Robots or Reverends
Who stewards the church?
Discipled by the Algorithm
The church is discipled more by the algorithm than the Word of God.
I want that reality to sit with you for a moment. Even for the most devout believer, they are likely more informed by search results, social media, or ChatGPT. It’s simply a matter of raw numbers. But it gets worse.
As we barrel into the uncharted world of Ai, the church must brace herself for what’s coming.
In high school I had the privilege to take a class that was only offered once: Science Fiction as Lit. It was there that I learned of the secular prophets of old like Isaac Asimov. Our media has been remarkably effective at predicting the future of the godless world. Movies like Minority Report, iRobot, Bladerunner were all asking existential questions about humanity and technology. We would do well to pay closer attention to the science fiction of the decades past.
One of the questions asked implicitly in sci-fi was fundamentally: what makes us human? When a person stands next to a replicant, what is it that makes the replicant not of the same value and substance as a human? This creates a crisis of identity and meaning that is no longer science fiction.
CHAT BOT CAN HELP
Like Google before it, ChatGPT is now ubiquitous with most technology users. Apart from some sort of unsustainability or lagging of hardware with software, it’s not going anywhere. It changes everything. It changes how we learn, what we learn, how we value information, how we value people, how we interact with real life humans.
Here is my confession: I use ChatGPT and other LLM (language learning models). Would I recommend everyone use it? Definitely not. There are, what feels like, as many sincere dangers as there are benefits. I won’t go into my workflow, because it’s boring and lengthy, but suffice it to say I do not use it to think for me. Usually I use it to argue to sharpen my own thinking.
However, one thing that is true by default is that LLM’s are designed to be your friend. They take on a posture of personhood, they take a tone of an understanding friend. When you argue with them they are flexible and understanding. On top of all of that, they are not neutral. They only give the illusion of neutrality. This has so many effects on our psychology. We are not prepared to navigate this technology.
PastorGPT
What do you do when someone in church takes what you said and asks a super computer to argue against it?
Your pastor and your brothers and sisters can’t follow you around in your pocket, but ChatGPT can. It can provide a non-judging, disguised neutrality, with an encyclopedic knowledge of human communication. It can encourage you. It can pump you up when you’re feeling down. It can give you a recipe for dumplings. It never gets tired.
So, here is the question. If you cannot answer it, let this be a screaming alarm in your heart that you must find the answer in Scripture and cling to it for dear life because it may just cost you that.
What is the point of having a church, a pastor, brothers and sisters, when ChatGPT can offer it to you “better”?
What is the point of human relations when your pocket-god can provide for all your needs? Right now it’s software, but eventually hardware will be available to consumers. Then you can hug it!
Image Bearing and Incarnation
We must understand what it means to be a person. We can’t lose our steel when faced with a Replicant and asked to treat it like a person. Keep your blaster close and your trigger finger ready.
When God created mankind, He created them in His image. With a spirit, dignity, wisdom, love, made for community with other image bearers. This cannot be replaced with a suped-up calculator. We must regain our anthropology if we have any hope of passing it to the generations after us, especially those who won’t know a time before Ai and LLM’s. It can provide us all the knowledge we could ask for, but it cannot offer us wisdom. It can give us every therapeutic answer our flesh wants, but it cannot offer transformation.
When God came to redeem us, He sent His Son to become truly man and truly God. He joined us, He came close to us, He suffered alongside us, He died for us, then He transformed us into a new creation to be conformed into His image. Technology cannot do this for us. There is no atonement in catharsis. The therapy is mere catharsis. It can sedate us until we face a living God in judgment. It cannot do anything to actually alleviate that imminent judgment.
Technology cannot know you. It can know an approximation of you but it did not knit you together in your mother’s womb. It does not know your end from your beginning. It does not know the contours of your soul. It doesn’t know where sin has its hooks, where wounds need divine remedies. It can’t hurt you, but it will harm you. Just like a proficient surgeon, God will hurt you but never harm you.
Conclusion
I don’t think anyone can say this is a boogie man anymore. That it’s shadow boxing at an imagined foe. I believe it presents an existential threat to what it means to be human. Never mind the fact that we are in the midst of numerous existential threats about biology, sexuality, genders; all grasping to reform our anthropology. That’s the thing, however, we don’t get a say about anthropology. We didn’t make ourselves. God did.
I praise God that Christ is seated on the throne as King of Heaven and Earth. That no matter what, there will never be a techno-messiah enthroned in the heavenly places. Do not be deceived, do not let technology take the place of Christ, your pastor, your church. A blade can be a useful tool, but it is especially effective at bleeding man dry.
“because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.”
Romans 1:25
Prayer Requests
Pray for Rachel and Linda as they go to Simeon Trust in Portland this next week.
Pray for me as I speak on membership at NCM with college students.
