Professor John Wyatt gives a perspective as a Christian bioethics experts on issues that are provoking a huge socio-political debate in Europe. An interview ahead of his participation in the "Jornadas de Bioética" conference in Spain, December 2022.

Eleven years later, Spanish evangelicals will gather for a new Bioethics congress. Non-Christians are welcome in a programme that will address issues such as euthanasia, artificial intelligence, and creation care.

In the Spanish city of Zaragoza, national and international speakers addressed the trends in Europe around the question of human identity. 

Churches can become centres of excellence for the creative use of AI technology to support everyone, including disabled people, both in church and elsewhere.

A survey concludes that 9 in 10 attend their church’s worship service every week. 63% of respondents do volunteer work and 40% identify with right-wing parties.

The technology-evangelists’ goal is to provide products and services that are so compelling, easy to access, and intuitive to use that we can’t help but adopt them.

Europe and other regions in the world are trying to control the power of large companies such as Amazon, Google or Alibaba. But there is no agreement about what the rules should be, says expert Jonathan Ebsworth.

We need a deeper understanding which transcends the distorted reflections of ourselves that we find in our own technology.

Large-scale use of algorithms has the potential to cause severe harm to individuals and communities. Lessons from the 2020 public examination results fiasco in the UK.

A group of experts on AI of the European Evangelical Alliance respond to the EU consultation on its White Paper on Artificial Intelligence.

Agents of the Revolutionary Guard raid homes looking for Christian literature. Seven Christians were falsely sentenced last month for “spreading propaganda against the state”.

The coronavirus crisis in Europe is “driving a public debate about privacy, ethics and public health, and what measures are appropriate (or not) to protect it”, says Patricia Shaw of the Homo Responsibilis Initiative.

Jonathan Ebsworth of the TechHuman initiative warns that some technologies being used in Europe are “approaching a level of quasi-omniscience that no human enterprise ought to have”.

As technologically simulated relationships become ever more realistic and superficially convincing, we must be aware of the risk that the simulacrum will exert a seductive appeal to our hearts.

Should we teach our children to be polite to Alexa, to say please and thank you, to respect its ‘virtual’ feelings? Or is it of no significance if children abuse, tease and bully a simulated slave-person?

Will the promotion of ‘relationships’ with machines contribute to societal wellbeing and human flourishing, or provide new opportunities for manipulation and deception of the vulnerable?

The technology is able to analyse and report about the frequency of attendance, the mood, gender and average age of the people who attend a service.

Christians need to be more aware of the use of data concerning them, and of both the opportunities and risks associated with AI.

David Glass, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at Ulster University (Northern Ireland) analyses whether a computer can have emotions or a conscious experience.

It is heartening to see Christians take a robust, positive and directive stance on artificial intelligence.

There are many who believe that nature created itself. However, since the days of Job until the present day, millions have believed this to be impossible.

Christians appear to be able to offer a framework for insisting on the value and dignity of the human being in a mechanising world.

The CNEF presented its positions on the Estates General of Bioethics in a public event. “The value and dignity that the Bible recognises for every human being invites respect for all”, they said in a statement.

The Chinese government has begun to develop a social scoring system that will determine people’s ability to travel or access property, amongst other things.

Intelligence is an extremely complex, contended subject, and there is plenty we still don’t know about animal intelligence, let alone human intelligence.