Artificial Intelligence Shows Why Atheism Is Unpopular
Imagine you're the president of a European country. You're slated to take in 50,000 refugees from the Middle East this year. Most of them are very religious, while most of your population is very secular. You want to integrate the newcomers seamlessly, minimizing the risk of economic malaise or violence, but you have limited resources. One of your advisers tells you to invest in the refugees' education; another says providing jobs is the key; yet another insists the most important thing is giving the youth opportunities to socialize with local kids. What do you do?
Well, you make your best guess and hope the policy you chose works out. But it might not. Even a policy that yielded great results in another place or time may fail miserably in your particular country under its present circumstances. If that happens, you might find yourself wishing you could hit a giant reset button and run the whole experiment over again, this time choosing a different policy. But of course, you can't experiment like that, not with real people.
You can, however, experiment like that with virtual people. And that's exactly what the Modeling Religion Project does. An international team of computer scientists, philosophers, religion scholars, and others are collaborating to build computer models that they populate with thousands of virtual people, or "agents." As the agents interact with each other and with shifting conditions in their artificial environment, their attributes and beliefs—levels of economic security, of education, of religiosity, and so on—can change. At the outset, the researchers program the agents to mimic the attributes and beliefs of a real country's population using survey data from that country. They also "train" the model on a set of empirically validated social-science rules about how humans tend to interact under various pressures.
And then they experiment: Add in 50,000 newcomers, say, and invest heavily in education. How does the artificial society change? The model tells you. Don't like it? Just hit that reset button and try a different policy.
The goal of the project is to give politicians an empirical tool that will help them assess competing policy options so they can choose the most effective one. It's a noble idea: If leaders can use artificial intelligence to predict which policy will produce the best outcome, maybe we'll end up with a healthier and happier world. But it's also a dangerous idea: What's "best" is in the eye of the beholder, after all.
"Because all our models are transparent and the code is always online," said LeRon Shults, who teaches philosophy and theology at the University of Agder in Norway, "if someone wanted to make people more in-group-y, more anxious about protecting their rights and their group from the threat of others, then they could use the model to [figure out how to] ratchet up anxiety."
The Modeling Religion Project—which has collaborators at Boston's Center for Mind and Culture, and the Virginia Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation Center, as well as the University of Agder—has been running for the past three years, with funding from the John Templeton Foundation. It wrapped up last month. But it's already spawned several spin-off projects.
The one that focuses most on refugees, Modeling Religion in Norway (modrn), is still in its early phases. Led by Shults, it's funded primarily by the Research Council of Norway, which is counting on the model to offer useful advice on how the Norwegian government can best integrate refugees. Norway is an ideal place to do this research, not only because it's currently struggling to integrate Syrians, but also because the country has gathered massive data sets on its population. By using them to calibrate his model, Shults can get more accurate and fine-grained predictions, simulating what will happen in a specific city and even a specific neighborhood.
Another project, Forecasting Religiosity and Existential Security with an Agent-Based Model, examines questions about nonbelief: Why aren't there more atheists? Why is America secularizing at a slower rate than Western Europe? Which conditions would speed up the process of secularization—or, conversely, make a population more religious?
Shults's team tackled these questions using data from the International Social Survey Program conducted between 1991 and 1998. They initialized the model in 1998 and then allowed it to run all the way through 2008. "We were able to predict from that 1998 data—in 22 different countries in Europe, and Japan—whether and how belief in heaven and hell, belief in God, and religious attendance would go up and down over a 10-year period. We were able to predict this in some cases up to three times more accurately than linear regression analysis," Shults said, referring to a general-purpose method of prediction that prior to the team's work was the best alternative.
Using a separate model, Future of Religion and Secular Transitions (forest), the team found that people tend to secularize when four factors are present: existential security (you have enough money and food), personal freedom (you're free to choose whether to believe or not), pluralism (you have a welcoming attitude to diversity), and education (you've got some training in the sciences and humanities). If even one of these factors is absent, the whole secularization process slows down. This, they believe, is why the U.S. is secularizing at a slower rate than Western and Northern Europe.
"The U.S. has found ways to limit the effects of education by keeping it local, and in private schools, anything can happen," said Shults's collaborator, Wesley Wildman, a professor of philosophy and ethics at Boston University. "Lately, there's been encouragement from the highest levels of government to take a less than welcoming cultural attitude to pluralism. These are forms of resistance to secularization."
Another project, Mutually Escalating Religious Violence (merv), aims to identify which conditions make xenophobic anxiety between two different religious groups likely to spiral out of control. As they built this model, the team brought in an outside expert: Monica Toft, an international-relations scholar with no experience in computational modeling but a wealth of expertise in religious extremism.
"They brought me in so I could do a reality check—like, do the [social-science] assumptions behind this model make sense? And then to evaluate whether this tracks with case studies in reality," Toft told me. At first, she said, "I was a little skeptical with this stuff. But I think what surprised me was how well it modeled onto the Gujarat case." She was referring to the 2002 riots that erupted in the Indian state of Gujarat: three bloody days during which Muslims and Hindus clashed violently, resulting in hundreds of deaths on both sides. (According to official figures, 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed.) "When I started looking at the data, I said to LeRon and Wesley, 'Oh my god!' Because I knew the case of Gujarat and what happened there. It matched the model beautifully. It was really exciting."
merv shows that mutually escalating violence is likeliest to occur if there's a small disparity in size between the majority and minority groups (less than a 70/30 split) and if agents experience out-group members as social and contagion threats (they worry that others will be invasive or infectious). It's much less likely to occur if there's a large disparity in size or if the threats agents are experiencing are mostly related to predators or natural hazards.
This might sound intuitive, but having quantitative, empirical data to support social-science hypotheses can help convince policymakers of when and how to act if they want to prevent future outbreaks of violence. And once a model has been shown to track with real-world historical examples, scientists can more plausibly argue that it will yield a trustworthy recommendation when it's fed new situations. Asked what merv has to offer us, Toft said, "We can stop these dynamics. We do not need to allow them to spiral out of control."
To that end, the next step is getting others interested in trying out the models. But that's proven difficult. The research has been published in outlets like the Journal of Cognition and Culture and is under review at Nature, and the team is building an online platform that will allow people with zero programming experience to create agent-based models. Still, Wildman is pessimistic about his own ability to get politicians interested in such a new and highly technical methodology.
"Whenever there's bafflement, you've got a trust problem, and I think there will be a trust problem here," he said. "We're modelers, sociologists, philosophers—we're academic geeks, basically. We're never going to convince them to trust a model." But he believes that policy analysts, acting as bridges between the academic world and the policy world, will be able to convince the politicians. "We're going to get them in the end."
Even harder to sway may be those concerned not with the methodology's technical complications, but with its ethical complications. As Wildman told me, "These models are equal-opportunity insight generators. If you want to go militaristic, then these models tell you what the targets should be."
When you build a model, you can accidentally produce recommendations that you weren't intending. Years ago, Wildman built a model to figure out what makes some extremist groups survive and thrive while others disintegrate. It turned out one of the most important factors is a highly charismatic leader who personally practices what he preaches. "This immediately implied an assassination criterion," he said. "It's basically, leave the groups alone when the leaders are less consistent, [but] kill the leaders of groups that have those specific qualities. It was a shock to discover this dropping out of the model. I feel deeply uncomfortable that one of my models accidentally produced a criterion for killing religious leaders."
The results of that model have been published, so it may already have informed military action. "Is this type of thing being used to figure out criteria for drone killings? I don't know, because there's this giant wall between the secret research in the U.S. and the non-secret side," Wildman said. "I've come to assume that on the secret side they've pretty much already thought of everything we've thought of, because they've got more money and are more focused on those issues. ... But it could be that this model actually took them there. That's a serious ethical conundrum."
The other models raise similar concerns, he said. "The modrn model gives you a recipe for accelerating secularization—and it gives you a recipe for blocking it. You can use it to make everything revert to supernaturalism by messing with some of those key conditions—say, by triggering some ecological disaster. Then everything goes plunging back into pre-secularism. That keeps me up at night."
According to Neil Johnson, a physicist who models terrorism and other extreme behaviors that arise in complex systems, "That's an overstatement of the power of the models." There's no way that removing one factor from a society can reliably be counted on to slow or stop secularization, he said. That may well be true in the model, but "that's a cartoon of the real world." A real human society is so complex that "all the things may be interconnected in a different way than in the model."
Although Johnson said he found the team's research useful and important, he was unimpressed by their claim to have outperformed previous predictive methods. "Linear regression analysis is not very powerful for prediction," he said. "I was a little surprised by the strength of their claims." He cautioned that we should be skeptical about the word prediction in relation to this type of model. Opinion might be better.
"It's great to have as a tool," he said. "It's like, you go to the doctor, they give an opinion. It's always an opinion, we never say a doctor's prediction. Usually, we go with the doctor's opinion because they've seen many cases like this, many humans who come in with the same thing. It's even more of an opinion with these types of models, because they haven't necessarily seen many cases just like it—history mimics the past but doesn't exactly repeat it."
The silver lining here is that if the power of the models is being overstated then so, too, is the ethical concern.
Nevertheless, just like Wildman, Shults told me, "I lose sleep at night on this. ... It is social engineering. It just is—there's no pretending like it's not." But he added that other groups, like Cambridge Analytica, are doing this kind of computational work, too. And various bad actors will do it without transparency or public accountability. "It's going to be done. So not doing it is not the answer." Instead, he and Wildman believe the answer is to do the work with transparency and simultaneously speak out about the ethical danger inherent in it.
"That's why our work here is two-pronged: I'm operating as a modeler and as an ethicist," Wildman said. "It's the best I can do."
The video in this piece appears courtesy of Jenn Lindsay.
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