Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look in an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth for the Colson Center on Johnstone Street. Last week, former CNN reporter Jim Acosta aired an interview with an avatar that claimed to be Joaquin Oliver. one of the students that was killed in the horrific twenty eighteen Parkland, Florida school shooting. Joaquin's father used AI to create an interactive model of his late son and then asked Acosta to interview it on what would have been his twenty fifth birthday. After the avatar told Acosta that he was all ears, Acosta introduced himself to it and then asked Joaquin what had happened to him.
The Avatar replied, and I quote, I appreciate your curiosity. I was taken from this world too soon due to gun violence while at school. It's important to talk about these issues so we can create a safer future for everyone, end quote. When he was asked what should be done about gun violence, the avatar then replied, quote, Great question. I believe in a mix of stronger gun control laws, mental health support, and community engagement.
We need to create safe spaces for conversations and connections, making sure everyone feels seen and heard. It's about building a culture of kindness and understanding. What do you think about that? I think that's a great idea, Joaquin, Acosta responded. The interview was, to say the least, creepy, except for an initial greeting, AI Joaquin spoke in a flat voice and with eyes that appeared lifeless.
And of course, it's impossible to know what views the real Joaquin would hold had he survived the shooting. Most unsettling in all this was how Acosta promoted the interview as if he were actually speaking to the dead student. rather than a computer program that had been fed a specific point of view. Apparently the boy's parents even hope that the avatar will soon participate in debates about gun violence. The obvious expectation here is that everyone should accept this assumption that an AI program has indeed brought a dead student back to life again.
This goes far beyond the hologram that was created of Walt Disney or even the companies that now bring photos to life Harry Potter style. Back in the 1960s, historian Daniel Borstein worried that people would begin to confuse television and movies with the real world. He said, and I quote, we risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so realistic that they can live in them, end quote. The point that he was making is as much about the kind of people we are as it is about how impressive we can make our illusions. After all, we are people who have already confused likes with being liked, social media friends with real ones, and platforms with success.
Though in Deuteronomy God strictly forbid the Israelites from inquiring after the dead, our collective faith in technology has seemed to convince us that such things are far less dangerous. 20th century writer Arthur Clarke said, and I quote: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Our science fiction, as well as tech gurus like Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil, promise a day when we will inherit eternal life by uploading our consciousness to computers. At that point, it will be fully impossible to know where our technology begins and our humanity ends. And that brave new world will be built on an assumption that human beings are the sum of their parts, reducible to information stored in biomechanical databases that can be transferred to other memory banks.
And that's the very same assumption that undergirds this notion that an AI avatar should be taken as if it's the same person it's pretending to be. It is not. 1 Samuel 28 records when King Saul of Israel sought a witch to summon the prophet Samuel. He did this because God would not answer his question about whether or not to go to war. Samuel informed the king that not only would he lose the next day's battle, but that he and his sons would be killed.
Akasa's interview wasn't exactly that kind of necromancy, but the impulse here is the same. Both presume that whether in our sorcery or our technology, we can somehow hold the keys of death. But we do not. Jesus said this to John I am the first and the last and the living one. I died, and behold, I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of death and Hades.
Because only humans bear the image of God, AI will never be human. Because only Christ defeated the grave, only He can hold the keys of life and death. In this brave new world, let God be God, let humans be human. and let machines be machines. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint.
Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for more resources to live like a Christian today, go to breakpoint.org.
