. We’re delighted to have over three hundred fifty participants from forty-six states and U.S. territories confirmed to be with us today. Thank you for taking the time to join this discussion, which is on the record. CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher focused on U.S. foreign policy. CFR is also the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Through our State and Local Officials Initiative, CFR serves as a resource on international issues affecting the priorities and agendas of state and local governments by providing analysis on a wide range of policy topics. We will be sending out the link to this video and transcript after the fact. This discussion is on the record and it will be posted on our website at CFR.org. We are pleased to have Will Freeman with us today. We’ve shared his bio with you so I will just give you a few highlights. Will Freeman is a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His work focuses on the rule of law, corruption and organized crime, elections, constitutional change, and U.S.-Latin America relations. And prior to coming to CFR Dr. Freeman was a Fulbright-Hays scholar in Colombia, Peru, and Guatemala, and worked with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to draft bipartisan legislation and Senate resolutions. So, Will, thanks very much for being with us today. We’ve seen recent elections in Central and South America. I thought you could begin by giving us—setting the stage of talking a little bit about the political landscape in Latin America and the implications for relations, you know, for the United States with countries in Latin America. FREEMAN: Sure. It would be my pleasure. And, first off, thank you so much, everyone, for joining us today. I’m excited to have this conversation. It means a lot to me that you can be here and that I can be here. So in terms of the political landscape, let me start small and then I’ll zoom out. About a month ago I was in Guatemala. As Irina mentioned, it’s a country I’ve been going to for some years now. I was back because the country is holding one of its most consequential elections in generations, really—there was a presidential vote on August 20. And just to put you in my shoes, I mean, as I was following this election in June there was a first-round vote. That’s something common in Latin America where, you know, you’ll kind of weed it down to just the top two vote-getters who go to a runoff for the presidency. Ahead of that first-round vote I had no idea who could come out on the other side of it and that did not, you know, put me in my own camp. That was everybody. Increasingly in Latin America predicting who’s going to win an election is like throwing a dart at a dartboard blindfolded. The region is—the elections in the region and politics have become more unpredictable, more fluid than I think they’ve ever been before. So it was the case in Guatemala. The other thing about Guatemala’s elections, so in that first-round vote, ultimately, you saw an establishment candidate win, a woman who had been in traditional politics for decades, had the oldest political party in Guatemala at her command, and her rival, ultimately, for the runoff was a total outsider who most Guatemalans had never heard of. He had not worked in politics before. But he really, you know, kind of capitalized on that, presented himself as a fresh face. That’s something else that you’re seeing, not just in Guatemala but all over the region, outsiders versus insiders. I’d argue that it’s a more important political division in Latin America right now than left versus right. Increasingly that’s the way voters look at the candidates they have to choose between. It’s not so much, you know, who’s a conservative, who’s a progressive. Sure, that matters a bit, but it’s more about who’s been around forever and who looks like a fresh face who maybe I can trust to do things differently. And then, you know, besides that, voters in Guatemala wanted solutions to problems, which I’d argue dominate the agenda in every Latin American country. Those are security, so public safety, economic growth and opportunities, particularly for the middle class, for the lower middle class, for the poor, and corruption, in that order. Those are really important issues in Latin America today. Again, it doesn’t always break down so much along right and left; it’s more about who can most credibly say that they’re going to solve those problems. And as I alluded to, I mean, often we’re seeing in elections now in the region it’s these political outsiders, it’s these new faces who voters trust to be sort of least entangled, least corrupt, maybe least already enmeshed in the status quo so that they’re actually willing to make changes on these fronts. In terms of implications for U.S. relations, now zooming out beyond Guatemala, right now, obviously, everyone in Latin America knows, recognizes that we’re going through a huge moment of geopolitical realignment. The U.S. is no longer the uncontested hegemon that it once was. We have the rise of China, which is particularly important for Latin America, but also Russia as this sort of increasingly aggressive geopolitical competitor. And I think where Latin Americans see themselves in this situation or their leaders see themselves is trying not to get burned by siding too much with any one external power in all this because Latin America has had, you know, a traumatic experience with us in the past. Some countries, you know, went the way of the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War. Many more stuck with the U.S. In every country there were terrible human rights abuses. In many there were civil wars. The Cold War was devastating for Latin America and the last thing Latin Americans and their leaders want right now is to be wrapped up in a new Cold War. So just to give you a sense of how I think they see this, right, is there’s a lot of fear that as competitions escalate Latin America is going to get pushed and pulled in one direction or the other. I think that also contributes to a lot of the region’s leaders being quite sensitive when they get the message from the U.S. that they’re expected to be obedient or somehow automatically take the United States’ side because they’re, quote/unquote, in a phrase no one likes in the region, “in the backyard of the United States,” right? So I think that if you see, you know, Brazil’s president, for instance, saying controversial things on Ukraine or you see other countries, you know, one by one signing trade deals with China, it’s because they’re trying to build in a degree of buffering against sort of being towed in the direction of the U.S. We might not like that but that’s the reality on the ground and I think it’s one that we have to be cognizant of and we have to deal with. You know, anything that can be seen as kind of bullying from the United States’ side to say, hey, get in line—this is a competition with our rivals—you’re on our side, you know, I think that it’s dangerous and we need to think really carefully about how we try to build and maintain those partnerships, making sure that we’re offering something to make it attractive, right, to partner with the U.S. as opposed to our rivals. So, yeah, I think I’ll wrap it up there in terms of elections and relations with the U.S. But that’s the big picture that I see. FASKIANOS: Thank you, Will. And can you talk a little bit about—give us a little background on the influx of migrants to the United States, how that’s shaping? I mean, this is very much in the news and on top of people’s minds of how we deal with this. FREEMAN: Absolutely. Yeah. And I was just recently about two months ago down in Panama in the Darien Gap, which, you know, is this region of undeveloped jungle that increasingly migrants from Venezuela, from Haiti, but also from all over the world are traveling, making it, ultimately, to the U.S.-Mexico border. So I think the headline we often see is the—just the raw numbers in terms of migrants arriving at and crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are surging past all records. Sure, that’s absolutely true. But I think we’re seeing a qualitative change in migration in the Western Hemisphere, not just a quantitative one. So it’s not just that the numbers are higher. It’s also that the countries from which people are coming are so much more diverse than they were in the past. So in the 2000s you saw, and even back to the 1990s, huge amounts of migration from Mexico and off and on quite a bit of migration from Central America. That continued all the way up until the early 2010s. But what we’ve seen in the last five to maybe ten years is this route opening from South America through Central America, crossing that Darien Gap that I mentioned, and increasingly more and more Venezuelans coming, more and more Ecuadorians coming, more and more Haitians arriving and, you know, what I had the chance to see on the ground was just the sheer quantities of also Chinese nationals, people from Afghanistan, people from West Africa coming. The point I’m trying to make here is that migration in the Western Hemisphere has become global. So this is not Mexico and Central America predominantly anymore. It’s much larger. It’s also a business. So governments in the region have incentives to make migration through their territories as fast as possible because they don’t want to have to deal with the problem and they want it to be low visibility so they don’t suffer consequences with their own voters, right? So I think that that’s led a lot of governments, Panama’s included, to try to basically invisibleize the problem and allow whatever local businesses and criminal groups are already on the ground to continue running this thing, right? So what you’re seeing and—you know, for instance, when I was in Panama or on the Colombian side of the border is that you have local kind of pop-up businesses charging migrants for everything from writing down a river on a canoe to getting on a bus to charging their cell phones. These are exorbitant rates. It’s, honestly, a travesty. But it works from the eyes of everyone, you know, involved locally because locals are making money they didn’t have before, governments get to move people along quickly. I’m telling you all this because I think it makes the problem extremely intractable. We’re seeing an international business setup that moves people to the U.S. or allows them to get there if they have sufficient money and sufficient determination, and I don’t see any way that we’re going to dismantle that anytime soon even with cooperation from our partners. So, you know, I think given what I’ve just described it only makes so much sense to talk about root causes. That was a language that really came into vogue when it was more Central Americans and Central Americans alone who were migrating. But I do think root causes still matter because, of course, even if we can’t stop it there are things we can do to control just this unprecedented flow of people from South America, Central America into the U.S. and elsewhere. And so I think, you know, one thing that in most countries you really need to get right, you need to improve, is not so much, you know, how large are the economies, how many resources are there floating around. Sure, that matters. But it’s also about distribution of opportunities. We’re talking about some of the most unequal countries on earth, unequal not only in their wealth distributions but also in terms of, you know, control of different industries by businesses. In most Latin American countries you have a few very large businesses controlling most sectors, you know, kind of elbowing out competition through all kinds of legal and sometimes, unfortunately, illegal means. What I think you need in a lot of Latin American countries, for instance, in Central America is a real sort of, you know, trust-busting movement that is going to open up space for small and medium-sized enterprises so that normal people who have very few options right now can actually dream of starting a business in their own country and, you know, having kind of prosperity in the future that right now they only see as a possibility if they come to the U.S. So, you know, there is some positive momentum in the region on this. Guatemala’s recently elected president has pledged to push through an antitrust law. But usually—you know, these are very politically sensitive measures. Because the system is the way it is there are a lot of private and even public interests that want to resist any kind of broad economic change. I say all that just to underscore that it’s not just about pumping dollars into the region; it’s about how they’re spread around and who they create opportunities for. Now, I said that the economy is kind of the big issue in most countries but let me focus in on one where the issue is different. That’s Ecuador. You might be hearing more and more about Ecuador because numbers of Ecuadorians arriving in the U.S. have been surging despite the fact that we’re talking about one of the smaller countries in Latin America. Right now Ecuadorians are the third largest group crossing Panama’s Darien Gap. They’re one of the largest groups arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border and I think they’re the second largest right now arriving in New York City where I am right now. So that’s kind of alarming. You know, what’s going on? Well, I just went down to Ecuador a few weeks ago or a few months ago to try to find that out, to try to figure out what was driving so many people to leave. Bottom line is it’s violence. Ecuador right now is caught in a spiral of violence that looks like Colombia in the ’80s in the days of Pablo Escobar or Mexico twenty years ago. The only difference is that Ecuador’s state is so much weaker, has so much less capacity to respond. My biggest worry right now about the region or one of the biggest worries is that, unfortunately, leaders in Washington and elsewhere are going to let Ecuador fly under the radar because it’s a small country. It won’t get the support it needs in time to fight back against the drug cartels and gangs that are making Ecuador into the newest hub for shipping drugs out of Latin America and that we’re going to see the country basically implode. I mean, I hate to imagine something like a second Venezuela but it’s not out of the realm of possibility. So, you know, I really kind of try to champion that cause. I try to talk about it as much as I can. I think we need to focus on Ecuador. It’s at such a vulnerable inflection point. OK. So I’ll leave off there with migration but happy to dig into the specifics in our Q&A. FASKIANOS: Great. And so a few people have written questions already. So if you would like to ask your written question, please raise your hand. Otherwise, I will read your questions. And if you would like to ask a question, if you raise your hand, click on the icon, I will call on you and then accept the unmute prompt. So I’m just seeing if—let’s see. OK. Nobody has raised their hand yet so I will start with Representative Elizabeth Velasco, who represents the House District 57 in western Colorado. How can we push the United States to model the humane treatment of migrants? FREEMAN: I think that’s an excellent question, you know, I think one we should be most concerned with. Look, I’m not an expert on border policy but I do think it starts there. That’s the visible message we send to the world. You know, just today the New York Times published a story on migration and they interviewed Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who was kind of citing the image we saw. You know, we all saw border guards riding horseback and whipping people who were crossing the border. I think that was a year ago, two years ago. That’s devastating for our, you know, international soft power in the region. That can’t be happening. So I think, one, making sure that our, you know, kind of Border Patrol is upholding the highest standards and, you know, putting pressure on necessary officials in Washington to make that happen. But, you know, I think it’s also about what we encourage our partners to do. So in Panama and Colombia this passage, the Darien Gap, is harrowing. I talked to Venezuelans as they were emerging from the jungle. It can take ten but up to twenty days to cross this pretty impassable stretch of land and, you know, along the way migrants are subjected to just the most terrible types of victimization you can imagine, the most terrible crimes. I think we need to be pushing our partners in Colombia and especially Panama to assert more control over this part of their territory. It’s not easy, right, and we need to be helping them. We need to be giving them the resources to do that. But a lot of the worst abuses that occur in the entire migration process are happening in that patch of land. So I think sending that message that, you know, there needs to be accountability for crimes committed against migrants there that matters as well. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. I’m going to take the next question from Bob Kaplan, who’s a councilor in Ashland, Oregon, and I think you touched a little bit upon this but if you would dig into it a little bit more: Where in the United States are nontraditional migrants taking the overland route through Central America and Mexico settling? Are they connecting with prior migrants from their country of origin as was the case for so long for migrants from Mexico and Central America? FREEMAN: Yeah. In terms of migrants from Central America and Mexico I see that is basically the pattern you’re describing. They’re going to the traditional communities, you know, New York, New Jersey, south Texas, southern California, you know, because these are already well-established communities. When I meet people in Guatemala who are leaving usually they know someone in the U.S. and they’re planning to join those communities. I think it’s—you know, it’s the more recent arrivals who don’t have such a track record like this latest wave of Ecuadorians or like arrivals from outside the hemisphere where the distribution, you know, is a little bit more random. FASKIANOS: Thank you. All right. So the next question—written question—is from Canek Aguirre, a council member in Alexandria, Virginia. Is it possible to get a breakdown of this new global migration in terms of percentages from Mexico, Central America, South America, Caribbean, West Africa, and Middle East, North Africa and how it compares to pre-2010 levels? FREEMAN: Yeah. So if you were to search, like, southern border encounters it’s the CBP—page of the CBP website. You can look at the breakdown of arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border based on nationality group going back several years. I think it only gets so fine-grained, like, to have the biggest twenty nationalities or something like that. You can look at those and beyond that it’s like a box that says other. But those resources are out there. FASKIANOS: Thank you. So the next question is from Connecticut Representative Anabel Figueroa: I hear you talking about immigration. I believe the main reasons why many of us have immigrated to this country has to do with violence and economic conditions. In El Salvador, violence has decreased but economic conditions continue to be a challenge. What do you think we can do to help these countries with similar issues? FREEMAN: Well, I think in terms of economics, and maybe we’ll get to this topic, I mean, I see a region that wants to trade with the United States and sees great benefits in that. But what really concerns me is I see a U.S. public that’s increasingly skeptical of trade deals, increasingly unlikely to approve them or vote for politicians who advocate them. So I think that’s really on us. I mean, we need to change the message on trade. I understand there are tradeoffs with—you know, with free trade or whatever you want to call it. But it’s not zero-sum. You know, we also gain here in the United States and, you know, in the form of lower consumer prices. It’s not always an offshoring of jobs that happens, you know, and also it’s a question of who we’re going to trade with. There’s a lot of talk right now about friend shoring, nearshoring so that at least, you know, a lot of our supply chains and trade is happening with partners of ours rather than geopolitical adversaries like China. So, you know, I think there’s appetite in the region. Just look at the case of Ecuador or Uruguay, both of which were clamoring for trade deals with the U.S. But when, you know, they couldn’t get them because there’s just too much political resistance here what did they do? They ultimately signed trade deals with China. So I think it’s something we have to fix domestically. And then in terms of the violence question, you know, I do think there’s a track record of the United States in some cases making a positive improvement. You could look at Plan Colombia, which, you know, in the late 1990s and early 2000s really helped Colombia stabilize and ultimately end up in a more peaceful place than before, not without its blemishes along the way. But, you know, I think that we should be thinking about, you know, why we haven’t been as willing in recent years to invest those same resources in a country like Ecuador. Now, El Salvador, you mentioned, is a troubling case because there the violence has come down under the watch of an authoritarian president who has completely thrown civil liberties to the wind. But he’s extremely popular and, you know, the gang problem in El Salvador was just crippling for the population, as I probably don’t need to tell you, and, you know, Bukele used authoritarian means to get there but homicides are much lower. My concern is that we don’t see democratic approaches to fighting crime throughout the region. We’re going to see more and more leaders following Bukele’s example. You might like that. You might dislike that. But it would be a huge change for the region in terms of the sort of respect typically that’s been maintained at least somewhat for civil liberties while governments went about the business of fighting crime. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. We have several questions now in the chat so let’s see where to go. Let’s go to Karina Macias: You mentioned the situation in Ecuador of increased violence and the influx of organized cartel activity, activity that has been present in other Latin America countries for years. At what point is a summit needed to address this as a crisis with the support of the State Department? FREEMAN: That’s an excellent idea. I’d say yesterday or, you know, maybe last year. As soon as possible. As soon as possible. When I was talking to members of the Foreign Ministry and the foreign minister in Ecuador, you know, he said, this is going to become a failed state in ten years if we don’t have, you know, a huge influx of international support. I will say there’s already good work being done on the ground but I’m just not sure that it’s rising to a high enough priority. So I think something like a summit to bring together, you know, the interagency on the U.S. side with Ecuadorian authorities and, ideally, transition teams from the very—you know, the couple candidates right now who are vying for the presidency. I think that that would be absolutely a step forward. You know, a big concern we have in Ecuador right now is that heading up to the October 15 presidential runoff there you have two candidates, one of whom who’s more likely to maintain a close relationship with the U.S., the other who is more likely to distance herself. You know, what can we be doing right now to try to show that we’re willing to offer assistance no matter who wins? I think that that’s really important because we can’t take it for granted that after October 15 we’re going to have a government in Quito that trusts us to collaborate with them. FASKIANOS: Great. I’m going to take the next question from Thomas Black, who’s an alderperson in San Elizario, Texas: Appreciate all the useful information. I constantly hear the negatives but can you help explain the benefits migration has on a country? FREEMAN: Oh, absolutely. I mean, yeah, I think in my view the benefits outweigh the costs or the negatives, however you want to put it. You know, one, I think, OK, look, we’re in this—we’re in this rising competition with China, a country which is facing a real demographic crisis. It’s probably China’s greatest weakness, along with a slowing economy in the long term. A lot of people are wondering about how the U.S. will compete. I think one of our main advantages is that this is still a country where many people want to come, many young people from Latin America that will, you know, to some extent, I think, if we allow more migration will help, you know, ameliorate our own demographic sort of slowdown, which is a good thing, you know, from the perspective of paying into pension contribution systems, you know, for Social Security, for tax revenue. But a critical caveat on all that is that migrants need to be legal, right? They need to be here paying taxes and a feeling that they can be visible to the system. So I think, you know, there are great benefits to migration, especially on this demographic and economic point. A lot of research shows that. But there also needs to be a new kind of pact or agreement, you know, bipartisan on how we get immigration reform. I know I’m probably sounding like, you know, pie-in-the-sky thinking because we all know the political obstacles to getting anywhere on migration. But I do think if we can solve that part of the problem a lot of those positive impacts of migration will really become tangible very quickly. FASKIANOS: Great. We have another written question from Jaime Patiño, who’s a council member in Union City, California: Would redirecting manufacturing from China to Central and South America slow down the influx of migrants from these regions? FREEMAN: Yeah. You know, I think that the research on economic development and migration is a little mixed. So some scholars have talked about waves of migration and spikes and, like, waves, you know, occurred over decades. They tended to have to do with the demographics of a country, often a country that’s experiencing a youth bulge. And in countries which have sent waves of migrants to the U.S.—think Europe in the nineteenth century or Central America from the 1990s to the 2010s—usually these are actually countries that are undergoing economic growth. So growth doesn’t necessarily limit migration. Sometimes growth even gives you the small amount of capital you need to make your trip to the U.S. So I think we should be realistic that it’s not just, like, creating economic growth is going to have this linear relationship decreasing migration from Central and South America. But there are other reasons we should do it. I think growth will add to the political stability of these parts of the world. I think that they will allow us to have more lasting partnerships as we compete with our geopolitical rivals, again, you know, because we’ll be bringing something to the table. And, you know, for some people they might create an alternative to migrating. But as I said earlier, I think it’s also about how economies are structured. It’s not just, you know, GDP numbers. Right now Guatemala is an upper middle-income country just based on growth numbers. Might sound good but if you’ve ever been to Guatemala most people are not living the lives of people in upper middle-income countries, you know, because of the vast, vast inequalities, high rates of poverty, right? So it’s also about the structure, who gets the opportunities. Yeah. And then, you know, in terms of—one last thing to say on this is in terms of the nearshoring, you know, people often kind of talk with a broad brush about Central America, Mexico, and South America. It’s really Brazil and Mexico that have already the capability to manufacture in a big way. You know, these are two countries with large automobile industries, that have the infrastructure, that have the factories. Elsewhere you’re talking about, you know, so to kind of generalize here about building more from the ground up. So I think it’s worth being realistic that Mexico and Brazil, large, large economies—industrial economies—but the rest of the region it’s a bit of a tougher sell and I think a longer road ahead. FASKIANOS: Great. Representative Elizabeth Velasco has another follow-up question: How can we prepare for a threat of massive deportations if DACA ends? FREEMAN: Yes. I mean, I think it’s a terrifying question, one that concerns me a lot. But, you know, I think that sort of falls within domestic policy. I’m really not sure. I’m sure many of you on the call are much better informed about how to prepare for that in your own communities, you know, with your own constituents. In terms of mass deportation to the region, I mean, I think that it will have really disruptive consequences, one, because you’re uprooting people who are Americans who’ve grown up here, but, two, because we know what happens, you know, when you have mass waves of deportation of people who aren’t ready and don’t want to leave the U.S. I mean, this happened in the 1980s during Central America’s—and 1990s during and after Central America’s civil wars. You had large numbers of people deported, for instance, from California and, you know, that ultimately, you know, created these dislocated communities in El Salvador and elsewhere and laid, you know, the foundation—sowed the seeds of some of the gangs that we see today. So, you know, I think this could be really destabilizing for the region. It’s just one among many reasons to push back, you know, against this threat of ending DACA. But in terms of preparing at the local level, I think you all will know much better than me. FASKIANOS: OK. Councilor Brad Riley from East Hampton, Massachusetts: What are some key agencies or nonprofit and philanthropy stakeholders that can help support municipal governments when we receive caravans of migrants from countries with varying histories of violence and poverty? FREEMAN: Yeah. I mean, again, I think that this is somewhat more of a question on the domestic side, not so much on foreign policy. But I know that the Lutheran Social Services, you know, have been very active across the country in terms of helping new arrivals, you know, integrate, build lives, build communities. So that’s just one organization I look to, and I know my home state of Minnesota, you know, has been very active on these issues. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I want to shift a little bit. You know, we’ve seen some countries in Latin America experiencing democratic erosion. Can you talk about what—how the U.S. can help shore up, take a more active role in preventing democratic backsliding? FREEMAN: Yeah. Sure. So, you know, while we do hear about it, I sometimes think that we hear about it too much given the levels of how much it’s actually happening. You know, I think that—OK, so, like, just take a really broad scope. Look across the world. Latin America, most countries transitioned to democracy between the ’70s and the ’90s. And only in two countries, Venezuela and Nicaragua, have we seen democratic breakdowns. Other countries have teetered close to the brink, but they’ve always rebounded in the right direction. So I think we’re actually talking about probably the region of the world where democracy—new democracies have been most resilient. You look at Southeast Asia, South Asia, West Africa right now, I mean, you see one democracy collapsing often after a military coup—you know, one after the next. Latin America you really don’t see that so it’s something to applaud. Someone earlier asked about, well, we hear all this bad news—I think it was on migration. What’s the good news? Well, let me tell you, you might be hearing a lot of bad news about democracy in Latin America. I think it’s actually one of the region’s biggest accomplishments and something that’s really helping, you know, create stability rather than taking it away. That said, in terms of what the U.S. can do, well, I do think we should applaud just what’s happened in the last few years under the—as long as the Biden administration has been in office. In Brazil, the country came dangerously close to a rupture with the constitutional order. Ex-president Jair Bolsonaro ad certain members, ex-members of the military, seemed intent on conspiring to thwart elections in that country. Now, fortunately, mostly because of Brazilian bottom-up activism but also because of the strong messages sent by the State Department and Washington, we saw that outcome avoided and a peaceful transition of power in Brazil. Right now, Brazil’s doing pretty well. The economy is growing. There’s political stability. You’re not seeing huge protests in the street. That’s something we should all applaud. And it was possible, in part, because the U.S. did play a constructive role. Same thing about Guatemala. On August 20, when I was in the country, everyone was sitting on the edge of their seat wondering if certain anti-democratic forces would try to thwart the elections or overthrow democracy. And fortunately, you know, you also saw the State Department, in a very quiet way, but be active on that country. So I think regardless of which party holds office next, who we see as the next president, just trying to maintain some continuity on that. The message I’ve gotten from this administration is: We don’t care who wins. We just want to see a free and fair process respected. I think it’d be great to see that going forward. And I hope—I really hope that that’s the value that any next, you know, administration or administrations share. FASKIANOS: Thank you. And can you talk about the political trends that we’ve seen, you know, just in response to the U.S. opioid epidemic and the trafficking of fentanyl? FREEMAN: Yeah, sure. So this is the toughest issue. I think, frankly, this is the issue that has to do with the region that’s affecting life in the United States right now most. We all know that around 110,000 Americans died last year from drug overdoses, the lion’s share being from synthetic opioids like fentanyl, which is an absolute tragedy. You know, I think that with the arrival of synthetic drugs—the shift away from biological drugs like cocaine and towards synthetic drugs like fentanyl, I think we’re talking about the end of the drug war, or at least the end of the war on drugs as we know it. One flatbed truck can store enough fentanyl pills to saturate the U.S. market for years—for a year, sorry, one full year—because of how potent these pills are, right? So that just means, you know, in theory, traffickers driving one truck need to get through the U.S. border. That’s it. All the other enforcement we might do for a year, down the drain, right? So I think that that means that, you know, we should be doing everything we can to reduce the amount of fentanyl coming into the country. We’re never going to stop it. And if that’s the case, what should we be focused on? And, again, this falls more into the realm of domestic policy, but I do feel strongly about this. We should be focused on harm reduction and on addiction treatment, as I know, you know, many towns and counties across the country are, about saving lives here in the U.S. I think it’s the only path forward. So what can we be doing, though, to reduce the supply? Because I do think the less fentanyl there is, maybe the more manageable this problem becomes. But we have to be clear-eyed. We have a government in Mexico right now that’s reduced law enforcement cooperation and intelligence sharing with the U.S., that has a strong kind of nationalist component to it. Has had a lot of skepticism about cooperating closely with the U.S. So we’re facing sort of an uphill battle here. But I do think it’s important that we maintain as much of that relationship as we can. We cannot afford to—there’s just no way that we can fight this fentanyl problem without cooperation from Mexico. I think that that means we need to be very careful about the kind of, you know, rhetoric that’s going on in this presidential campaign right now. For instance, talking about sending U.S. troops unilaterally into Mexican soil, I know that that would require congressional approval and, you know, it’s just talk at this point. But I think it’s dangerous talk. It probably makes the current Mexican government sour more on the idea of cooperating with us. I understand where it comes from. I understand all the frustration and all the pain that this issue is causing. But I think we need to try to maintain what cooperation we can with Mexico. The other thing is, you know, Mexico is, at most, in this entire process sort of a toll post on the road of fentanyl going from, you know, Chinese chemical producers to U.S. drug consumers. So, sure, it would be, you know, a huge improvement if Mexico threw all of its resources and, you know, had a serious intention about controlling the kind of incoming precursor chemicals to its ports or the manufacture of fentanyl in drug cartels’ labs. But it wouldn’t, you know, solve the problem unless the precursors stopped coming. So in this—you know, work I did with the Senate Foreign Relations, we did focus on, you know, trying to encourage Treasury to update as often as possible its sanctions against Chinese chemical companies which keep pumping out these new precursors. You know, there is a U.N. working group on this issue involving China. China does pledge cooperation now and again, but I think we need to be keeping up the pressure to make sure that we’re tackling this issue from the source all the way to, you know, where the drugs get consumed here. So I’ll leave it there, but it’s obviously a very complicated problem. And, as I said, I think just the reality of synthetic drugs is that you can’t eradicate them along the way, like you even in theory maybe could with cocaine—although, we all saw that that was very, very difficult and even impossible. But with fentanyl, it’s a hundred times harder. And I think we need to be focused on, you know, treatment and ending addiction here in our communities. FASKIANOS: Thank you. There are several questions just about, you know, how to make sure our migrants get medical attention when they’re entering the U.S. at the border to avoid deaths. and how can you—you know, how can we ensure that illegal migrants are treated vis-à-vis fair pay and equity. I don’t know if those are in your— FREEMAN: I think it would be better suited for an expert on domestic policy. FASKIANOS: Right. So I but I—if anybody wants to share best practices of what they’re doing in their community, you can—you can raise your hand or share your experience in the chat for others to see. So I’m going to take the next question from Council member Heidi Henkel in Broomfield, Colorado. She’s city council member and a county—and a commissioner: I’m also the executive director of a new resettlement agency and we focus on Afghan and Ukrainian refugees, but feel hamstrung with on serving those with no Office of Refugee Resettlement eligibility. Do we know of any federal bills that would fight for more ORR eligibility for our migrants from the south? FREEMAN: Unfortunately, I can’t provide any information about that. FASKIANOS: OK. All right. Looking to see if anybody else has raised their hand. There’s another question about legislative suggestions for rural states that are seeing a rise in their populations. But I think, again, that’s maybe too domestic for this. You talked a little bit—you mentioned—you talked about trade as well. And I thought it would be great if you could maybe, you know, just give us sort of overview of U.S.-Latin trade, and where we are, and what you what you see— FREEMAN: Yeah, sure. So just to recap, you know, some of what I was saying earlier, I do think that—again, it’s a region of countries that wants to trade with the U.S., but unfortunately there’s a lot of political hostility right now to trade in the U.S. A lot of skepticism around it. So, you know, I do think we should temper our hopes about new trade deals. Look, if we can’t figure it out at home this is going to lead to China becoming the majority trading partner everywhere in the region, I think. You know, as I said, you already saw Ecuador, Uruguay lining up to try to get trade deals. Couldn’t happen, so they went with China. But I do think—if we’re going to just accept right now, given the current political moment, free trade deals are off—new FTAs are off the table, there are measures short of that that I think can—you know, can make a positive change. So one is encouraging the Commerce Department to send missions to the region so that, you know, private-sector companies in the U.S. can be fully aware of the opportunities as well, in the region. Commerce sometimes, you know, has a tendency to, for whatever reason, you know, let Latin America slide on the agenda. I think it needs to be higher. More missions need to go. On top of that, I mean, it’s small things, but Latin America is a huge producer of critical minerals, really important for the green transition for EVs. So there’s a few different things on that, that we—that I’d hope to see coming out. You know, one—and these are—it gets a little bit in the weeds. But one is—you know, I think an immediate win would be for the Senate to ratify the U.S.-Chile Bilateral Tax Treaty. That would basically allow Chilean mining to, you know, have, like, fluid relations with the U.S. You know, Chinese companies would no longer be at a huge advantage in in Chile. Beyond that, I think the administration could also think about bringing Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Peru into the existing mineral security partnership. That’s an agreement that, again, kind of creates channels for critical minerals from those countries to be traded with the U.S. with relatively less friction. And, you know, I also think you could, for instance, extend the Semiconductor Supply Chain Mapping Project, which was announced at the North American Leaders Summit, to go beyond Mexico, Canada, and the U.S., to other countries in the region that are prepared for it, like Costa Rica. Very, you know, technical in the weeds, but just to say that—more the reason I bring it up is there are things we can do that don’t require the whole political lift of a free trade agreement. Those are just a few. Last thing I’ll say is that so we—as of a couple years ago, you know, we have this new agency in Washington, the Development Finance Corporation. It’s kind of a remaking of a preexisting agency. And, you know, that’s a really powerful tool. But right now, it’s rules say that it has to prioritize financing lending to low-income countries. As I mentioned earlier, you know, there are countries in Latin America which, just based on the rules we use to slot countries into different categories, they end up as middle-income or upper-middle income, like Guatemala, the case I mentioned, just because of their, you know, GDP numbers. But that’s not talking about sort of the realities for ordinary people in the country, right? So I think that we need more flexibility in the rules that the DFC, or Development Finance Corporation, is bound by when it’s making decisions about lending. It should be—have a much freer hand to prioritize countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, which, again, might look like they’re sort of, you know, middle-income or upper-middle income on paper, but where we have a great urgency of stimulating, you know, economic development and growth. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question from Mayor Jorge Maldonado in Nogales, Arizona: Border Patrol is a very good service here. They check medically and criminal all immigrants that they apprehend. My question is, will the border cities continue to get federal funding to support the efforts of getting these migrants to their destinations and funds to process them? Small cities like ours cannot afford these costs. FREEMAN: It seems to me like that would, you know, really depend on the way the debate goes in Washington. I don’t know. I unfortunately don’t think I can, you know, see the future on that one. But it’s obviously a live topic, you know, the sense that border cities, border states have had to shoulder more of a burden. And now you’ve seen, you know, as a result of some of the, you know, busing from Texas, that there’s really been kind of a reaction on the part of Eric Adams, other mayors, you know, governors of states in the northern part of the U.S. So, you know, I think that eventually there’s going to have to be a longer, sustained political discussion on this that kind of sets up a stable way of doing things, but I can’t see what it’s going to be. FASKIANOS: OK. So the next question is from Evan Reade, who is international affairs advisor for the lieutenant governor of California: Any thoughts you care to share on the upcoming presidential election in Mexico? FREEMAN: Yeah, absolutely. So, look, what’s happened in Mexico is 2018-19 you had the start of the government of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, also known as AMLO. AMLO, comes from the left, but he’s really governed more in the center, center-right. He was, you know, for years trying to win the presidency in Mexico. He felt that he had been thwarted by the traditional political parties in Mexico. So he gets in office. Those parties start to collapse, because everyone’s fed up with all the corruption and violence that’s been raging in Mexico. And it gives him this vacuum, this total window of opportunity to build his own new party and really take control of the state. So that’s what’s happened. Some people call it democratic backsliding. I think there’s some truth to that story. But other people say, look, AMLO was handed this opportunity. He’s just kind of, you know, pushed his political muscle to the limit. And he’s built a strong new party. I think there’s truth to both sides of the story. But what it means is that he’s very well set up to put a successor in office for the next term. So there’s just been a sort of primary process within AMLO’s party Morena, to determine who that successor will be. The woman who came out on top, she is the former mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum. Would be the first woman in the history of Mexico—in Mexico’s history to be president. But, you know, many people worried that she will be a total loyalist to AMLO, won’t question any of his policy decisions, that she’s essentially been chosen because she’s the most loyal soldier. That said, you know, in terms of her own views, she hews a little bit more on the center-left direction. You know, under her would we see the concerning things we’ve seen during AMLO’s presidency—the empowerment of the military beyond all previous levels, you know, continuation of violence? Most likely, I think, we would. They’re pretty intractable issues and the ball’s already rolling on those. So, you know, people are looking at her—at her candidacy in the U.S., I’d say, with some amount of worry. Now, on the other hand, you have an opposition coalition that’s put forward a candidate by the surname Galvez. So she—you know, it looks like a stronger competitor to AMLO’s party than anyone expected to surface in this race. Mostly because, as I mentioned, those traditional political parties that were the opposition feel pretty spent, pretty out of gas. But this new candidate, Galvez, she herself comes from a very humble background. She sort of has a way of connecting with ordinary Mexicans, like AMLO himself. And she’s really been able to, you know, to poke holes in some of his narrative that everything is going well, or better than it used to, in Mexico. She’s focused a lot on the security issue. So I wouldn’t count her out, even though AMLO’s party and has candidate, Sheinbaum, still look like the favorite to win. In terms of what it means for U.S. relations, you know, I do think that because we’re neighbors, we share this huge border and right now Mexico is the biggest trading partner, Mexico and the U.S. will stay close on a number of dimensions, no matter who wins. But I do expect that if the opposition candidate, Galvez, wins, there’ll be less friction in the relationship than if it’s Sheinbaum and AMLO’s party, you know, kind of lives on for another day. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. I’m going to take the next question from Council member Patricia Farrar-Rivas from Sonoma, California, who’s asking about the elements of a fair immigration path. I wanted to just broaden that a little bit. From your time traveling in South and Central America, what have you heard, Will, as the common criticisms of the U.S. immigration system? And how to what—yeah, what others think we should be doing? FREEMAN: Look, at a very high level—and maybe this won’t shock anyone—what I hear time and time again is that I would love to take the legal pathway, but it’s too slow. I can’t wait years, you know, for the problems of violence in my community or the lack of economic opportunity to maybe start to fix itself. You know, I also think just consider the disparities. I mean, in Quito in Ecuador, I was meeting people who, you know, might make $20-30 a day. They know that in Miami they can make $20 an hour, you know, doing a number of construction jobs or, you know, other sort of manual labor, right? So I think just seeing that disparity, the fact that—for instance, a Venezuelan I met told me, you know, if I stay in my community I might work my entire life to have a car and my own apartment. My friends who are already in Florida have those things, right? And they’ve been there a few months. So even if I know this is extremely risky and I’d love to do it a different way, I’m going to go. So I think just hearing those stories firsthand, you know, you kind of realize that unless we speed up the immigration process substantially, there’s going to be no way to deter people from making this journey. Just to underscore that, I mean, you know, if you consider the risks people already face as they’re crossing the Darien jungle in Panama, or, you know, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, where they can be kidnapped, or held for ransom, or extorted for—and put into debt. I mean, you know, when people are already willing to brave all those risks—and being fully aware of them when they set out—I think the, you know, deterrence is just—the way we know it—doesn’t work. The only way is faster legal immigration. FASKIANOS: Which we’ve been trying to do for many years. FREEMAN: Yeah. Yeah, I know, I’m really saying completely revelatory things here, which no one has thought of. FASKIANOS: No, no, no. I mean, it just—it really is, you know, that that seems to be the thing that needs to happen. FREEMAN: But, you know, on that—on that point—and I know, this might seem very naïve or what have you, but I do think this all starts with people’s perceptions on the ground. And I imagine the people on this call, you know, your constituents, your community members, I’m sure have as wide a range of opinions on migration and immigration as the entire American public. But I think working with people to understand these realities and communicate that you can be a fan of it or not, but deterrence, as we’ve been talking about, just I think there’s real limitations to that working as a strategy. If people understand that, I wonder if they won’t—you know, there won’t be more of a bottom-up push for figuring out a path to immigration reform. You know, because as long as some people continue to believe that just by—if you tighten the border enough, it’ll all stop, you know, I think that’s what in a way, from the ground up, stops us from coming to any kind of, you know, political consensus on this. And everyone’s going to have to make concessions, right? But I do think that the change starts—you know, the change starts at the level of voters’ opinions and perceptions. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Oh, I think there was another question. OK, it’s from representative Leonora Dodge: Are there elements from Colombia’s success story that can be replicated in Mexico, even though, due to its geographical proximity to the United States, Mexico is bound to be a major battleground for the trafficking of drugs and human migrants? As the historical saying goes, poor Mexico, so close to the United States, so far away from God. FREEMAN: Yeah. You know, I think that in a sense we’ve already tried to apply those. The Mérida Initiative in Mexico since 2007 put tons of money into the country. Has helped here and there, but it has not achieved the turnaround that Colombia experienced. You know, I think that’s for a number of reasons. But what can we apply from Colombia? I mean, I think one big high-level takeaway is that the military is a very important tool to restore order to a country where it has effectively lost a chunk of its territory and doesn’t have full sovereignty anymore. You need the military. Colombia had to use it to fight against leftist insurgents and right-wing paramilitaries. But the military can’t ultimately solve the problem of organized crime. Soldiers and generals can’t investigate and prosecute crimes, right? They can’t retake control of prisons that have been captured by gangs. They can’t flush out corruption from ports. So if I had a magic wand and was going to change things in Mexico, I would take the ports and, you know, other key institutions out of the hands of the military, which Lopez Obrador has given them, you know, control over his institutions, and work on strengthening the civilian authorities that should be managing those institutions. You know, Mexico’s police force, unlike Colombia’s, is federal. So it has a high degree of autonomy, you know, all over the country. I don’t know if that’s a workable solution indefinitely. You know, you’re talking about a large country where police are, you know, underpaid, and it’s, you know, relatively easy for organized crime groups to co-opt them, to corrupt them. So I think focusing on those civilian institutions, that’s the big lesson to me from Plan Colombia. FASKIANOS: Wonderful. I don’t think we have any more questions. Is there—I’ will leave it to you for any last remarks, Will, what you want to leave the group with before we close. FREEMAN: Sure. No, I’ll just say that I really appreciate you all being here. You know, I, in part, work on this region because I think it’s probably the most important, or one of the most important, to ordinary people in the U.S., you know, in terms of affecting our lives, and we affect, you know, people in the region. So, yeah, I appreciate it. And I’m always—you know, feel free to follow up as well if you didn’t have a chance to formulate your question or didn’t get a chance to ask it. I’m accessible. You can find me on Council on Foreign Relations webpage, and perhaps also in the invitation you received to this event. So thanks again. And I hope I was able to provide you some insight on what I’ve been seeing and hearing in my travels and work throughout the region. FREEMAN: Wonderful. Will, thank you very much for sharing your expertise with us today, and to all of you for joining us. Again, we will send out a link to this webinar recording and transcript. You can follow Will on X at @willgfreeman. And, as always, we encourage you to visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for the latest developments and analysis on international trends and how they’re affecting the United States. And we encourage you to share your suggestions for future webinars by emailing us to [email protected]. So thank you all again for today’s discussion, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.    

Josh Franklin, senior rabbi at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, and Noreen Herzfeld, professor of theology and computer science at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, discuss how AI is affecting religious communities and the relationship between science, technology, and religion. Johana Bhuiyan, senior tech reporter and editor for the Guardian, moderated.  Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program. FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Social Justice Webinar Series, hosted by the Religion and Foreign Policy Program. This series explores social justice issues and how they shape policy at home and abroad through discourse with members of the faith community. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. As a reminder, this webinar is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on CFR’s websites, CFR.org, and on the Apple podcast channel Religion and Foreign Policy. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We’re delighted to have Johana Bhuiyan with us to moderate today’s discussion on religion and AI. Johana Bhuiyan is the senior tech reporter and editor at the Guardian, where she focuses on the surveillance of disenfranchised groups. She has been reporting on tech and media since 2013 and previously worked at the L.A. Times, Vox Media, Buzzfeed News and Politico New York. And she attended Lehigh University where she studied journalism as well as global and religion studies. She’s going to introduce our panelists, have the discussion, and then we’re going to invite all of you to ask your questions and share your comments. So thank you, Johana. Over to you. BHUIYAN: Thank you so much, Irina. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. As Irina said, my name is Johana Bhuiyan, and I cover all the ways tech companies infringe on your civil liberties. And so today we’ll be talking about a topic that’s not completely unrelated to that but is a little bit of a tangent. But we’re talking about “Religion and AI.” And AI is unfortunately a term that suffers from both being loosely defined and often misused. And so I kind of want to be a little bit specific before we begin. For the most part my feeling is this conversation will focus on a lot of generative AI tools and the way that these play a role in religious communities and play a role for faith leaders, and some of the issues and concerns with that. That being said, if the conversation goes in that direction, I will take it there. I would love to also touch on sort of the religious communities’ roles in thinking about and combating the harms of other forms of AI as well. But again, we’ll be focusing largely on generative AI. And today with us we have two really wonderful panelists who come from various perspectives on this. Both are really well-versed in both theology, of course, as well as artificial intelligence and computer science. First, we have Rabbi Josh Franklin, who wrote a sermon with ChatGPT that you may have read in news articles, including one of mine. He is a senior rabbi at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in East Hampton, and he co-writes a bimonthly column in Dan’s Papers called “Hamptons Soul,” which discusses issues of spirituality and justice in the Hamptons. He received his ordination at Hebrew Union College and was the recipient of the Daniel and Bonnie Tisch Fellowship, a rabbinical program exploring congregational studies, personal theology, and contemporary religion in North America. And we also have Noreen Herzfeld, who most recently published a book titled The Artifice of Intelligence: Divine and Human Relationship in a Robotic World. That was published by Fortress, so go out and get a copy. She is the Nicholas and Bernice Reuter professor of science and religion at St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict, where she teaches courses on the intersection of religion and technology. Dr. Herzfeld holds degrees in computer science and mathematics from Pennsylvania State University and a PhD in theology from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Thank you both so much for having this conversation with me. FRANKLIN: Thank you for having us. BHUIYAN: I do want to set the stage a little bit. I don’t want to assume anyone has a very thorough knowledge of all the ways AI has sort of seeped into our religious communities. And, in particular people when they think of ChatGPT and other chatbots like that, they’re not necessarily thinking of, OK, well, how is it used in a sermon? And how is it used in a mosque? Or how is it used in this temple? So, we’ve had the one-off situations like, Rabbi Franklin, your sermon. But I think it’d be great to get an idea of how else you’ve been seeing chatbot and other—ChatGPT and other chatbots using both of your respective worlds and communities. One example I can give before I turn it over is that there was a very short-lived chat bot called HadithGPT, which purportedly would answer questions about Islam based on Hadiths, which is the the life and saying of the Prophet, peace be upon him. But immediately the community was like, one, this is really antithetical to the rich, scholarly tradition of Islam. Two, the questions that people might be asking can’t only be answered by Hadiths. And, three, chatbots are not very good at being accurate. And so the people behind it immediately shut it down. I want to turn it over to, Rabbi Franklin, you first. Is there a version of HadithGPT in the Jewish community? Are you still using ChatGPT to write sermons? Or what other use cases are you seeing? FRANKLIN: I actually did see a version of some kind of parallel within the Jewish world to HadithGPT. It was RabbiGPT, something along those lines. But actually, Google has done a great job already for years answering very trivial questions about Judaism. So if you want to know, where does this particular quote come from in the Torah, and you type it into Google, and you get the answer. And if you want to know how many times you shake the lulav, this traditional plant that we shake on Sukkot, you can find that on Google. ChatGPT, the same in terms of purveying information and actually generating trivial content or answering trivial questions, yeah. That far surpasses any rabbi’s ability, really. It’s a dictionary or encyclopedia of information. But religion goes far beyond answering simple questions. We’re asking major questions, ultimate questions about the nature of life, that I don’t think artificial intelligence is quite there yet. But when you get into the philosophical, the ethical, the moral, the emotional, that’s when you start to see the breakdown in terms of the capabilities of how far artificial intelligence can really answer these kinds of questions. BHUIYAN: Right. And I do want to come back to that, but I first want to go to Noreen. I mentioned that the immediate reaction to HadithGPT was, OK, this is antithetical to the scholarly tradition within Islam. But is there actually a way that religious scholars and religious researchers, or people who are actually trying to advance their knowledge about a particular faith, are using ChatGPT and other chatbots to actually do that in a useful and maybe not scary and harmful way? (Laughs.) HERZFELD: Well, I’m in academia. And so, of course, ChatGPT has been a big issue among professors as we think about, are our students going to be using this to do their assignments? And there’s a lot of disagreement on whether it makes any sense to use it or not. I think right now, there’s some agreement that the programs can be helpful in the initial stages. So if you’re just brainstorming about a topic, whether you’re writing an academic paper, or writing a homily, or even preparing for, let’s say, a church youth group or something, it can be helpful if you say, give me some ideas about this topic, or give me some ideas for this meeting that we’re going to have. But when it comes to a more finished product, that’s the point where people are saying, wow, now you have to really be careful. Within the Christian tradition there are now generative AI programs that supposedly explicate certain verses or pericopes in the Bible. But they tend to go off on tangents. Because they work stochastically in just deciding what word or phrase should come next, they’ll attribute things to being in the Bible that aren’t there. And so, right now I think we have to warn people to be extremely careful. There have been earlier AIs. Like Germany had a robot called BlessU-2. And if someone asked it for a prayer about a particular situation, it would generate a prayer. If someone asked it for a Bible verse that might fit a particular setting, it actually would come out with a real Bible verse. But I think a lot of people—and this goes back to something Josh said, or something that you said about the Hadith—the Christian tradition is an extremely embodied tradition. When you go to mass, you eat bread, you drink wine, you smell incense, you bow down and stand up. The whole body is a part of the worship. And that’s an area that AI, as something that is disembodied, that’s only dealing with words, it can’t catch the fullness. I think one would find the same thing in Muslim tradition, where you’re prostrating yourself, you’re looking to the right and the left. It's all involving the whole person, not just the mental part. FRANKLIN: Yeah, I’d phrase some of that a little bit differently in terms of the biggest lacking thing about AI is definitely the sense of spirituality that AI can generate. And I think part of the reason that is, is that spirituality has to do with feeling more than it does data. Whereas AI can think rationally, can think in terms of data, and it can actually give you pseudo-conclusions that might sound spiritual, at the end of the day spirituality is something that is really about ineffability. That is, you can’t use words to describe it. So when you have a language model or generative language model that’s trying to describe something that’s really a feeling, that’s really emotional, that’s really a part of the human experience, even the best poets struggle with this. So maybe AI will get better at trying to describe something that, up until now, has very much been about emotion and feeling. But at the end of the day, I really don’t think that artificial intelligence can understand spirituality nor describe spirituality. And it definitely can’t understand it, because one of the things that AI lacks is the ability to feel. It can recognize emotion. And it can do a better job at recognizing emotion than, I think, humans can, especially in terms of cameras, being able to recognize facial expressions. Humans are notoriously bad at that. Artificial intelligence is very good at that. So it can understand what you might be feeling, but it can’t feel it with you. And that’s what genuine empathy is. That’s what religion is at its best, where it’s able to empathize with people within the community and be in sacred encounter and relationships with them. And although AI can synthesize a lot of these things that are extraordinarily meaningful for human encounter and experience, it’s not really doing the job of capturing the meat of it, of capturing really where religion and spirituality excel. BHUIYAN: Can I— HERZFELD: I’m sorry, but to underline the importance of emotion, when people talk about having a relationship with an AI, and especially expecting in the future to have close relationships with an AI, I often ask them: Well, would you like to have a relationship with a sociopath? And they’re like, well, no. And I said, but that’s what you’re going to get. Because the AI might do a good job of—you know, as Josh pointed out, it can recognize an emotion. And it can display an emotion if it’s a robot, or if there’s, let’s say, an avatar on a screen. But it doesn’t ever feel an emotion. And when we have people who don’t feel an emotion but might mentally think, oh, but what is the right thing to do in this situation, we often call those people sociopaths. Because they just don’t have the same empathetic circuit to feel your pain, to know what you’re going through. And coming back to embodiment, so often in that kind of situation what we need is a touch, or a hug, or just someone to sit with us. We don’t need words. And words are all the generative AI has. FRANKLIN: I would agree with you like 99.9 percent. There’s this great scene and Sherry Turkle’s book, Alone Together. I don’t know if you read it. HERZFELD: Yes. FRANKLIN: She talks about this nursing home where they have this experimental—some kind of a pet that would just kind of sit with you. It was a robotic pet that would just make certain sounds that would be comforting, that a pet would make. And that people found it so comforting. They felt like they had someone to listen to, that was responding to what they were saying, although it really wasn’t. It was synthetic. And Sherry Turkle, who’s this big person in the tech world, it automatically kind of transformed her whole perspective on what was going on in such an encounter. And she transformed her perspective on technology based on this one little scene that she saw in this nursing home. Because it was sociopathic, right? This doesn’t have actual emotion. It’s faking it, and you can’t be in legitimate relationship with something that isn’t able to reciprocate emotion. It might seem like it. And I know, Noreen, I asked you a question a little earlier—before we got started with this—about Martin Buber, who I do want to bring up. Martin Buber wrote this book exactly 100 years ago, I and Thou, which at the time really wasn’t all that influential, but became very influential in the field of philosophy. And Martin Buber talks about encounter that we have with other individuals. He says most of our transactions that we have between two people are just that, transactional. You go to the store, you buy something, you give them cash, they give you money back, and you leave. But that’s an I-it encounter. That person is a means to an end. But when you’re really engaged with another human being in relationship, there’s something divine, something profound that’s happening. And he says, through that encounter, you experience God, or that spark that’s within that encounter, that’s God. And I have changed my tune during the age of COVID and being so much on Zoom, to say that, actually, I do believe you can have an encounter with another individual on Zoom. That was a stretch for me. I used to think no, no, you can’t do that, unless you have that touch, you have that presence, that physical presence, maybe even through some kind of being with another human being. But in terms of having encounter with artificial intelligence, no matter how much it might be able to synthesize the correct response, it can’t actually be present because it’s not conscious. And that’s a major limitation in terms of our ability to develop relationships or any kind of encounter with something that’s less than human. HERZFELD: Yeah. It seems to fake consciousness, but it doesn’t actually have the real thing. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth said that to have a truly authentic relationship you need four things. And those were to look the other in the eye, to speak to and hear the other, to aid the other, and to do it gladly. And the interesting thing about those four, I mean, to look the other in the eye, that doesn’t mean that a blind person cannot have an authentic relationship. But it is to recognize the other is fully other and to recognize them as fully present. To speak to and hear the other, well, you know, AI is actually pretty good at that. And to aid the other—computers aid us all the time. They do a lot of good things. But then you get to the last one, to do it gladly. And I think there is the real crux of the matter, because to do it gladly you need three things. You need consciousness, you need free will, and you need emotion. And those three things are the three things that AI really lacks. So far, we do not have a conscious AI. When it comes to free will, well, how free really is a computer to do what it’s programmed to do. And then can it do anything gladly? Well, we’ve already talked about it not having emotion. So it cannot fulfill that last category. FRANKLIN: Yeah, it does it almost so well. And I really say “almost.” We really do confuse intelligence and consciousness quite often. In fact, AI can accomplish a lot of the tasks that we accomplish emotionally through algorithms. Now it’s kind of like a submarine can go underwater without gills, but it’s not a fish. It’s accomplishing the same thing but it’s not really the same thing. It’s not living. It doesn’t have anything within it that enables us to be in relationship with it. And that is—yeah, I love that—those four criteria that you mentioned. Those are really great and helpful. HERZFELD: And you just mentioned that it’s not living. When you were talking about the pet in the nursing home, I was thinking, well, there are degrees of relationality. I can be soothed by a beautiful bouquet that somebody brings if I’m in the hospital, let’s say, just looking at the flowers. And certainly everyone knows now that we lower our blood pressure if we have a pet, a cat or a dog, that we can stroke. And yet, I feel like I have a certain degree of relationship with my dog that I certainly don’t have with the flowers in my garden, because the dog responds. And sometimes the dog doesn’t do what I tell her to. She has free will. There’s another story in that same book by Sherry Turkle where instead of giving the patient in the nursing home this robotic seal, they give them a very authentic-looking robotic baby. And what was really sad in that story was that one of the women so took to this robotic baby, and to cradling it and taking care of it, that she ignored her own grandchild who had come to visit her. And Sherry Turkle said at that point she felt like we had really failed. We had failed both the grandchild and the grandmother. And that’s where I think we fail. One of the questions that keeps bedeviling me is what are we really looking for when we look for AI? Are we looking for a tool or are we looking for a partner? In the Christian tradition, St. Augustine said, “Lord, you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” I think that we are made to want to be in relationship, deep relationship, with someone other to ourselves, someone that is not human. But as we live in a society where we increasingly don’t believe in God, don’t believe in angels, don’t believe in the presence of the saints, we’re looking for a way to fill that gap. And I think for many people who are not religious, they’re looking towards AI to somehow fill this need to be in an authentic relationship with an other. BHUIYAN: And we’re talking a lot about sort of that human connection. And, Noreen, you said this in your book, that AI is an incomplete partner and a terrible surrogate for other humans. And it sounds like both of you agree that there is not a world where AI, in whatever form, could sufficiently replace—or even come close to replacing that human connection. But on a practical note Rabbi Franklin, you mentioned Rabbi Google. You know, a lot of faith practices are incredibly, to reuse the word, practice-centric, right? That that is the building block of the spirituality. Within the Muslim community, of course, right, the five daily prayers. There’s a version of this in many different faith practices. And so if people are seeking answers about the practical aspect of their spirituality from a tool even if they’re thinking, yeah, this is a tool. Trust, but verify. If they’re seeking those answers from this tool that has a tendency to hallucinate or make mistakes, is there a risk that they will over-rely on this particular tool, and then that tool can create sort of a friction between them and the community? Because, I’ll admit it, as someone who practices a faith and also is well-versed in the issues with Google and the misinformation that it can surface, I will still Google a couple—(inaudible). I will turn to Google and be, like: How do I do this particular prayer? I haven’t done it in a very, very long time. And of course, I’m looking through and trying to make sure that the sources are correct. But not everyone is doing that. Not everyone is going through with a fine-tooth comb. And ChatGPT, given how almost magical it feels to a lot of people, there is even less of a likelihood that they will be questioning it. And it is getting more and more sophisticated. So it’s harder to question. So is there a concern within religious communities that this tool will become something that will create even one more obstacle between a person and their faith leader, or their clergy, or their local scholars? FRANKLIN: I don’t seem that worried about it. I think what synagogues and faith-based communities do is something that’s really irreplicable by ChatGPT. We create community. We create shared meaningful experience with other people. And there is a sense that you need physical presence in order to be able to do that. Having said that, yeah, I use ChatGPT as a tool. I think other people will use it too. And it will help a lot with how do you get the information that you need in a very quick, accessible way? Sometimes it’s wrong. Sometimes it makes mistakes. I’ll give you an example of that. I was asking ChatGPT, can you give me some Jewish texts from Jewish literature on forgiveness? And it gives me this text about the prodigal son. And I typed right back in, and I said: That’s not a Jewish text. That’s from the Gospels. And it says, oh, you’re right. I made a mistake. It is from the Gospels. It’s not a Jewish text. I actually thought the most human thing that it did in that whole encounter was admit that it was wrong. Maybe that’s a lack of human—because human beings have an inability often to admit that we were wrong, but I actually love the fact that it admitted, oh, I made a mistake, and it didn’t double down on its mistake. It’s learning and it’s going to get better. I think if we measure artificial intelligence by its current form, we’re really selling it short for what it is going to be and how intelligent it actually is. And, by the way, I think it is extraordinarily intelligent, probably more intelligent than any of us. But we have human qualities that artificial intelligence can never really possess. And I think the main one, which we already touched on, is the idea of consciousness. And I think the experiences that you get within a faith-based community are those experiences that specifically relate to human consciousness and not relate to human—not developing intelligence. People don’t come to synagogue to get information. I hope they go to ChatGPT or Google for that. That’s fine. People come to synagogue to feel something more within life, something beyond the trivial, something that they can’t get by reading the newspaper, that they can’t get by going on Google. It’s a sense of community, a sense of relationship. And so I don’t think that there can be a way that artificial intelligence is going to distract from that. Yeah, I guess it’s possible, but I’m not too worried about it. BHUIYAN: And—go ahead, Noreen, yeah. HERZFELD: I was just going to say, I think you need to be a little careful when you say it’s more intelligent than we are. Because there are so many different kinds of intelligence. FRANKLIN: Yes. IQ intelligence, let me qualify. HERZFELD: If intelligence is just having immediate access to a lot of facts, great, yeah. It’s got access we don’t have. But if intelligence is having, first of all, emotional intelligence, which we’ve already discussed. But also just having models of the world. This is often where these large language models break down, that they don’t have an interior model of the world and the way things work in the world, whether that’s the physical world or the social world. And so they’re brittle around the edges. If something hasn’t been discussed in the texts that has been trained on, it can’t extrapolate from some kind of a basic model, mental model that—which is the way we do things when we encounter something brand new. So, in that sense, it’s also lacking something that we have. BHUIYAN: There’s a question from the audience that I think is a good one, because it sounds to me, and correct me if I’m wrong, that, Noreen, you in particular believe that the doomsday scenario that people are always talking about, where AI becomes sentient, takes over, is more—we become subservient to AI, is unlikely. And, OK. And so the question from the audience is that, it seems like most of the arguments are, we can tell the difference so AI won’t replace human connection. But what happens if and when AI does pass the Turing test? Is that something that you see as a realistic scenario? HERZFELD: Oh, in a sense we could say AI has already passed the Turing test. If you give a person who isn’t aware that they’re conversing with ChatGPT sometime to converse with it, they might be fooled. Eventually ChatGPT will probably give them a wrong answer. But then, like Josh said, it’ll apologize and say, oh yeah, I was wrong. Sorry. So we could say that, in a sense, the Turing test has already been passed. I am not worried about the superintelligent being that’ll decide that it doesn’t need human beings, or whatever. But I’m worried about other things. I mean, I think in a way that that’s a red herring that distracts us from some of the things we really should be worried about. And that is that AI is a powerful tool that is going to be used by human beings to exert power over other human beings. Whether it’s by advertently or inadvertently building our biases into this tool so that the tool treats people in a different fashion. I’m also worried about autonomous weapons. They don’t need to be superintelligent to be very destructive. And a third thing that I’m worried about is climate change. And you might say, well, what has that got to do with AI? But these programs, like the large language models, like ChatGPT, take a great deal of power to train them. They take a great deal of power to use them. If you ask a simple question of ChatGPT instead of asking Google, you’re using five to ten times the electricity, probably generated by fossil fuels, to answer that question. So as we scale these models up, and as more and more people start using them more and more of the time, we are going to be using more and more of our physical resources to power it. And most of us don’t realize this, because we think, well, it all happens in the cloud. It’s all very clean, you know. This is not heavy industry. But it’s not. It’s happening on huge banks of servers. And just for an example, one of Microsoft’s new server farms in Washington state is using more energy per day than the entire county that it’s located in. So we just are not thinking about the cost that underlies using AI. It’s fine if just a few people are using it, or just using it occasionally. But if we expect to scale this up and use it all the time, we don’t have the resources to do that. BHUIYAN: Yeah, and you mentioned electricity. A couple of my coworkers have done stories about the general environmental impact. But it’s also water. A lot of these training models use quite a bit of water to power these machines. HERZFELD: To cool the machines, yeah. BHUIYAN: And so yeah, I’m glad that you brought that up, because that is something that I think about quite a bit, covering surveillance, right? Religious communities are this sort of, incredibly strong communities that can have a really huge social impact. And we’ve had various versions of AI for a very, very long time that have harmed some religious communities, other marginalized groups. You mentioned a couple of them. Surveillance is one of them. There’s also things that feel a little bit more innocuous but there’s bias and discrimination built into them like hiring algorithms, mortgage lending algorithms, algorithms to decide whether someone should qualify for bail or not. And so my general question is, is there a role that religious communities can play in trying to combat those harms. How much education should we be doing within our communities to make sure people are aware that it’s not just the fun quirky tool that will answer your innocuous question. AI is also powering a lot more harmful and very damaging tools as well. FRANKLIN: I’d love for religious leaders to be a part of the ethics committees that sit at the top of how AI decides certain decisions that are going to be a part of everyday real life. So, for example, when your self-driving car is driving down the road and a child jumps out in the middle of the street your car has to either swerve into oncoming traffic, killing the driver, or hit the child. Who’s going to decide how the car behaves, how the artificial intelligence behaves? I think ethics are going to be a huge role that human beings need to take in terms of training AI and I think religious leaders as well as ethicists, philosophers, really need to be at the head, not the lay leadership programmers or the lay programmers. Not the lay but they’re not really trained in ethics and philosophy and spirituality, for that matter, and religion. I really think that we need to be taking more of an active role in making sure that the ethical discussions of the programming of artificial intelligence have some kind of strong ethical basis because I think the biggest danger is who’s sitting in the driver’s seat. Not in the car scenario but, really, who’s sitting in the driver’s seat of the programming. BHUIYAN: Noreen, do you have anything to add onto that? HERZFELD: No, I very much agree with that. I do think that if we leave things up to the corporations that are building these programs the bottom line is going to be what they ultimately consult. I know that at least one car company—I believe it’s Mercedes-Benz—has publicly said that in the scenario that Josh gave the car is going to protect the driver. No matter how many children jump in front of the car the car will protect the driver and the real reason is that they feel like, well, who’s going to buy a car that wouldn’t protect the driver in every situation. If you had a choice between a car that would always protect the driver and a car that sometimes would say, no, those three kids are more valuable— FRANKLIN: And that’s a decision made by money, not made by ethics. HERZFELD: Exactly. FRANKLIN: Yeah. BHUIYAN: Right. Rabbi Franklin, I have a question. There’s a good follow-up in the audience. Are there ethics committees that you know of right now that are dealing with this issue, and then the question from the audience from Don Frew is how do we get those religious leaders into those committees. FRANKLIN: We have to be asked, in short, in order to be on those committees. I don’t know if it’s on the radar even of these corporations who are training AI models. But I think there are going to be very practical implications coming up in the very near future where we do need to be involved in ethical discussions. But there are religious leaders who sit on all sorts of different ethics committees but as far as I know there’s nothing that’s set up specifically related to AI. That doesn’t mean there isn’t. I just don’t know of any. But, if you were to ask me, right now we’ve seen articles about the decline of humanities in college and universities. I would actually say that humanities is—if I had to make a prediction is probably going to make a comeback because these ethical, philosophical, spiritual questions are going to be more relevant than ever, and if you’re looking at programming and law and the medical industry and medicine those are actually things where AI is going to be more aggressive and playing a larger role in doing the things that humans are able to do. BHUIYAN: Right. I do want to bring the question or the conversation back to, you know, religion, literally. In your book, Noreen, you bring up a question that I thought was just so fascinating, whether we should be deifying AI and it sounds like the short answer is no. But my fascination with it is how realistic of a risk is that, and I know there’s one example that I just knew off the top of my head was the Church of AI, which has been shut down and was started by a former Google self-driving engineer who was later pardoned for stealing trade secrets. His name is Anthony Levandowski. So, yeah, take what he says with a grain of salt, I guess is what I’m saying. But the church was created to be dedicated to, quote, “The realization, acceptance, and worship of a godhead based on AI developed through computer hardware and software.” Is this a fluke? Is this a one off? Do you think there’s, like, a real risk of as AI gets more sophisticated people will be sort of treating it as, like, a kind of god like, I don’t know, figure, if that’s the right word, but some sort of god? FRANKLIN: It sounds like a gimmick to me. I mean, look, it’s definitely going to capture the media headlines for sure. You do something new and novel like that no matter how ridiculous it is people are going to write about it, and it’s not surprising that it failed because it didn’t really have a lot of substance. At least I hope the answer is no, that that’s not going to be a real threat or that’s not going to be a major concern. Who knows? I mean, I really think that human beings are bad at predicting the future. Maybe AI will be better at predicting the future than we are. But my sense, for what it’s worth, is that no, that’s not really a concern. HERZFELD: Well, I would be a little more hesitant to say it’s not any type of a concern. I do not think there are going to be suddenly a lot of churches like the one you mentioned springing up in which people deify AI with the same sorts of ways in which we’ve worshipped God. But, we worship a lot of stuff. We worship money all too often. We worship power. And we can easily worship AI if we give it too much credence. If we really believe that everything it says is true, that what it does is the pinnacle of what human beings do and this is what worries me is that if we say, well, it’s all about intelligence, I’ve often thought, well, we’re trying to make something in our own image and what we’re trying to give it is intelligence. But is that the most important thing that human beings do? I think in each of our religious traditions we would say the most important thing that human beings do is love and that this is something that it can’t do. So my worry is that—because in some ways we’re more flexible than machines are and as the machines start to surround us more, as we start to interact with them more we’re going to, in a sense, make ourselves over in their image and in that way we are sort of deifying it because when we think about—in the Christian tradition we talk about deification as the process of growing in the image and likeness of God, and if instead we grow in the image and likeness of the computer that’s another way of deifying the computer. BHUIYAN: I want to turn it over to audience questions; there are some hands raised. So I want to make sure that we get some of them in here as well. OPERATOR: Thank you. We will take the next question from Rabbi Joe Charnes. CHARNES: I appreciate that there are potential benefits from AI. That’s simply undeniable. The question I have is and the concern that I have that I think you certainly both share and I don’t know the way around it is as humans we do often relate to human beings. That’s our goal in life. That’s our purpose. But human relationships are often messy and it’s easier to relate to disembodied entities or objects, and I see people in the religious world relating now through Zoom. Through their Zoom sessions they have church so they’re relating to church and God through a screen, and when you speak of ethics and spirituality, Rabbi, of somehow imposing that or placing that into this AI model I don’t see how you can do that and I do fear we lean—if there’s a way out of human connection but modeling human connection to some extent I do fear we’re going to really go in that direction because it’s less painful. FRANKLIN: So I’ll try to address that. There’s a great book that’s going to sound like it’s completely unrelated to this topic. It’s by Johann Hari and the book is called Chasing the Scream. What he argues is that, generally, addiction is not about being the opposite of sobriety. Addiction is about being disconnected from other individuals and using the substance or a thing as a proxy for a relationship that we have with other people. Love that idea. I think there is a huge danger that artificial intelligence can be just that, the proxy for human relationship when we’re lonely, when we’re disconnected from others, and it’s going to be the thing that we are going to turn to. I would even echo Noreen’s fear that we end up turning to AI in very inappropriate ways and making it almost idolatrous, that when we say deifying it what we’re really doing is idol worshipping AI as something that really won’t actually give you the connection even though you think that it will. I think that’s a very legitimate fear. Having said that, I think that AI is going to be a great tool for the future if it’s used as a tool. Yes, there are tremendous amount of dangers with new technology and newness. Every single new innovation, every single revolutionary change technologically has come with huge dangers and AI is no different. I hope we’re going to be able to figure out how to really put the correct restrictions on it, how to really make sure that the ethics of AI has involvement from spiritual leaders and ethicists and philosophers. Am I confident that we’ll be able to do that? I don’t know. I think we’re still at the very beginning stages of things and we’ll see how it develops. HERZFELD: Two areas that I worry about because these are areas that people are particularly looking at AI are the development of sex bots, which is happening, and the use of AI as caregivers either for children or for the elderly. But particularly for the elderly this is an area that people are looking at very strongly. I think for religious leaders the best thing that you can do is to try to make sure that the people in your congregation—to do everything you can to foster the relationships among the people because as Josh was saying, we’ll use this as a substitute if we don’t have the real thing. But if we are in good and close and caring relationships with other human beings then the computer will not be enticing as a substitute and we might merely use it as a tool or just not bother with it at all. So I think what we really need to do is tend to the fostering of those relationships and particularly for those that are marginalized in some ways, whether it’s the elderly, whether it’s parents with children, particularly single parents who might be needing help, and whether it’s those that are infirm in some way. OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Ani Zonneveld of Muslims for Progressive Values. ZONNEVELD: Hi. Good morning. Good afternoon. You had raised that question, Johana, about what are the faith communities doing or can contribute to a better aggregated response on AI and I just wanted to share that members of our community has been creating images of, for example, women leading prayer in Muslim communities. So that those are some of the aggregated information that could be filtered up into the way AI is being used as a tool. So I think, at the end of the day, the AI system works as an aggregate of pulling in information that’s already out there and I think it’s important for us in the faith communities to create the content itself from which the AI can pull, and that also overcomes some of the biases, particularly the patriarchal interpretations of faith traditions, for example, right? The other thing I wanted to also share with everyone is that there’s a real interest in it at the United Nations. That is being led by an ethics professor from the university in Zurich. I taught a master’s ethics class there as a person of faith and so there’s this international database system agency that is being created at the UN level. Just thought I would share that with everyone. Thanks. FRANKLIN: Thank you. HERZFELD: And I would also share that the Vatican is working on this as well. I am part of a committee that’s part of the dicastery of culture and education and we’ve just put together a book on AI and the Pope is going to be using his address on January 1 on the Day of World Peace to address AI as a topic. FRANKLIN: I’m pretty sure rabbis across the country right now are going to be writing sermons for tomorrow, which begins Rosh Hashanah, our high holiday season, and many rabbis—most rabbis, perhaps—are going to be preaching about AI. OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Shaik Ubaid from the Muslim Peace Coalition. UBAID: Thank you for the opportunity. Can you hear me? BHUIYAN: Yes. UBAID: Overall, we are sort of sort of putting down AI because it does not have the human qualities of empathy. But if instead of that we focus on using it as a tool whether in educating the congregations or jurisprudence then we would be using it. When it comes to the human quality, another quality is courage. We may have the empathy, but many times we do not show the courage. For example, we see pogroms going on in India and an impending genocide. But whether it be the—a (inaudible) chief or the chief rabbi of Israel or the Vatican, they do not say a word to Modi, at least publicly, to put pressure, and same with the governments in the West. And sometimes their mouthpieces in the U.S. are even allowed to come and speak at respectable fora, including sometimes even in CFR. So instead of expecting too much from the AI we should use it with its limitations and sometimes the bias and the arrogance that we show thinking that we are humans, of course, we are superior to any machine. But many times we fail ourselves. So if the machines are failing us that should not be too much of a factor. Thank you. FRANKLIN: Very well said. HERZFELD: Yeah. BHUIYAN: There are other audience questions that sort of build on that. We’re talking about humans having bias and our own thoughts sort of being a limiting factor for us. But, obviously, these machines and tools are being built by humans who have biases that may be and putting them into the training models. And so one of the questions or one of the topics that Frances Flannery brought up is the ways in which AI is circumventing our critical thinking. We talked about over reliance on these tools within the faith practice but is there—beyond that, right? We talked about AI when it comes to very practical things like these practices that we do. I understand it doesn’t replace the community and it doesn’t replace these spaces where we’re seeking community. But people are asking questions that are much more complex and are not trivial and are not just the fundamentals of the religion. Is there a concern with people using chat bots in place of questioning particular things or trying to get more knowledge about more complex topics? FRANKLIN: I would actually just kind of respond by saying that I don’t think AI circumvents critical thinking. I actually think it focuses us to think more critically, and by getting rid of the trivial things and the trivial data points and rational kind of stuff that AI can actually do and piece together and solve even just complex IQ-related issues it focuses us to think about more critical issues in terms of philosophy, in terms of faith and spirituality and theology, all things that I think AI might be able to parrot. But it can’t actually think creatively and original thoughts. So I actually think that AI gets rid of the dirty work, the summaries of what other people have said, maybe even generating two ideas together. But really true creativity, I think, is in the human domain and it’s going to force us to think more creatively. Maybe I’m just an optimist on that but that’s my sense. HERZFELD: And I’ll give the more pessimistic side, which is not to say—I mean, I believe that everything that Josh just said is correct. My concern is that we might end up using AI as a way to evade responsibility or liability. In other words, if decisions are made—Johana, you were talking earlier about how we use AI to decide who gets bail, who gets certain medical treatments, these things, and if we simply say, well, the computer made a decision and we don’t think critically about whether that was the right decision or whether the computer took all things into account I think we need to think about the same thing when we look at autonomous weapons, which are really coming down the pike, and that is how autonomous do we really want them to be. We can then, in a way, put some of the responsibility for mistakes that might be made on the battlefield onto the computer. But in what sense can we say a computer is truly responsible? So I do fear that as long as we use it as a component in our decision-making, which I think is what Josh was saying, this can be a powerful tool. But when we let it simply make the decision—and I’ve talked to generals who are worried about the fact that if we automate warfare too much the decision—the pace of warfare may get to be so fast that it’s too fast for human decision-makers to actually get in there and make real decisions and that’s a point where we’ve then abdicated something that is fully our responsibility and given it to the machine. FRANKLIN: Let’s not forget, though, how strong human biases are. I mean, read Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow and you’ll see all these different heuristics for human bias that are unbelievable. Going to the realm of bail, there was a study that showed that judges who haven’t had their lunch yet are much more likely to reject bail than those who just came out of their lunch break. I mean, talk about biases that exist in terms of the ways that we make decisions. I would say that ultimately although there are biases that we implant within these algorithms that will affect the way that outcomes actually come out probably artificial intelligence and these algorithms are going to do a better job than human beings alone. Having said that, to echo Noreen, when we use them in tandem with human decision-making I think we get the best of both worlds. BHUIYAN: Right. I mean, there are so many examples. Forget warfare and other places. I mean, in policing it happens all the time, right? There’s facial recognition tools that are intended to be used as sort of a lead generator or something that—a tool in an investigation. But we’ve seen time and again that it’s being used as the only tool, the only piece of evidence that then leads to the arrest and false incarceration of many, often black, people. And, again, to both of your points, it’s because of the human biases that these AI tools, particularly when used alone, are unable to—I mean, they’re just going to do what the human was going to do, too—the human with the bias was going to do as well. And I have seen in my reporting that there are a lot of situations where police departments or other law enforcement agencies will kind of use that as an excuse just like you said, Noreen, or sort of, like, well, the computer said, and they validated our data so it must be right. So I do think that there’s a little bit of the escape of liability and responsibility as well. We don’t have a ton more time and, Noreen, you talked a little bit about some of your major fears. Rabbi Franklin, you’re a little bit more optimistic about this than maybe Noreen or even I am. I would like to hear what your great fears of this tool are. FRANKLIN: My biggest fear is that it’s going to force me to change and, look, I think that’s a good thing, ultimately, but change is always really scary. I think I’m going to be a different rabbi five years from now, ten years from now than I am right now and I think AI is going to be one of the largest reasons for that. I think it’s going to force me to hone certain abilities that I have and really abandon and rely on artificial intelligence for other ones. And even going back to the original thought experiment that involved me in this conversation to begin with, which was using AI to write a sermon or ChatGPT to write a sermon at the very beginning of its infancy of ChatGPT, really, what a sermon looks like is going to be profoundly different. And it was part of one of the points that I was making when I actually delivered that original sermon. The only thing that was scripted was the part that was written by AI. Everything else was a conversation, back and forth questioning, engagement with the community who was there. I think sermons are going to look more like that, more like these kind of conversations than they will a scripted, written, and delivered words that come from a paper and are just spoken by a human being. Rabbis, preachers, imams, pastors, priests, are not going to be able to get away with that kind of homiletical approach. We’re going to have to really radically adapt and get better at being rabbis and clergy with different skill sets than we currently have, and that’s scary. But at the same time it’s exciting. BHUIYAN: And, Noreen, to end on a positive note, is there anything that you see that ChatGPT or other forms of generative AI or AI, broadly, what are some of the most positive ways that you see these tools being used in the future? HERZFELD: Well, we haven’t even mentioned tools that work with images is like DALL-E or Midjourney. But I think that those tools have sparked a new type of creativity in people, and I think if there’s a theme that goes through everything that the three of us have said today it’s a great tool, bad surrogate—that as long as we use this as a tool it can be a very good tool. But it’s when we try to use it as a complete replacement for human decision-making, for human courage, for human critical thinking, for human taking of responsibility, that we realize that just as we are flawed creatures we’ve created a flawed creature. But in each of our religious traditions I think we hold dear that what we need to do is love God and love each other and that we as religious people keep raising that up in a society that views things instrumentally. BHUIYAN: Thank you both. I am just going to turn it over to Irina now. FASKIANOS: Yes. Thank you all. This was a really provocative and insightful discussion. We really appreciate it. We encourage you to follow Rabbi Josh Franklin’s work on rabbijoshfranklin.com. Noreen Herzfeld is at @NoreenHerzfeld and Johana is at @JMBooyah—it’s B-O-O-Y-A-H—so on X, formally known as Twitter. And, obviously, you can follow Johana’s work in the Guardian. Please, I commend Noreen’s book to you. And please do follow us on Twitter at @CFR_religion for announcements and other information. And please feel free to email us at [email protected] with suggestions for future topics and feedback. We always look forward to hearing from you and soliciting your suggestions. So, again, thank you all for this great conversation. We appreciate your giving us your time today and we wish you a good rest of the day.