so the question our speakers have been asked to address is why religions need to be at the Forefront of pursuing a human-centered technological development and our first speaker is Professor Hamza Yusuf the president of the zaituna college in Berkeley California he's amongst foremost Muslim Scholars and thinkers of all times and his college is the first accredited Muslim liberal arts college in the United States as a member of the uae's highest Patchwork Council the co-president of religions of peace and has said on the ethics in Action a sustainable integral development initiative and collaboration between religions for peace the Holy See and the United Nations and other organizations he is a member of the Jordanian Royal Academy for Islamic Studies and it is the vice president of the Abu Dhabi forum for peace working closely with the architect with the Marrakech reparation a groundbreaking document in defense the rights of people of other faith in Muslim majority Society he's a prolific author and his Works have been published around the world and there is no one more suitable to address the topic from an Islamic perspective thank you once again to be back in this esteemed environment and uh I want to talk I think a little bit about maybe a more cautious view of a lot of the technology and one of the interesting things about uh this technology is that it's it's captivated our lives in ways that certainly our our parents and grandparents would not have been captivated by it I think but uh in Plato's dialogue phaedrus he lets us in on a conversation between booth and the inventor of the pen and famous the king who when the inventor presents his invention he tells the king that oh this is an extraordinary new technology that's going to do wonders it's going to enable human beings to preserve their knowledge well the king tells him it's not for the inventor to tell us what the benefit of the invention is but for others who are going to look at the invention to tell and he actually the king tells him that it's quite the opposite of what you think that the introduction of the pen is going to cause the loss of knowledge and not the preservation of knowledge because people will no longer rely on their memories that knowledge won't come from inside of themselves but from outside of themselves the interesting thing about that story is that inventors often in fact almost always invariably tell us about the upsides of their technology and their inventions and they rarely look at the downside of the inventions or the externalities so in the past people were extremely wary of Innovations in fact the word invention had a very negative connotation in ancient Greece it had a negative connotation in the Christian world and the Muslim World our Prophet Muhammad said Beware of novelties because religion by its very nature is a conservative Enterprise it wants to conserve the best but it also is very wary of destabilizing elements when things change too rapidly Things become destabilized and so it's very interesting that it was Machiavelli who really put a positive pin on inventions in the print there's a real change after Machiavelli in the approach to invention we have a Muslim jurisdiction a juristic principle among our Scholastics which really emphasizes and he himself is is somebody who uses this it's called another looking at the consequences of thing looking down the road so one of the modern myths that many progressives will constantly remind us is that you can't stop progress there are many iterations that this one of them is you can't turn the clock back um and and I think there's some some ideas embedded or assumptions embedded in this one of them is that progress is good by its nature and also that it's a juggernaut it's an Unstoppable force that we simply have to submit to so I want to argue that we actually have his historical example to counter both those views I won't bother to spend much time on the idea that uh it's always progress is always beneficial but one example when the car was first invented uh there was a lot of pushback in cities about the cars because they were very noisy and problematic but one of the arguments was it was so much cleaner than the horse so we can put that one to rest so but there are other really interesting examples so another one is in the second lateral Council under Pope Innocent II in 1139 in this great city state that we are in now he actually outlawed the use of crossbow because he considered them to be unethical and he said they they were not something that a Christian could engage in and he actually said quote the crossbow is an instrument of the devil and hateful to God and unfit for Christian so part of what makes that technology so odious was that it could take a peasant who could learn to use it in a week and he could destroy an armored Knight because the crossbow could actually penetrate the armor and this Knight who took 10 years to master his martial arts would simply be killed at the hand of this peasant in 1589 an inventor in England William Lee attempted to convince Queen Elizabeth to support a knitting machine that would replace hand knitting Lord Hansen asked the queen to Grant Lee a patent and to use Crown money to invest in in a factory to produce the machine the queen refused saying my poor my Lord I have too much love for my poor people who obtain their bread by knitting to give money to forward an invention which will tend to their ruin by depriving them of employment in his remarkable book giving up the gun no parent shows us that the Japanese who at the time in the 17th century comprised one of the most advanced pre-modern societies on Earth the Japanese were actually once the gun was introduced into Japan in 1543 they became the finest producers and mass producers of the musket they actually developed a musket that was also waterproof which was one of the main problems in Europe during using muskets in Warfare but interestingly enough they there were three uh Shoguns uh Nobunaga and uh heidiyoshi and Lord tokugama and these people unify the warring uh principalities of Japan and actually outlawed the gun and so for 300 years Japan actually chose to reject the technology this is a really important historical example of where a society decided and part of the reason for the decision was again they saw that it was one a cruel way of killing people but another that a samurai who spent 20 years mastering uh the martial arts could be killed by a peasant with a musket another really interesting example is in the Ottoman Empire for almost 300 years they chose not to use the Gutenberg printing press of movable print one of the myths as they did it because they were worried about knowledge coming in uh to to the Ottoman Empire which is actually not true the the main reason why they did not use a printing press is there were tens of thousands of scribe that would have lost their jobs because of this and I think this is an aspect that we really don't think about when we think about uh AI Rabbi Rosen and I were part of the c-100 at the world economic forum and Faust swab came in to us one day all of the quote unquote religious leaders and said we're moving along whether you keep up with us or not but we're waiting for your ethical ideas but we're just going to move along with or without you so this idea somehow that oh we can work with these ethical considerations technology is moving on uh one of the things that's that is really important to remember is and and in this great institution of the Catholic Church they took very seriously the five intellectual virtues well the least of them is technique the least of them is technique technology is the least The Craft over that is phronesis which is prudent how do we use our technology prudently and you have news and epistemy and wisdom the highest another really important thing to think about is the the wise ancient Greek had the engineer to face this was actually crippled and his enemy was Athena the goddess of wisdom the reason that Hephaestus I think was crippled is because Technologies tend to up we're all using the crutches of Technology now and each time we adopt a new technology we lose something of our autonomy it becomes a crutch and and most of us can't even imagine life now without a cell phone and yet the vast majority of us in this room are old enough to remember our life was without a cell phone our young people won't remember that they they have no idea of what a world without cell phones was like but I think most of us do remember it and perhaps fondly again the idea that you can't stop uh progress um I think it's a very dangerous idea if that progress is harmful and this gets back to what Sheikh Abdullah pointed out of the idea of harm the prohibition of harm and reciprocating harm so one of them the really tragic aspect of modern technology I think is the alienating nature of the technology the distraction of the technology the fact that we're constantly checking our cell phones we're constantly being distracted well it's very interesting that Bethlehem which was the first mental hospital in England was actually called Bethlehem for the incurably distracted we forget that distraction in English actually means mentally drained and so bronze Khan uh Franz Kafka who I consider actually a formidable Theologian said that evil is whatever distracts and the great Catholic tradition has acedia as one of these seven deadly sins which could be interpreted sometimes it's translated as sloth meaning like a spiritual laziness but it was actually understood by the great Church Desert Fathers as distractibility this idea of constantly being distracted and I think this is what a lot of people are suffering from so we now have a massive mental illness crisis there are many many factors to it but I think one of the real factors is is the types of technology that our young people are being exposed to and are growing up with we have a fentanyl crisis in the United States that's taking about 50 000 55 000 lives a year Marx reminded us when he said that religion was the sigh of the oppressed preachers the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless condition it is the Opium of the people in other words Mars was actually trying to understand why people needed religion well part of the reason was to numb them of the pain of the world because it's a difficult place to be if we don't have religion then opium becomes the Opium of people the prophet Muhammad peace be upon a warned us of the latter days the antichristic period one of the things that he told us about the Antichrist that he would make the Sky Force for rain he would make the blind seek cure the leopard he would have mountains of wheat to satiate the poor who would follow him in hopes of of uh of gaining that benefit he said that he would travel in every city in 40 days they asked him how he would do that he said like a wind that leaves behind a cloud and so I think it's it's very interesting that we we we have to really think seriously about where this technology is going because just I mean I travel a lot I go to universities I walk through colleges I see everybody bent over these machines something really has changed in a very short period of time and and change should should always be considered with great deliberation so where we're going I don't know but I think we have to think seriously about the dangers of AI what people are going to do and then also kuabono who benefits from artificial intelligence who benefits from it when we eliminate all these jobs when people get Universal incomes what are they going to do how are they going to live what is the purpose of life what type of meaning in life will they have I think these are all serious questions do we have to greatly consider our profit in conclusion uh has one of the verses that was revealed in the Quran it's a great question it's a question that was well known in this city quovadas where then are you going the Quran says where then are you going and I think this is something we have to ask ourselves because God allows you turns on the road of life and I think the possibilities of of metanoia should be very seriously considered thank you thank you so much for really challenging us both a conceptually with regards to the whole the fallacy of inevitable progress through technology like of course the fallacy of unlimited economic growth but even if these are fallacies we of course face the enormous challenge of how difficult it is to put the genie back into the bottle and whether it's possible to impose a discipline necessary once the dam is busted think actually within Jewish tradition for example the Sabbath is perhaps the most important response to modern technology in terms of limiting us and observant families there's no operational technology no smartphones no televisions no uh radios if such things exist anymore which they probably don't and but if once people have no longer are imbibing that discipline with their mother's milk it's almost impossible to try to really and reintroduce them to it that's the enormous challenge