Be mentored by a world-expert on AI:

Applications now open for BT Academy’s world-leading AI course

“Mind & World for Humans & AI”

BTA’s accelerated Diploma in AI has been designed for the emerging body of practitioners, professionals, researchers, engineers, scientists, policy makers, academicians, and others, who are increasingly confronted with the challenges of AI in a variety of personal, commercial, academic, social, and political contexts.

The course, taught by AI world expert Yaqub Chaudhary, will critically examine the underlying technical, conceptual and philosophical foundations of AI research through a uniquely interdisciplinary prism that unites philosophical, theological, and socio-political study of AI with practical technical, mathematical and scientific insight.

Participants who complete this course will be able to articulate rigorously grounded intellectual perspectives on the transformative challenges of AI in every sphere of life, and the specific contexts in which they are confronted with the transformative effects of AI deployment. The overall objective of this course is to elevate the sophistication of Islamic intellectual thought at the frontiers of AI by providing carefully curated instruction and orientation across the full extent of the comprehensive digital mediatisation of reality and digitalisation of the human condition provoked by the rapid encroachment and imposition of AI.

This course will aim to empower participants with the knowledge, technical literacy, intellectual nuance, and situational awareness to appreciate the technical accomplishments of AI development, whilst being able to critically appraise the limitations of contemporary AI systems in view of their fundamental mathematical and computational foundations. The course is designed to complement the skills and analytical abilities of participants with knowledge, understanding, and orientation that is essential to identify and expound on the moral, social, philosophical and metaphysical challenges that arise from applications of AI.

Over the past decade, AI systems have advanced rapidly yielding remarkable performance that significantly surpasses human capabilities in a range of complex cognitive domains. Conversational agents powered by large language models can now generate fluent speech in thousands of languages with a wide range of vocal styles making it possible for almost anyone to enter into a two-way dialogue with a non-human entity and reasonably expect intelligible responses. This alone marks the present moment as unprecedented in human history. Generative AI tools are rapidly being adopted in ways that are fundamentally altering the way we engage with computational systems and digital media as well as the spoken and written word, based on endless possibilities to generate novel text, images, speech, audio and video. Some have argued we have entered a phase of accelerating improvements in AI technologies and 2025 is widely being hailed as the year in which a vast variety of artificial agents will descend upon (or ascend into) the physical world and out of the confines of the virtual microworlds in which they have been gestated and trained.

Every nation has developed national strategies focussed on AI and digital innovation in the pursuit of the promises, dreams, and hopes for the future of AI that have been renewed and repeated over the past century, including the reinvigoration of the quest for artificial general intelligence. However, philosophical, theological, and ethical discussion on AI from the perspective of Islam remains highly limited in public and academic discourse, hence the present moment demands greater participation of Muslim intellectual thought in the production, evaluation and understanding of AI research and its applications.

The vast Islamic intellectual tradition stands as a source of crucial insights to resist the dehumanising tendencies of a mechanistic, materialistic and technoscientific reconstruction of intelligence and world, yet remains unexplored in relation to AI. This course will cultivate a network of active interlocutors in the revolutionary era of AI who are able to draw on this tradition to participate in shaping the future course of AI transformation according to the spiritual and axiological principles of Islam.