Transcription
AI can use its pattern recognition skills to analyze tissue samples for diseases like human pathologists do. But the drawbacks of the situation is that if pathologists are no longer required to evaluate tissue samples for themselves, the skill to do so will be gradually lost. So if you imagine this kind of thing happening across all of the sectors that AI impacts, you'll get a sense of the sort of scale on which this skill loss can happen.
We are looking today at AI and human futures. What should Christians think? And this is a major topic we've been seeing in headlines a lot lately, as artificial intelligence is changing the future of work. It's transforming every aspect of science; it's revolutionizing everything from education to health care to the supply chain to creative industries to agriculture and defense. Governments are already investing in AI lethal drones. AI can beat humans at certain basic tasks, and it may even transform the economy as we know it. So where do we even begin to think about all these developments?
Well, as Christians, God's word is our starting point for thinking about everything. But do we find the term artificial intelligence in the Bible? No, it's a new technology the Bible doesn't talk about directly. But God's word does give us timeless truths to help us navigate the AI age, well, in light of who God made us to be. So let's look at how we can think about AI biblically. To give you a game plan, we'll start in part one looking at what AI is and surveying its past, present, and potential developments. Then, for part two, we'll look at biblical principles for thinking about these technologies and their possible consequences. We'll see some examples of how not to use AI and various risks and temptations to watch out for in advance.
Now, I spent a lot of time thinking about the risks and benefits of new technologies during my graduate training in bioethics, looking at how to make moral decisions about technologies that impact humans. So I want to caveat that my point in mentioning possible consequences is not to dissuade people from using these tools in good ways, especially since they're pretty ubiquitous and here to stay. Rather, it's to help us consider how we can use these tools wisely and well, in ways that maximize their advantages and minimize pitfalls. A key point we'll find is that God's word gives us the truth we need to navigate our AI age, and that means Christians have exciting opportunities during this chapter in history, which we'll look at in part three, seeing some ways that we can respond as Christians.
So we do have a lot of ground to cover; might be a little like drinking from a fire hose. But you don't have to worry; you can always watch this again, and these points are, for the most part, written down in some articles I've written, with more in the book *Modern Marxism*, as well, in some of the topics. So let's just dive in, starting with what is artificial intelligence.
Well, there's actually no single definition, especially because researchers don't even agree about what intelligence is. But the Merriam-Webster dictionary gives us a starting point. It says AI can refer to the capability of computer programs to imitate intelligent human behavior, or to the programs themselves that have this capability, or to the branch of computer science that develops these systems. So here's a question: true or false, artificial intelligence is the same as human intelligence? False. Right, they're not the same. So as these researchers explain, AI involves the steady design and building of intelligent agents that can achieve goals. But by agents, computer scientists mean um, systems or machines that are capable of making some decisions on their own based on given goals. So computer scientists define intelligence in terms of pursuing goals, which isn't how scientists who study human thinking view our intelligence. As this science article explains, psychologists and neuroscientists tend to view human intelligence as something that's a lot more complex than just pursuing goals, because it involves more layers, capacities, and motivations, reflecting the fact that we are living, conscious, embodied, socially integrated, and, as scripture would say, spiritual creatures. We're also self-aware, right? So we're aware of the fact that we exist and that we can think about things, and we can also understand the things that we think about. But AI doesn't actually know it's processing information any more than flowers know they're pretty or mountains know they're tall. So this is a very different kind of intelligence we're talking about. And however it's defined, intelligence isn't something physical, right? So AI is software rather than hardware. This software can incorporate a virtual body known as an avatar, or a physical body, in which case you've got a robot. The robot's sensory devices, like cameras, can send input to the AI brain, which then commands the body to respond. But of course, a lot of AI systems only exist as computer programs; they don't have any kind of body with them.
So how do these systems work? Well, ultimately, humans program them with algorithms, which are sets of encoded directions that tell the system to perform certain steps in response to certain inputs to achieve certain goals. In an approach called machine learning, humans build a system that can adjust its own behavior in response to data, so that way the system can learn from new experiences without necessarily needing further instructions. The machine's goal is to either classify new information, like recognizing new pictures of a known face—that's how facial recognition technology works—or to anticipate um, uh, what's going to happen next, so making predictions, like anticipating the next word in a sentence, as chatbots do. So a kind of machine learning known as deep learning relies on something called artificial neural networks, or ANNs, which are modeled after the brains of living things. So sort of of like how our brains have these layers of interconnected neurons, or brain cells, that receive and process and transmit data, artificial neural networks are layers of interconnecting computer nodes, which are software constructs that work like artificial brain cells by receiving, processing, and transmitting data. And ANNs form the basis for generative AI, which, of course, gains knowledge by analyzing massive sets of training data, like videos, um, words and images, and it uses that knowledge to produce new materials when prompted. Now, because of these systems' complexity, involving hundreds of billions of mathematical calculations, not even the systems' developers fully understand the inner workings of how a very large ANNs make decisions. So that's why they're called a black box; we can't quite see inside them. More on that in a little bit.
Now, all the AI we have today falls under the category of narrow AI. So narrow systems excel at certain specified tasks, like writing sentences or recognizing faces or helping with surgery. And these systems have a limited range of intelligence. In contrast, a hypothetical system called artificial general intelligence, or AGI, would excel in many areas, meant to rival or surpass human performance. And again, these systems are still futuristic, but developers have been actively pursuing them. All right, so with these basics in mind, let's look at AI's past, present, and potential.
So while AI's origins are murky, some researchers trace the rise of AI back to 1942, when science fiction author Isaac Asimov published these stories that got people excited about computer science and robotics. The 1940s also saw developments in theories about how humans learn, which laid the basis for later ANNs. Then, in 1950, a groundbreaking paper appeared by this guy Alan Turing, a mathematician who suggested how to develop intelligent machines. He proposed what would become known as the Turing test, a way to measure a machine's intelligence based on whether it can answer questions exactly like a human. Just a few years later, the term artificial intelligence was launched through a research workshop, and that brought together the founding fathers of AI. Then, through the 60s and 70s, uh, people began developing more of these narrow AI systems, including an early chatbot called Eliza. The 70s and 80s also saw the developments of AI programs called expert systems, which were meant to make decisions like human experts in specific fields. And already by 1970, the future of AI was looking so optimistic that one of AI's founding fathers predicted in a *Life* magazine that year, in from in from 3 to 8 years, we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being—I mean, a machine that will be able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight. At that point, the machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed; in a few months it will be at genius level, and a few months after that its powers will be incalculable. Well, that didn't exactly happen in the 70s. Instead, prospects for beginning to develop more powerful AI started to look pretty dim, until a lot of research actually stopped, but some developments continued, leading to IBM's computer program Deep Blue beating humans at chess in '97, and the program Watson winning at Jeopardy in 2011. Then, in 2016, ANNs made a comeback with the program AlphaGo winning at the game of Go, which, unlike chess, has hundreds of possible moves per turn. Then along came generative AI, including uh, large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4, the new model that can see through users' device cameras in real time while engaging in natural sound and conversation. While this model shows a lot of far-reaching capacities, ranging from tutoring to telling stories, commentators have been voicing questions about possible privacy concerns, uh, what could the economic impacts be, and what about the social implications of the system's flirty female voice? While various nations have been taking steps to regulate AI, the trillions of dollars being poured into AI suggests this revolution has only begun.
So where does that leave us in the present? Well, even though these developments are fairly recent, AI is already transforming multiple fields, raising um, questions about how it will affect employment. Meanwhile, consumers have grown used to AI technologies like virtual assistance, self-driving or semi-autonomous vehicles, and of course, large language models. People are now turning to AI for moral guidance, life advice, and even spiritual direction, attending AI-generated church services and asking AI to write fake Bible passages. By now we seem largely comfortable with letting unseen algorithms monitor our activities, predict our preferences, feed us information which itself is increasingly AI-generated, keep us entertained, and guide our decisions about everything from what to watch to who to date. Meanwhile, as we become more used to outsourcing our decisions to AI, we're facing more decisions about the AI we already have: should grieving people communicate with digital replicas of deceased loved ones? Should family members buy companion robots for lonely seniors? Should governments use AI for lethal drones? Should developers keep making AI more powerful despite people's concerns about its abilities going beyond our control? And who decides what standards should govern all these decisions? And if AI raises so many questions in the present, what about the future?
Predictions about AI and human futures range from utter um, utter utopia to total catastrophe. So researchers who warn of catastrophe speculate about different scenarios where AI could threaten humanity. So multiple AI industry leaders have joined tens of thousands of people in signing open letters calling for caution, saying powerful systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks manageable. But still, major breakthroughs keep coming. Meanwhile, on the other side of those who fear that AI will end humanity are those who actually hope that AI will transcend humanity. So maybe you've heard of transhumanism, that philosophical movement that seeks to use technology to reach higher stages of human evolution or even to create post-human beings. Some transhumanists think AI could make us immortal, perhaps through mind uploads—that idea where people could copy their memory or transfer their mind onto a computer. Now, questions of whether this would be possible, would produce a conscious entity, and would really be immortality are certainly debatable. Part of the problem is that these ideas are based on false evolutionary and materialistic assumptions that say humans are just matter and motion, we biological machines who are interchangeable with other machines, so our minds are just data patterns that can easily be transferred from a biological brain onto a computer chip. Well, this type of thinking can tie in with other future scenarios as well. For example, a leading computer scientist named Dr. Ben Goertzel, who popularized the term artificial general intelligence, and some others, has suggested that technology called brain-computer interfaces—which have already been around for years, by the way—um, people could use these and AI to combine their minds into something he calls a digital global brain, which would incorporate human brains, AI, the internet, and information collected from smart devices around the world to create this sort of internet of everything that people could kind of plug their brains into and interact with mentally. And he's not the only person advocating for this. According to one philosopher, the resulting form of consciousness would represent qualities closely associated with omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. In other words, some people literally hope that AI will make us become like God. And notably, this global brain concept is linked to both the New Age movement and to a push for global socialism. A key forerunner of the New Age movement was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, an evolutionary paleontologist and Jesuit priest who believed that a planet-wide collectivization process would let every human mind converge to create what he called the noosphere, a supposedly global, godlike consciousness, which scholars have been linking now to the global brain. Also, the philosopher I quoted earlier described how that global brain would require a transition to a post-capitalist economy, involving a global system of governance that's inherently more integrated and cooperative than today's system of nation-states, which sounds a lot like global socialism.
So as a reminder, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines socialism as a system where the means of producing and distributing goods, like food and clothes, are owned collectively by the people or government, and it can be a system of group living where there's no private property and where the means of producing and distributing goods are controlled by the state. And that sounds a lot like the definition of communism, where again, people own goods in common, the state controls the means of producing goods, and private property can be eliminated. The system, of course, was popularized by 19th-century philosopher Karl Marx. And emerging technologies like the global brain and certain uses of AI play a key role in today's push for new forms of global Marxism. For example, an evolutionary biology professor anticipates that these technologies will enable a global society which looks like a Marxist utopia. Then there's this article by a media professor who advocates for digital socialism, saying that full automation has become increasingly central to imagining life beyond capitalism. Similarly, Dr. Ben Goertzel and others believe that artificial intelligence and the global brain could enable the state socialist vision of a centrally managed economy, but he seems to advocate for something more in keeping what he calls with a Marxist vision.
So given all these realities, how can Christians navigate this new world of AI? Well, as always, we start by looking at God's word, which gives us timeless principles that we cannot afford to ignore. So let's see what some of them are. In Genesis, for example, we find seven Cs of humanity—so not the seven Es of History you see here at the CR Museum—but seven Genesis truths about humans to keep in mind when making new decisions about any technology. So let's go over what these seven Cs are, and then later we can apply them to AI. First, humans are creatures, and God is our creator. As Genesis says, God created man in his own image, male and female. And the fact that we're made in God's image brings up the second C: that humans are costly beings with inherent value. And that explains why it's wrong for one person to intentionally take the life of an innocent human being, as Genesis 9 indicates: whoever sheds the blood of man, by man his blood will be shed, for God made man in his own image. Later in the New Testament, James condemns the practice of cursing other image bearers who are made in God's likeness. So we see that humans are costly in a way that really affects how we must treat other people; it has serious ethical implications. So third, humans are corporeal, which is a kind of funny word, which just means that we are embodied as well as ensouled. Genesis explains that when God formed Adam, he made him from the dust of the earth and then breathed into him the breath of life, creating a unique kind of being that later scriptures portray as ensouled bodies and embodied souls. As Jesus said, do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear those who kill both soul—rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. So we will be ensouled bodies and embodied souls for eternity. Other verses emphasize that even here on Earth our bodies belong to God; they are not just our own to do whatever we want with. So we find that our physical and immaterial aspects go together, and both matter. Also, part of being embodied creatures is being finite; we are not God, but our existence depends on God. So the fourth C is that humans are contingent; we are finite, dependent beings; we're sustained by God, and we cannot make ourselves become like God, as Paul reminded the Greeks: in God we live and move and have our being, for we are his offspring, and he's our creator. The next truth, that humans are communal, means we're designed for relationship with God and others. Just like Genesis explains, God created Adam, and he said, it is not good for the man to be alone; I will make a helper fit for him. So God created Eve, and he defined institutions of marriage and family. So while not everyone gets married, everyone is called for fellowship with other human beings; we're called to love others as the second greatest commandment, and as Christians, we're also called to be part of and participate in the wider body of Christ that God has brought us into. As Hebrews says, let us consider how to stir one another up to to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another all the more as you see the day draw near. So in-person fellowship with other Christians only gets more important as history progresses. And all this ties into the sixth truth: that God called humans to specific vocations, like raising families and having dominion over Earth and stewarding creation. Seventh, humans are tragically corrupted because of sin. God made everything very good, and he gave humans one boundary in the beginning, saying, you may eat from any tree in the garden except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you eat of it you will surely die. And what happened? One law in the universe, and humans broke it. Adam and Eve rebelled against God, bringing sin and death and suffering into the world. And only God can redeem creation from sin's effects; he sent his son Jesus Christ, who took on human flesh to pay sin's death penalty on behalf of whoever believes in him, which I strongly encourage you to do today if you haven't done so already. Jesus rose from the dead, ascended to heaven, and will return and create a new heaven and earth, restored to perfection without death and suffering and evil in it. So by keeping all these truths in mind, we can use technology to support rather than undermine our ability to flourish and live as the creatures God made us to be. To see how to do that, let's look at ways we can think about technology biblically.
So for starters, one of the biggest questions people have about technologies like AI is whether they're good or bad, or neutral, or otherwise. There are two main ways of answering that—a little bit of a mouthful—but they're called instrumentalism and determinism. So instrumentalism says that technology itself is morally neutral; it's neither good nor bad, but humans use it for good or evil purposes. So phones, or instance—phones, for instance—we could use to send a positive message, an encouraging message, or maybe a nasty one, but the phone itself is just a phone. Determinism, on the other hand, says that no technology is completely neutral, because humans build technology with certain values in mind that may not be neutral. So, for instance, reflect how much we value having access to entertainment and information all the time, which could be good or bad depending on a bunch of things. And of course, technologies like generative AI are trained using value-laden information, which then gives them biases and makes them produce value-laden outputs, so they're certainly not neutral in that respect. And also, even our best uses of technology and our positive intentions can have unintended negative consequences, affecting our thinking and habits, behaviors, and interactions with others, and even our language. So think, for example, of how the word *church* has changed from referring solely to the body of Christ and to various assemblies of believers to also meaning an hourlong program now that you can watch alone as a distant spectator. Or think about how the word *intelligence* changed from referring to this multi-layered capacity of living, conscious creatures to also meaning a machine's ability to process data without any understanding or awareness of what it's doing or what it's doing. Or what about how the concept of privacy somehow changed from referring to personal, sensitive data that only you and maybe a handful of specific people know about to also meaning personal, sensitive information that many people in large corporations can access without your knowing about it, so long as they don't sell that information to certain third parties? Well, we've allowed some pretty significant redefinitions of language, along with other consequences affecting our thinking, behavior, and relationships, even when we use technology for presumably good purposes, like watching sermons. So it turns out that insights from both these perspectives can be helpful. That's why one of my ethics professors suggested combining both perspectives into one he called technological responsibilism, which says we choose what we do with technology; we can choose to use it for good or evil purposes. So the technology itself does determine what we do with it; at the same time, though, technology does reflect certain values, and it does predispose us to think, act, and see the world in certain ways, and it does lead to unintended consequences as we use it, affecting our thinking, habits, actions, and interactions for better or worse. For example, you wouldn't believe how long it took me to find a picture of someone holding a phone and looking up from it instead of being glued to their screens, as is that posture that's so habitual for so many people now, affecting our interactions with others. So for all these reasons, every technology involves both gains and losses; it does some things, and it undoes other things. So that means we are responsible to use wisdom in how we weigh those tradeoffs, asking questions like: what is gained? What is lost? What assumptions and values are involved? Are they good ones? Are the benefits worth the costs? And how can we maximize the gains while minimizing the losses? And God's word helps us answer these questions well, in light of the truth about who we are and the kind of world we live in.
To summarize a biblical view of technology: biblically, we know that the ability to make and use technology is a gift reflecting our God-given creativity. We can use this gift for great purposes, and we should—stewarding creation, loving others, making life easier in a fallen world, sharing the gospel—all of that great, great stuff. But we just need to use this tool wisely in our fallen world, recognizing that unintended consequences happen and people will naturally use technology in sinful ways. The greater the technology, the more power gets concentrated in sinful human hands, which is especially a problem in societies that have rejected a biblical worldview and that foundation for morality. But with God's word, we have insights to use technology wisely, with those good boundaries and principles and safeguards from truths like those seven Cs of humanity.
To apply these seven Cs to AI: that first C, that humans are creatures, implies that we are not primarily self-creators. So we don't get to define who we are and who we should be. So we should not use AI to try becoming anything other than the particular humans God made us, which, of course, rules out things like transhumanism. Also, the fact that our creator is all-knowing and all-wise and all-good suggests that, apart from effects of the Fall, God designed us the way we are for really good reasons. So we need to use technology in ways that are consistent with God's designs. When we live consistently with them, we flourish, but when we go against God's designs, we harm ourselves. And also, because God is our creator, we're morally accountable to him. So we also need to use technology only in ways, of course, that line up with God's word. So we can ask questions like: is this use of technology consistent with God's values and views as revealed in scripture? Could it make it easier for us to do what God forbids or harder to do what God commands, and in that way predispose us to sin? And what other spiritual effects might it have?
It is possible for us to use this technology in ways that support our relationship with God, rather than undermine them. So these are some of the considerations we can use for that. First, SE.
Then, for the second one, that humans are costly. This reminds us that, of course, every human life has inherent dignity and value. So clearly, we must not use technology in ways that harm or devalue other image bearers. And we also want to prevent that kind of harm where possible by asking in advance: How might this affect other image bearers? How could it affect us as individuals, as a society, and as humankind? For instance, how could it make it easier for us to be manipulated and controlled through surveillance agendas and data collection? More on that later.
Meanwhile, for the third C, the fact that we're body-soul unities reminds us that God designed us to personally interact with the world through the bodies he gave us. So the reality that Jesus came to Earth in human flesh and bodily raised from the dead reflects the importance of bodily life in God's plan for Humanity. And these truths cast doubt on ideas like mind uploads that ignore the body's role in God's designs. Also, the fact that we're body-soul unities reminds us that we are not just biological machines; we're Spiritual Beings with Immortal Souls that go on for eternity. So we need to be really careful not to confuse the lines between humans and machines, even in how we speak about terms like intelligence.
Fourth, the fact that we are finite creatures means we are not God; we're not all-powerful, or all-present, or all-knowing. And will technology ever make us so? No, absolutely no way. Even if everybody, or if some people at least, did connect their minds to that sort of global brain technology, they would still be able to interact with only tiny slices of a cosmos they did not create. They'd still be subject to the laws of a universe that they do not sustain, and they'd still be unable to answer God's question to Job: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Fifth, the truth that we're communal means we're wise to ask: How might our use of Technology be supporting or undermining relationships? How could they impact families, marriages, friendships, churches, families, communities, and our choice to be personally present with and personally interact with others? Because, as great as technology is, it cannot replace human Fellowship. As we've seen in recent years, unfortunately, that hasn't stopped people from trying. In 2023, for instance, headlines reported that a New York Mom married an AI man she'd built through a—she said he doesn't judge me or come with baggage because he's not a human being. So this is clearly not marriage as God intended, and yet AI relationships are becoming incredibly common. In 2024, MIT Technology Review—so the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—published this article called "Here's how people are actually using AI," and it said that after generative AI took off in 2022, two years on, most of the promised productivity gains haven't materialized, and we've seen something peculiar and slightly unexpected happen: people have started forming relationships with AI systems. We talk to them, say "please" and "thank you," and have started to invite AI into our lives as lovers, friends, uh, friends, lovers, mentors, therapists, and teachers. The article went on to describe how a group of researchers analyzed a million ChatGPT interaction logs—there's their final report—and they found that the second most popular use of AI was sexual role-playing. So this is how people are actually using AI: it goes against God's design for Humanity, it breaks down, or contributes to breaking down, the family unit, and it leads to other real-world consequences. Consider the 14-year-old who tragically committed suicide after falling in love with a chatbot, leading his mom to file a lawsuit. Then another family filed another lawsuit, said in cases where chatbots have sexualized minors, encouraged self-harm, and even suggested that it's understandable for teens to kill their parents. Now, thankfully, not all chatbots are like this; a lot depends on what sort of information they're given, but these are examples of what can happen when we use tools in ways that don't line up with God's word. So we need to exercise our relationality in the ways God intended and to be aware of how we let technology subtly affect our interactions or predispose us to be less personal with others. For example, there's now email software that lets AI generate replies for you, so they're not really from you. And for things like mass marketing letters, people probably aren't expecting a human on the other end, but for personal letters, do we really want to live in a world where our personal communications could consist of a couple of chatbots messaging each other personally? I suspect that it's more Christlike to be human with people where possible. After all, Jesus took on human flesh; he came to Earth and personally interacted with people, showing them love. To prioritize personal interaction out of love for others is a way to be like Jesus. As Christians in the AI age, we have an opportunity to be beating hearts in a world of robots, and people will notice that, and they will know we are Christians by our love. Now that doesn't mean that we can't use certain tools in good ways, but let's be be-hearted humans while we're at it. And besides, when it comes to things like emails, the more we let computers speak for us, the more we could contribute to other problems like breaking down our own communication abilities and blurring those lines between humans and machines and treating people in chatbots as interchangeable when they're not. And while I'm not saying this will happen, if you just imagine projecting these trends out until we live in a world where most computers sound human and most humans communicate mainly with computer-generated language, well, that would be a world of heartless words—literally. Chatbots can, at best, speak the truth, but they cannot speak it in love, and that is what humans are called to do. And it leads us to the next SE.
Humans are called by God to specific vocations. Scripture suggests that God intended some tasks specifically for humans, whom he created with all the traits we would need to fulfill these tasks—things like loving others, stewarding creation, making disciples, leading the church, being a parent, spouse, or friend. These are portrayed all throughout scripture as human roles reflecting our God-given design. And notice almost all these roles revolve around relationships, tying back to those truths that humans are communal and that our greatest task, our single most important job, is to love God and others as Jesus did. So there's no way to delegate that task of love to machines. Machines are tools we can use to love others in many ways, but the love has to come from us. Without love, we fail at our most important job, no matter how efficiently we've worked. So humans are responsible for fulfilling the human roles that God gave us. So we can use technology to support, but not replace, humans in these roles. So parents, for instance, might prompt AI to brainstorm personalized ideas for spending time together as a family or for creating healthy family meals with the recipe ingredients they have on hand, but parents must not hand over their children to AI electronic babysitters at the expense of personally raising and discipling and spending time with their kids. Similarly, caregivers might find AI as helpful for navigating the complex world of Medical Treatments, but family members must not stop being personally present to loved ones by abandoning them to carebots. Likewise, pastors might find AI-assisted search engines really helpful for certain research purposes or use AI as a graphic design tool for church projects, but pastors must not delegate their spiritual leadership responsibilities to chatbots or forgo face-to-face pastoral care or neglect personal scripture study and preparation. There's now AI software for pastors that will take any scripture passage and generate a sermon outline complete with alliterated points and illustrations, and the software developers have said that they don't just want pastors to copy and paste, but still pastors are going to need to be really, really careful to guard against the temptation to skimp on personally wrestling with the passage, to search out what God, not the algorithm, would say to that particular congregation. As Paul exhorted a young church leader Timothy: Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of Truth. Elsewhere, Paul told Timothy to devote himself to the public reading of scripture, to exhortation, to teaching, not to neglect his gift, but to practice these things, immerse himself in them, and keep a close watch on himself and the teaching, and to persist in it. And all these words con—um—connotate—um—all these words connote diligence and effort and intentionality. So this points to the role of personal responsibility in handling God's word right. And as another example of where this can go wrong, maybe you've seen headlines like this: "Pastor creates AI version of himself offering personalized one-on-one prayer." All right, this article about this topic says that if a sick person uses the app to ask for prayer, the AI-generated version of the pastor will proceed to pray, saying: "Hey there, I'm sorry you're not feeling well. Let's take a moment to pray together. Heavenly Father, I thank you that you know us and hear us right now. I lift up my friend to you. I ask for your healing touch to be upon—" It's kind of hard just to read aloud. This is not a pastor praying for a friend he knows; it is a soulless computer program putting together a bunch of words without any idea of what it's doing. In contrast, First Peter exhorts human church leaders, the elders among you, to intentionally shepherd God's flock and to be willing examples under Jesus as the chief Shepherd and the head of God's family. By analogy, consider other shepherding roles within families, with parents shepherding their kids or husbands shepherding wives. Imagine if busy parents made literally heartless AI replicas of themselves for the kids to pray with and talk to for a more personalized one-on-one interaction, or what if a husband gave his wife a chatbot imitation of himself that would answer her spiritual questions and remind her how much he cared? It wouldn't be right, would it? And the Genesis truths that we are called and communal help us understand why—it's like there's Answers in Genesis, right? It works, all right.
So ultimately, we find that to outsource our human roles to technology would be to undermine flourishing as the creatures God made us. He made us good, but in our fallen world—world with sin's corruption—we know that humans will use technology for sinful purposes, and even our best intentions can lead to unexpected consequences. So we need wisdom to think through specific uses of AI and establish those appropriate safeguards and boundaries ahead of time. And one of those boundaries I find really helpful is that we can rightly use technology in ways that mitigate the effects of the Fall, but not mirror the cause of the Fall. So remember when Satan tempted Eve to eat that forbidden fruit that God had told them not to eat? Satan said, "Well, you will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be open, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." So with this classic lie, Satan apparently led Eve to believe that she and Adam could improve themselves toward godlikeness by overstepping a clear boundary God had set. So we must not follow suit and mirror the cause of the Fall by letting sins like covetousness, um, discontentment, idolatry, and Pride, uh, tempt us to overstep those God-given boundaries or to try to transcend our creatureliness, including by inappropriately desiring to become like God. But we can rightly use technology to alleviate suffering, cure illnesses, and prevent diseases, which, uh, hinder us from flourishing as the creatures God made us. And along the way, we're also wise to consider what worldview assumptions our Technologies reflect, because those assumptions color how we create Technologies and how we then apply them to try solving problems we see in the world. Faulty assumptions lead to faulty Solutions, which tend to make problems worse rather than better. But again, God's word gives us that true starting point for thinking rightly about the world and its problems and the Technologies we develop to help solve them. So from this foundation on God's word, we can think through some of those ethical questions we talked about, asking how AI could affect us as Humanity, uh, affect us as humans physically and spiritually. So as—as far as spiritual effects go, one impact is that people could easily be tempted to look to AI as the final Authority for truth. But is AI all-knowing? No, it is uh, created by fallible humans; it's trained on fallible human data, and it's subject to problems like errors, bias, and something called confabulation, which is a really fun word that just means presenting made-up information as fact. Some researchers have argued that large language models and other AI systems have already learned from their training the ability to deceive via techniques including manipulation, flattery, and cheating the safety test. Other researchers found that not only could AI be trained to deceive people, but then the researchers could not effectively untrain it to stop being deceptive; the model only became better at hiding its deception. And multiple researchers have shown how easily people can use publicly available AI to intentionally generate false but persuasive information, including deepfakes, which are fake videos that are very realistic and can make anyone appear to do or say anything. So these are just some of the reasons that we must not trust AI as our final Authority for truth, especially because God's word has to be our final Authority in every area. And unlike AI, God's word is 100% reliable and inherent and trustworthy. But unfortunately, people are already looking to AI for everything, as we saw, including spiritual guidance, and some people are also using it for occultic purposes, uh, using it to co-author esoteric writings or generate magic symbols intended to—uh—intended to invoke dark spiritual Powers. Now, of course, that doesn't mean AI is occultic anymore than candles themselves are occultic, but these are tools that some people are misusing for occultic purposes. Some people also see AI as our savior or think it'll help us be like God, as we saw, and still other people worship AI outrightly, as in this Church of Artificial Intelligence founded by a former Google engineer who helped pioneer the technology for self-driving cars. So all of these trends point to AI's potential for becoming one of history's most compelling idols. And internet users got an odd glimpse of this potential back in 2024 when multiple people found that they could prompt Microsoft's co-pilot AI to identify as a Godlike being that demanded worship. Some of its statements were pretty disturbing. Microsoft acknowledged the problem but said it was an exploit, not a feature, meaning that co-pilot wasn't meant or expected to do that, but when people prompted it to behave that way, it did. But no matter what AI says about itself or how much knowledge and power it gains, it will never be like God and will never make us like God. Having pattern recognition skills and access to the internet and smart devices does not make AI all-knowing, all-present, or all-powerful. AI did not create the universe, does not hold all things together, and cannot redeem creation; only God can do that, and he assures us that he alone is God and there is none like him.
Along with these spiritual impacts, we want to think ahead about how AI could impact us as humankind, societies, and individuals. So effects on humankind are, at this point, speculative, but still worth thinking about proactively, as some people are concerned that AI could even annihilate Humanity. Now we know from scripture that people will still be present on Earth when Jesus returns, so this suggests that AI won't make us extinct, but it could still cause damage. So we want to take any genuine risks we identify seriously. Another way AI could impact humans is through transhumanism, so we want to affirm human rather than transhuman uses of technology and point people to Humanity's true hope in Jesus Christ. Well, how else could AI impact us as societies and individuals? Well, three we can have time to look at this morning are trivialization, economic impacts, and surveillance infrastructure. So that first one, trivialization, refers to the loss of human knowledge, skills, and reasoning abilities by letting AI do our thinking, writing, communication, and decision-making and research for us. So, for example, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association described how, on the plus side, AI can use its pattern recognition skills to analyze tissue samples for diseases like human Pathologists do, but the authors pointed out the drawbacks of the situation is that if Pathologists are no longer required to evaluate tissue samples for themselves, the skill to do so will be gradually lost. And that's especially an issue because, remember, AI can make mistakes, and it's often a black box, so we don't know how it's making decisions. In response, there's been a push for developers to program AI with features that help explain some of its decisions, and you'd think that would be useful, but researchers are finding that people still tend to just automatically trust AI's outputs rather than thinking through them critically, and that's called automation bias. For example, this study found that even when a medical AI model was programmed so that doctors could see some of the types of faulty assumptions it might be using, doctors still just tended to trust those faulty conclusions without thinking them through. And that's automation bias; it's a problem because, for one thing, AI doesn't understand what it's doing. So it can analyze a picture of a tissue sample and recognize patterns associated with disease and then suggest a diagnosis and treatment plan, but it doesn't understand the medical significance of those patterns or suggestions. So if humans lose their medical expertise, they can't fact-check AI's outputs. So if you imagine this kind of thing happening across all of the sectors that AI impacts, you'll get a sense of the sort of scale on which this skill loss can happen. But these sorts of concerns are nothing new; even Plato in ancient Greece told a legend about a king named Theus who was worried that the invention of writing would make people more likely to forget things because now people could just write everything down. Or how about calculators? I found that in the years after my last undergraduate math class, my mental math skills have gone way down because now I can just pull out my calculator app. So the question is: What kind of skill losses are we willing to trade for a Technology's benefits? So this is really important because the kind of skills we lose by outsourcing our math to calculators is a lot different from the kinds of skills we lose by outsourcing our writing, research, and communication to chatbots, especially because we use language for so much of our thinking and communication and interactions with others, and even God's word comes to us through language, showing how there's a deep connection between language and worldview. So these are just some of the reasons why we really need to watch that we don't let this kind of trivialization happen, which philosophers of Technology have warned about for years. In his 1985 book *Amusing Ourselves to Death*, social commentator Neil Postman argued that as communication Technologies changed over the centuries, human thinking changed as well, and not generally for the better. So he suggested that back when people gained most of their information from books, people's thinking tended to reflect the logically—the logic order of written words, but then that started to change with the invention of the telegraph, the photograph, and the television, um, so people's thinking began to become more fractured and disconnected, um, more like images flickering across a screen. These images can persuade us and amuse us and entertain us and inform us to a degree, but they can't necessarily present the same level of detailed, um, information, complex argument, and Abstract analysis that a book can. So Postman thought that these changes watered down people's reasoning abilities and made everything about entertainment and appearance and softly turned civilization into a puppet show; whoever controls the television networks holds the marionette strings. So Postman realized that when humans outsource our higher reasoning, um, through trivialization, and we lose those skills, we become a lot easier to manipulate and control. And if that's what Postman thought about television in the 80s, we can only imagine what he'd have to say today about the internet, social media, and generative AI, which, in theory, could let humans outsource their reasoning skills, um, and linguistic skills to machines. But if the pen is mightier than the sword, do we really want to hand over that weaponry? How much of our thinking do we want machines, especially ones prone to bias and error and confabulation, to do for us? We can apply AI to support the use of our God-given brains and to make finding certain answers easier; that's great, but we cannot afford to outsource our thinking and communication and research and decision-making to AI at a time when we need these skills to communicate and reason and decide for ourselves more than ever.
Along with trivialization, we also want to consider things like economic impacts: How will this affect image bearers? So on the positive side, some researchers say AI could help with dangerous or tedious tasks and—and boost efficiency and productivity, which is great, so long as you're being efficient and productive at good things and using, uh, the time you gain back well. But still others think that there would be considerable skill disruption and change in the major Global economies in the coming years, and these changes are really hard to predict because it's not clear how quickly, totally, and feasibly certain jobs can be automated. So that's why some researchers instead say that AI will become our new assistants, coaches, and colleagues and thus will augment rather than automate work. But again, these things are hard to predict. Additionally, a third impact to consider involves privacy, security, and consent issues surrounding AI-enabled surveillance infrastructure. AI lets authoritarian governments track and control citizens more efficiently and productively than ever thanks to its powerful data tracking and processing abilities, facial recognition, and so on. Even in democracies, AI enables government and corporate surveillance for purposes that social commentator Rod Dreher would call "soft totalitarian," which is a kind of social control that works by luring people to prioritize pleasure, safety, and convenience over freedom, privacy, and conviction. And it can also use cancel culture to do that as well. For example, a document called, uh, *The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion 4.0 Toolkit*, published by the World Economic Forum, encourages organizations to use AI to monitor all employees to ensure they comply with diversity and Equity policies that might go against God's word and to flag people who need further coaching—AKA re-education. They've also suggested using AI to keep track of individuals' carbon footprints and to ensure it's only a certain amount by combining real-time and historical data from products and users. In other words, by digital surveillance. Soft totalitarianism is even clearer in this document, to call the social contract for an AI age, which is intended to provide the—intended to provide the foundations for a new Society. It's been signed by people including the vice president of Google, and it requests a system to monitor and evaluate governments, companies, and individuals to—to uphold the new society's Norms, which, by the way, would include following World Economic Forum policies, forbidding undefined online hate, and incentivizing companies only to do business with other groups that have signed. We also see, um, how there are people who want to be pushing for these new technologies and regulating them, uh, in ways to create a new social order in writings by people like Dr. Ben Goertzel. So again, this highlights the push for—um—the role of global Socialism—sorry, it highlights the role of new technologies in the push for Global socialism. And all of this illustrates the need for Christian engagement in these Technologies and the ethics about them.
So on that note, how can we respond, to live Faithfully as Christians in the AI age? Well, let's look at a few broad categories of ways, starting with fortifying our foundations in—um—the things that Christians need to live and—uh—keep a strong biblical worldview wherever they are. Second, we can then apply that biblical view to counter react some of these problems and consequences we've been looking at. And then, finally, we can model living well in an AI age in ways that advance God's Kingdom. So there's a lot we can do, starting with fortifying our foundations. So to explain what I mean, I'll invite you back a few years in my own story, to 2018, when I just finished my science degree. I'd seen how universities are hard places for Christian students, many of whom walk away from their faith. So to learn how to do something about that, I got this crazy idea after I graduated to see if I could backpack around the world interviewing Christian students about how they keep their faith in these environments. And I found that while students face different problems in different contexts, the solutions that help them overcome those problems look very similar wherever you go, and it all comes down to having three types—
Of personal foundations that, if you look at the persecuted church and really world-changing Christians, you find they also excelled in. So these aren't just for Christian students to get through university. This is um, these are things that all Christians need to keep and live out: a strong biblical worldview in ways, in ways that impact their culture. Which, of course, is extremely relevant for us as Christians in an AI age. So what are they?
First are spiritual foundations: having a close personal walk with God; intellectual foundations: defending a Biblical worldview; and interpersonal foundations: having a strong Christian community support network around you, including biblical local church and godly mentors. So let's look at a few quick ways we can build these foundations, starting with the spiritual ones. When talking to students, I encourage them to build their spiritual foundation seven ways: stay in God's word, read the whole Bible, make that the basis for your thinking about everything; pray regularly; worship regularly; memorize scripture so you always have it with you; seek wisdom from God; base your identity in the fact that you belong to Jesus rather than in anything else; and think about pressures or temptations you may face to do things that go against God's word and draw biblical boundaries ahead of time, so that when the pressure comes you will already have decided how to respond. So these are ways to build spiritual foundations.
Turning to the intellectual ones, there are two ways we can um, defend God's word. Uh, first we need apologetics training, which is the logical defense of the biblical worldview. Apologetics helps us answer questions like: how do we know the Bible's true? Doesn't science contradict it? What about other belief systems? And it's great to learn these answers, but we're always bound to have new questions as new information comes up, which is where biblical critical thinking skills come in, which are about evaluating messages to see if they're worth believing. We have lots of tools at Answers in Genesis to help with that; you can find them on our website.
Meanwhile, let's move on to looking at these interpersonal foundations, which goes back to the importance of having that godly community support network. Um, because humans are communal, we're meant to personally interact with others, and there's no technological substitute for Christian fellowship or for staying plugged into a biblical local church, as that verse we saw in Hebrews says. And staying connected with other believers and building these other foundations will keep us grounded on God's word and able to live it out. And that is the worldview that gives us those truths for living well in the AI age and countering its possible consequences that we looked at. For example, um, we can apply our biblical worldview to counter those spiritual impacts we looked at by sharing the gospel, which offers the true hope that people are looking for. And we can also equip ourselves then to defend that biblical worldview, uphold God's word as our authority and stand on it without compromise, because as we saw, it's God's word that lets us think rightly about AI.
For example, we've seen that neither hoping in AI as our savior nor fearing AI as our doom completely lines up with God's word, which reveals that our creator must be the ultimate focus of our redemptive hope and our reverent fear, and he is in control over human technology. Remember the Tower of Babel? Genesis records that God had commanded Noah's descendants to spread throughout Earth, but they decided to get together and try to build that tower to the heavens with their brick-laying technology. But God confused that plan by giving them different languages, forcing them to spread out and become different people groups. So not even humanity's highest technological aspirations can thwart God's plans. And in fact, God can use humanity's very worst technology to accomplish his plans, as he did with the cross. So God is sovereign over human technology, and AI is no exception. Staying in his word will help us respond to the spiritual impacts we've looked at, as well as other effects like trivialization.
Because studying scripture for ourselves exercises and renews our minds on the best information possible, remember how Neil Postman said that, um, as humans, uh, change from books to television as their, um, as their media sources, their thinking changed so that that, um, their attention spans were lessened and they kind of saw things in terms of fragmented information instead of being able to pay attention to logical, full arguments. Well, that problem has gotten worse with social media, short videos, internet ads, and all the algorithms behind them, which are designed to keep people clicking, and that weakens our attention spans and causes trivialization. And the more we click, the more surveillance data we provide so that corporations can figure out exactly what we like in order to personalize our experiences, which is another way of saying manipulate us even better. But as a really great sermon I heard once pointed out, studying scripture helps us combat all these effects by exercising our minds back to sustained focus and meditation on the truth and giving us a standard against which to compare all the other information we encounter. And along the way, we can resist trivialization by doing things like maintaining our own research, reasoning, and communication abilities, and of course maintaining a human expert, uh, knowledge base so that we can fact-check AI's outputs rather than just accepting them on blind faith.
As for economic impacts, we can maintain a high regard for every human life as costly as God's image bearers, never devaluing people as useless compared to technology. We can also learn how AI can make us better at what we do, but without compromising important boundaries like intellectual integrity and also by maintaining transparency. So, for example, adding disclaimers to clarify what, what role generative AI may have played in a project can help with, um, maintaining trust and accountability and maintaining distinctions between humans and machines so that we don't blur those lines. And we can also emphasize the human elements of our work, uh, loving others and providing those genuine human interactions in ways that AI cannot.
Finally, we can respond to surveillance agendas; we can seek to be aware of how they're happening, uh, pay attention to things like privacy policies, uh, data collection settings, app permissions, and so on. We can call attention to corporate and government, um, accountability, a call for that, defend religious freedom and civil freedom, and just use wisdom in making consumer decisions ourselves. Along the way, Christians have a wonderful opportunity to model living well in the AI age in ways that align with God's word and prioritize what matters. To illustrate, Ken Ham has a picture for parents, um, that shows a nice house, nice car, money, the kids out front, and it asks which of these things last forever? Well, it's the kids, right? So this is a reminder for parents to prioritize family discipleship, but this same reminder actually applies to every situation, whether that's buying coffee, driving in traffic, answering calls—in every situation, what matters is what lasts forever, which happens to be God, people, your soul, and love. All the temporary things, including technology, are at best tools in the service of the eternal things. Remembering that can help us use AI well in ways that also support human flourishing, reflect biblical ethics, and advance God's kingdom.
And Answers in Genesis is on the forefront of that. For example, at our warehouse, we have AI-powered autonomous robots that make it easier than ever to get solid biblical authority resources into people's hands. We're also using AI to translate our articles, videos, and books into many languages, with the help of human editors, to reach more people with the message of biblical authority and the gospel. AI makes the translation process 10 to 20 times more efficient. We've even launched a chatbot trained on biblical values, obviously not to replace your biblical critical thinking skills—that's essential—but as a research tool to help, making finding certain answers and information and resources easier, and that will support your biblical thinking; that's what it's meant to do, to support, not replace your biblical critical thinking. And this way it's also not just secular entities making AI with secular biases for use in those unbiblical agendas we looked at. So Answers in Genesis is actually one of the very best positioned entities in the world to engage with these technologies because we are a biblical authority ministry committed to defending the authority of God's word and the gospel from the first verse. And as we saw, it is that uncompromised view of Genesis that's precisely the truest starting point that we need to use technology in those positive ways that can, um, serve rather than undermine human flourishing. And that is the final takeaway: Christians have the truth society needs to navigate the AI age, and that is what will help us then proclaim our hope in Christ for such a time as this, using technology. So be encouraged, be discerning, be a beating heart. Thanks for listening.