Báyò Akómoláfé x Catherine Keller | Crossroads, Creation, and Artificial Intelligence
In this episode of Curiosity Entangled, philosopher and psychologist Báyò Akómoláfé joins theologian Catherine Keller for a searching dialogue on artificial intelligence, theology, and what it means to be human at the crossroads of technology.
What begins with the question of AI’s place in creation unfolds into a meditation on race, mortality, authority, and the fragile line between the natural and the artificial. Bayo invokes the Garden of Eden, crossroads in Yoruba cosmology, and his idea of “becoming dust” to reimagine AI not as a tool but as a disruptive force unsettling human identity and mastery. Catherine draws from process theology and her work on apocalyptic hope to probe whether AI is a new instrument of denial or a chalice through which unexpected solidarities and forms of life might emerge.
Together, they wrestle with risk, death, and transformation, asking whether we are witnessing the end of “the human” or the unveiling of new ways of being entangled with each other and the more than human world.
5 Questions This Episode Might Leave You With
1. Is AI a threat to human identity, or an invitation to rethink what being human means?
2. What can Yoruba crossroads, biblical dust, and apocalyptic theology teach us about decision and risk in an age of AI?
3. Does naming the world bring care, or does it foreclose possibility?
4. Can AI be a tool for denying death, or a companion in embracing finitude?
5. How might solidarity and possibility be cultivated at the crossroads of technology, theology, and ecological crisis?
Learn More About the Guests
Bayo Akomolafe Philosopher, Psychologist, Poet | Author, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences Founder, The Emergence Network https://www.emergencenetwork.org/ https://bayoakomolafe.net
Catherine Keller Theologian | Author, Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances Professor of Constructive Theology, Drew University https://catherineekeller.com/
Timestamps
00:00:27 – Opening and the invitation to speak about AI
00:03:05 – Creation and destruction as a single intensifying moment
00:05:27 – Eden, naming, and taxonomy as care or closure
00:13:09 – Crossroads versus intersectionality and the risk of decision
00:20:14 – Becoming dust, mortality, and species level vulnerability
00:27:13 – Transhumanist dreams, immortality quests, and denial of death
00:31:13 – Entanglement, weathering bodies, and the work of solidarity
00:40:16 – Authorship and authority reimagined in the age of AI
00:51:24 – AI as chalice, poetics, and naming the unnamable
01:07:02 – Regulation, safety, and the reinforcement of colonial dynamics
