These days, strong artificial intelligence is troubling to some probably for pretty much the same reason as the study of collective consciousness ---- on the one hand, that the mind is only a machine and therefore there is no soul and no free will - and on the other, that the One we know as God will be displaced by phenomenon attributed to a "force."
I'm sure each such advance in science have caused (or will cause) some to lose what little faith they had (have.) The strong in faith cannot be moved by anything at all.
To me, this suggests that the answer lies in helping the young and weak in faith grow strong. After all, there is no telling what doors science will open in the future.
Thanks for your thoughtful insights, A-G.
On the subject of artificial intelligence: If AI ("strong" or other) is being modeled on a machine analogy, then one wonders what kind of progress can be made. Living, conscious, thinking beings are not "machines": For a machine is a unity of order, and not of substance. Kefatos/Nadeau write: "Artifacts or machines are...constructed from without, and the whole is simply the assemblage of all parts." And the order that exists in any machine is external to its parts.
But increasingly, science is telling us that the part-whole relationship in living, conscious, thinking beings is an entirely different affair. As Ernst Mayr wrote, living systems "almost always have the peculiarity that the characteristics of the whole cannot (not even in theory) be deduced from the most complete knowledge of components, taken separately or in other partial combinations. This appearance of new characteristics in wholes has been designated emergence."
This is what I have referred to in the past as "irreducible complexity." The order of the living being is emergent "from within," not imposed "from without."
If we want to build "thinking machines," then this would seem to represent a daunting logistical problem.
Similarly, those who would say that God (understood as some kind of collective consciousness) can be "translated" as "force" likewise may be using the "wrong model" -- in more ways than one.