Sen. Lindsey Graham, Donald Trump -- (screeshot/AFP)
Deep within the many revelations in Bob Woodward's book "Fear" on the administration of President Donald Trump is a revelation that aides to the volatile president deployed some U.S. senators to talk Trump out of making rash decisions while they spent time golfing with him.
According to the Washington Post, White House aides wishing to manipulate the president would provide talking points to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) or Bob Corker (R-TN) before golf outings with Trump in hopes of preventing the president from making rash or disastrous policy decisions.
The Post writes, "White House legislative aides would prep them on helpful messages they were trying to share or 'disasters they were trying to divert,' according to a former senior administration official. A current senior administration official defended the practice as 'standard staff work in any White House.'"
The report goes on to state that former White House Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus would backburner Trump's requests for someone to be fired or policies to be put in place, by telling the president it would happen "next week," then dropping it entirely knowing Trump would have forgotten what he had asked for.
It isn’t just artists and teachers who are losing sleep over advances in automation and artificial intelligence. Robots are being brought into Hinduism’s holiest rituals – and not all worshippers are happy about it.
In 2017, a technology firm in India introduced a robotic arm to perform “aarti,” a ritual in which a devotee offers an oil lamp to the deity to symbolize the removal of darkness. This particular robot was unveiled at the Ganpati festival, a yearly gathering of millions of people in which an icon of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, is taken out in a procession and immersed in the Mula-Mutha river in Pune in central India.
Yet this kind of religious robotic usage has led to increasing debatesabout the use of AI and robotic technology in devotion and worship. Some devotees and priests feel that this represents a new horizon in human innovation that will lead to the betterment of society, while others worry that using robots to replace practitioners is a bad omen for the future.
Ganesha aarti being done by a robotic arm.
As an anthropologist who specializes in religion, however, I focus less on the theology of robotics and more on what people actually say and do when it comes to their spiritual practices. My current work on religious robots primarily centers on the notion of “divine object-persons,” where otherwise inanimate things are viewed as having a living, conscious essence.
My work also looks at the uneasiness Hindus and Buddhists express about ritual-performing automatons replacing people and whether those automatons actually might make better devotees.
Ritual automation is not new
Ritual automation, or at least the idea of robotic spiritual practice, isn’t new in South Asian religions.
Historically, this has included anything from special pots that drip water continuously for bathing rituals that Hindus routinely perform for their deity icons, called abhisheka, to wind-powered Buddhist prayer wheels – the kinds often seen in yoga studios and supply stores.
While the contemporary version of automated ritual might look like downloading a phone app that chants mantras without the need for any prayer object at all, such as a mala or rosary, these new versions of ritual-performing robots have prompted complicated conversations.
Thaneswar Sarmah, a Sanskrit scholar and literary critic, argues that the first Hindu robot appeared in the stories of King Manu, the first king of the human race in Hindu belief. Manu’s mother, Saranyu – herself the daughter of a great architect – built an animate statue to perfectly perform all of her household chores and ritual obligations.
Visvakarman, considered to be the architect of the universe in Hindu belief.
Folklorist Adrienne Mayorremarks similarly that religious stories about mechanized icons from Hindu epics, such as the mechanical war chariots of the Hindu engineer god Visvakarman, are often viewed as the progenitors of religious robots today.
Furthermore, these stories are sometimes interpreted by modern-day nationalists as evidence that ancient India has previously invented everything from spacecraft to missiles.
Modern traditions or traditionally modern?
However, the recent use of AI and robotics in religious practice is leading to concerns among Hindus and Buddhists about the kind of future to which automation could lead. In some instances, the debate among Hindus is about whether automated religion promises the arrival of humanity into a bright, new, technological future or if it is simply evidence of the coming apocalypse.
In other cases, there are concerns that the proliferation of robots might lead to greater numbers of people leaving religious practice as temples begin to rely more on automation than on practitioners to care for their deities. Some of these concerns stem from the fact that many religions, both in South Asia and globally, have seen significant decreases in the number of young people willing to dedicate their lives to spiritual education and practice over the past few decades. Furthermore, with many families living in a diaspora scattered across the world, priests or “pandits” are often serving smaller and smaller communities.
But if the answer to the problem of fewer ritual specialists is more robots, people still question whether ritual automation will benefit them. They also question the concurrent use of robotic deities to embody and personify the divine, since these icons are programmed by people and therefore reflect the religious views of their engineers.
Doing right by religion
Scholars often note that these concerns all tend to reflect one pervasive theme – an underlying anxiety that, somehow, the robots are better at worshipping gods than humans are. They can also raise inner conflicts about the meaning of life and one’s place in the universe.
For Hindus and Buddhists, the rise of ritual automation is especially concerning because their traditions emphasize what religion scholars refer to as orthopraxy, where greater importance is placed on correct ethical and liturgical behavior than on specific beliefs in religious doctrines. In other words, perfecting what you do in terms of your religious practice is viewed as more necessary to spiritual advancement than whatever it is you personally believe.
This also means that automated rituals appear on a spectrum that progresses from human ritual fallibility to robotic ritual perfection. In short, the robot can do your religion better than you can because robots, unlike people, are spiritually incorruptible.
This not only makes robots attractive replacements for dwindling priesthoods but also explains their increasing use in everyday contexts: People use them because no one worries about the robot getting it wrong, and they are often better than nothing when the options for ritual performance are limited.
Saved by a robot
In the end, turning to a robot for religious restoration in modern Hinduism or Buddhism might seem futuristic, but it belongs very much to the present moment. It tells us that Hinduism, Buddhism and other religions in South Asia are increasingly being imagined as post- or transhuman: deploying technological ingenuity to transcend human weaknesses because robots don’t get tired, forget what they’re supposed to say, fall asleep or leave.
More specifically, this means that robotic automation is being used to perfect ritual practices in East Asia and South Asia – especially in India and Japan – beyond what would be possible for a human devotee, by linking impossibly consistent and flawless ritual accomplishment with an idea of better religion.
Modern robotics might then feel like a particular kind of cultural paradox, where the best kind of religion is the one that eventually involves no humans at all. But in this circularity of humans creating robots, robots becoming gods, and gods becoming human, we’ve only managed to, once again, re-imagine ourselves.
Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) is usually remembered as the inventor of a revolutionary miner’s safety lamp. But his wild popularity came as much from his influence on popular culture as it did from his contributions to chemistry and applied science.
In the first few years of the 19th century, there was no hotter spectacle in London than Davy’s lectures at the Royal Institution. The carriage traffic jams caused by his keen audience led to the introduction of London’s first one-way street.
Hundreds of members of the public, many of them women, crowded into the lecture theatre to hear the charismatic Davy speak about his cutting edge research. They would watch demonstrations of his work, which often included elaborate explosions and other breathtaking displays.
In more recent times, Davy’s star has waned. Through our work on the Davy Notebooks Project, we aim to change that. Thanks to the help of thousands of volunteers, we’re creating the first digital edition of Davy’s 83 manuscript notebooks, an exciting and important collection that we’ll soon be able to share with readers all over the world.
The first lecture Davy gave at the Royal Institution was on the subject of galvanism (the electricity generated by chemical actions). The force was thought at the time to be capable of animating matter – or of bringing something dead to life.
Davy was born in Penzance, Cornwall and despite a lack of formal education, he rose quickly from obscurity to become an important force at the centre of Britain’s scientific community.
As a young chemist, he spent several years in Bristol, where he experimented with new gases, including nitrous oxide (laughing gas) which he frequently inhaled himself to test its effect.
The Royal Institution by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd (c. 1838)
Moving to London, Davy eventually became director of the Royal Institution’s programme of chemical research and, later, President of the Royal Society. In his scientific life, he isolated more chemical elements than anyone before or since.
Davy’s famous lectures on the animating power of electricity at the Royal Institution may have inspired a young Mary Shelley as she came up with the idea for Frankenstein (1818), a novel that questioned the boundaries of creation using emerging scientific ideas.
Shelley may have even modelled aspects of the charming but reckless Victor Frankenstein on Davy himself. In fact, many of the things that Davy said in his lectures were borrowed word-for-word to craft the fictional scientist’s dangerous experiments.
Portrait of Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell (1831-1840).
But, as Mary Shelley probably would have known, Davy was also a writer himself with close ties to the leading authors of his day.
He was friends with poets Lord Byron and Robert Southey and had a hand in the creation of some of the greatest works of the Romantic period. This included editing the second edition of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1800).
And he wrote his own poetry – lots of it. The pages of Davy’s dozens of surviving notebooks are crammed full of poems, both published and obscure, which share space with the complex records of his scientific experiments, alongside the notes for Davy’s jaw-dropping lectures.
Discovering Davy’s poetry
Our project aims to make these notebooks – which have never been transcribed in their entirety – available in a free to read, online edition based on crowd-sourced transcriptions provided by nearly 3,000 volunteers.
Their hard work has enabled us to bring Davy’s fascinating work in the arts and sciences to a whole new generation.
Davy’s notebooks give invaluable insights into how his mind worked. His firm conviction in the powers of the intellect, coupled with an unshakeable self belief, lay at the heart of his considerable success. As he declares in notebook 19E, containing drafts of lectures dating from around 1802:
Man is formed for pure enjoyments / his duties are high his destination / is lofty and he must then be / most accused of ignorance and folly / when he grovels in the dust having / wings which can carry him to the / skies.
These manuscript discoveries show how Davy influenced others, including Mary Shelley, through fantastical ideas rooted in scientific enquiry. While he may not be widely known today, his outsized achievements and towering public personality jump from their pages.
Whether influencing some of the greatest works of literature, or pioneering new modes of experimentation, Davy’s notebooks tell a fascinating story about the intertwined history of the arts and sciences in British history.
Understanding Davy’s legacy – and his possible influence as Victor Frankenstein’s role model – reminds us that these two arenas are much more closely, and importantly, linked to one another than we often hold them to be.
Many in the west have puzzled over this relationship between Chinese Communist Party chairman Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Some have imagined, for example, that Xi would be a neutral party in Putin’s war in Ukraine, or that he could even be a peacemaker.
But rather than imagining a troubling new partnership has emerged unpredictably after decades of peacetime globalisation, we should look to a longer arc of history to understand Russia and China’s shared confrontation with the world.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – backed openly by China’s economic power – is just the first geopolitical product of a restored Russia-China axis and the return of two states whose ambitions were never sated by the post-cold war peace. Once again, the world’s democracies are faced with the challenge of organising their defences against these two dictatorships in both Europe and Asia.
Writing in 1950, as American grand strategy began to cohere around the cold war challenge presented by the Soviet Union, US state department official Paul Nitze explained the period of upheaval that defined his generation’s experience of international affairs:
Within the past thirty-five years the world has experienced two global wars of tremendous violence. It has witnessed two revolutions – the Russian and Chinese – of extreme scope and intensity. It has also seen the collapse of five empires – the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, German, Italian, and Japanese – and the drastic decline of two major imperial systems, the British and the French.
Nitze, the architect of one of the cold war’s primary strategy documents, NSC-68, observed a world in which “the international distribution of power has been fundamentally altered”. Among the reasons for that alteration and upheaval were the two revolutions he wisely acknowledged, the Russian and Chinese. Two revolutions whose consequences, we should now recognise, have not fully ended.
We should remind ourselves that 21st-century Russia and China – and the leaders that run them – are products of the original Russian and Chinese revolutions that Nitze understood would shape the history and geopolitics of his lifetime. Xi and Putin, as products of these revolutions, are also heirs to their anti-western ideas and strategies of confrontation.
As American spymaster Jack Devine points out, Putin’s career took shape in Dresden, East Germany, ensconced in the Warsaw Pact world and he has called the Soviet empire’s collapse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. Now, as chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi is heir to what the party calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, a project of national revival that originated with Mao’s “New China” and has continued on in various forms since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Xi’s China seeks confrontation with the US and the establishment of a new order with China to “take center stage in the world”. In this endeavour, Putin’s Russia is Xi’s chief collaborator and “strategic partner”.
As totalitarian communist states in the 20th century, Russia and China challenged the world’s democracies and sought to establish an order of their own. The decade-long Sino-Soviet alliance spanned the Korean War and multiple Taiwan crises, producing a two-theatre strategic challenge for the US and its allies spanning both Europe and Asia. The US, having just fought the second world war in both the Atlantic and Pacific, was perhaps more prepared to manage a two-theatre strategic contest.
Simultaneous containment of both communist China and the Soviet Union provided a check against their ambitions. The Sino-Soviet alliance eventually became unsustainable and broke apart largely because Mao aspired to return China to a position of power and centrality in world affairs; he would not tolerate a role as junior partner to Moscow.
Today these roles have reversed, and these ambitions have been restored, not in the name of communist ideology, but in light of an aggressive, militarist nationalism that animates both regimes.
Xi and Putin showed the world the philosophical depth and contours of their relationship in their joint declaration of partnership at the Beijing Olympics in 2022 just weeks before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But the strategic partnership goes back even earlier.
Throughout the 2010s, both nations worked to expand their military, economic and diplomatic ties. In the statement at the Beijing Olympics, China and Russia pledged mutual support for the other’s “core interests”. Moscow pledged its support for Beijing’s claims over Taiwan, which it called “an inalienable part of China”, and Beijing pledged that “both sides oppose further enlargement of Nato and call on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologised cold war approaches”.
The shared China-Russia division of Europe and Asia is reminiscent of the original geography of the Sino-Soviet Alliance. As Stalin told his counterparts in communist China: “There should be some division of labour between us … you may take more responsibility in working in the East … and we will take more responsibility in the West.”
Putin’s war in Ukraine is not the only conflict, of course, that this axis may produce. China’s economic engagement with the democracies in the post-cold war supercharged a modern-day People’s Republic of China that now contests the world’s democracies in critical technologies and strategic industries and has built a military of unmatched scope in Asia that is meant to settle scores of its own in the Pacific.
This is the return of 20th-century antagonists whose ambitions never truly went away.
