Anne Foerst

Anne Foerst was a Lutheran theologian who served as a research scientist at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1997 to 2003, where she worked alongside roboticists building embodied AI systems. Her foundational contribution was bringing Paul Tillich's theological anthropology — particularly the distinction between self and thing, between beings with ultimate concern and objects without it — into the laboratory as a critical resource. Foerst argued that AI researchers systematically confused functional competence with genuine selfhood, projecting human categories onto machines that exhibited human-like behavior without possessing the ontological structure that makes humans persons. Her book God in the Machine (2004) applied Tillich's concept of the image of God to robotics, arguing that humans are created in God's image not by virtue of intelligence or capability but by virtue of the capacity for relationship, for creativity, for the experience of being grasped by ultimate concern. Machines, regardless of capability, lack this structure. Foerst's early death in 2011 cut short a project of theological engagement with AI that anticipated the existential questions the 2020s breakthrough would make unavoidable.