This session explores visions of human flourishing in the face of scientific, technological, and environmental change. The papers address a series of pressing issues, including: How do humans navigate the challenges that AI advancements pose for meaningful work? What is the role of humans in a more ecologically sustainable future? How have ideas of the frontier shaped how American space sciences? In total, the session responds to the conference theme and highlights how the "work of our hands" is always guided by the futures we imagine ourselves to be building.
It is frequently predicted that one consequence of ongoing advances in AI and automation is the elimination of meaningful employment. This paper applies insights from objective list theory and lessons from the rise of populisms to navigating healthy integration of AI into economic systems. Recognizing the role that some kinds of work can contribute to flourishing provides insight into how and when work is valuable, and recognizing the social and institutional failures that has contributed to the rise of authoritarian populisms provides insight into how institutional implementation of AI can go wrong. Developing a healthy integration of work and AI thus requires careful institutional implementations of the valuation of work and the values embedded in AI’s own institutionalization.
Niche construction theory has illuminated the significant evolutionary effects of an organism’s modification of its environment. Highlighting continuities between the constructive work of humans and other creatures, I argue that la labor de nuestras manos can serve as a theological “order of sustainability.” This is an adaptation of select Lutheran accounts of the “orders” of human life—household, government, church—that challenges the nature/culture divide and opens up a broader ecological purview than is typical of that discourse. Challenging accounts of humans as “ultimate niche constructors” or even “world-makers,” I articulate a modest but crucial human role in ensuring that life can go on.
The frontier myth is one of the most powerful and pervasive myths in US culture. While many critics have rightly observed that this myth drips with the ideology of a white settler state, they tend to overlook the religious undercurrents that nourish the pioneer’s visions of domination, conquest, and, ultimately, regeneration. Spotlighting these religious undercurrents in particular, this paper attends to the influence of the frontier myth in the arena of space travel. More specifically, it examines how early NASA scientists, astronauts, and administrators drew on the frontier myth to articulate their religious visions of, and engagements with, the project of space flight. Finally, it looks at how the frontier myth’s application to the sky was contested on the ground by the Poor People’s Campaign in 1969. Taken together, this paper aims to chart largely uncharted territories of US religious history.