The same Christians that chime “because free will must stay intact” when confronted with the problem of evil are the ones whose prayers are pleas to change people.  As technology improves and we have mastery over more and more things (like curing diseases for example) the onus becomes more and more on our just actions and less on God’s.  More of the earth is subordinate to human free will than at any time in the past.  If we say God can’t mess with free will this leaves us in a little problem.  God is painted into a corner and reliant on his followers to plead with those in power to do the right thing.

I might as well complicate things by saying that a lot of decisions humans have made (like flagging tax returns, diagnosing cancer, curating news, and in the near future driving cars) are done by computer algorithms, not people.  So we are trusting more and more of our lives to the will of computers.  I don’t know any religious tradition that has anything to say about this, people just couldn’t imagine something like this happening.  So do we pray to God that a computer will make a just decision on our behalf when it’s still just a Turing machine?  Aren’t all computer algorithms deterministic so they are the ultimate expression of the lack of free will?

In a way artificially intelligent computers are analogous to spirits because their inner workings and thought processes are a mystery and they do not possess flesh.  But they aren’t sentient, but there is always the possibility that a sufficiently intelligent computer might be operated by some kind of spirit.  I know this is nonsense to most materialist philosophers but I think it’s a subject worth exploring.