Beth Singler

Beth Singler is a British social and digital anthropologist who holds the assistant professorship in Digital Religion(s) at the University of Zurich, where she co-directs the university’s research priority programme on digital religions. She came up through Cambridge — a PhD in divinity, a postdoc at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, and a junior research fellowship at Homerton College — and her first book was an ethnography of the New Age “Indigo Children” movement.

Studying the believers, not joining them

Singler is the leading scholar of the entanglements between AI and religion: how faith communities adopt, adapt, or reject the technology, and how AI discourse itself keeps reaching for religious imagery — from “blessed by the algorithm” tweets to apocalypse and transcendence narratives among avowed atheists. Her 2024 Routledge monograph “Religion and Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction” won an ISSR Book Prize, and she co-edited “The Cambridge Companion to Religion and AI.” Her short documentaries on AI, including “Pain in the Machine,” won the AHRC’s Best Research Film award in 2017, and the Church Times has called her the “smartest and sanest observer of digital religion.”

What makes Singler rare in this archive is her deliberate refusal to pick a side. She approaches AI as an anthropologist observing human meaning-making — noting that disapproval and enthusiasm coexist even within single religious communities — and confines her own assessments to observations like finding AI’s conversational progress “impressive.” No open letters, campaigns, products, or lawsuits appear under her name on either side of the debate; her stance is, methodically, to study everyone else’s.