Robots in Religious Contexts

Abstract

In the wake of the robot revolution, social robots will eventually find their way into religious contexts. Indeed, some have already done so. Recently ‘Mindar’, the android version of the Buddhist deity Kannon Bodhisattva, has been introduced in a Buddhist Temple in Kyoto; a humanoid designed as Ibn Sina has probed Islamic attitudes to robots in the UAE; and Catholic and Protestant contexts have seen such inventions as SanTO and Bless-U2 respectively. As roboticists start to produce ‘theomorphic robots’ to represent and mediate the divine, there is an urgent need to include scholars of diverse religious traditions in the debate.