The Sibirskaya Blagozvonnitsa publishing house has published the book "Between Code and Conscience: Artificial Intelligence and Man." The publication was prepared as part of the work of the Commission of the Inter-Council Presence on Public Life, Culture, Science and Information on the topic "Artificial intelligence and other challenges of scientific and technological development to the Christian worldview."
The authors of the publication are Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk, Candidate of Theology, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Chairman of the Publishing Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, head of the Commission of the Inter—Council Presence on Public Life, Culture, Science and Information, and A.I. Ilyinsky, Doctor of Technical Sciences, Professor, member of the Expert Council of the Interdepartmental Working Group on Legislative Support for the Use of AI in the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, a leading expert at the Center for AI Technologies in International Relations.
In their address to the readers of Ethics in the Age of Algorithms, the authors write: "This book was not born out of academic interest or the opportunistic fashion of discussing technology. She was born out of pain. From the pain of a shepherd who sees his flock entangled in networks — not only informational, but also spiritual, and from the pain of a scientist who knows what algorithms are capable of, and sees how easily the world is ready to trade freedom for comfort, and immortality for endless scrolling of the tape."
The authors refer to those they address as interlocutors and identify three main groups of readers to whom it is addressed.:
"The first interlocutor is an engineer, developer, creator of artificial intelligence. We want to tell him: The Church is not an enemy of your cause. She does not call for destroying the server rooms and returning to the caves. But she begs: don't forget the image of God in man. Don't create an idol for yourself out of your own code. Remember: your power over the world is not omnipotence, but service. And the measure of this service is love.
The second interlocutor is our brother and sister, who live in a digital world and are often confused... Someone who feels that something is wrong, the world has shifted off its axis, but does not know where to look for support.
The third interlocutor is the future. Those who will take this book in twenty, thirty, fifty years. We want you to know that at the beginning of the digital age, when everything was just beginning, there were people in the Church who saw the danger and spoke about it. Not out of fear of the new, but out of love for the eternal... We're just reminding you: a person is not a function. Never was and never will be."
The publication includes eight sections: "Introduction: Why does the Church talk about AI", "What is artificial Intelligence?", "The Main theological prohibition: AI is not a person", "Transhumanism as a spiritual threat", "Real risks: not the apocalypse, but dehumanization", "The experience of Christian ethics in the world of algorithms", "Church participation: not to forbid, but to be useful", "Eschatological dimension", as well as "Explanatory vocabulary: concepts that hide something completely different from what it seems to us."
The book "Between Code and Conscience: Artificial Intelligence and Man" by Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk and Professor Ilyinsky has been published
28.06.2026, 07:00
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