Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Artificial intelligence really began back in the 1950s with what was known then as machine learning. Over the past decade, and especially the past year, dreams about so-called machine learning became possibilities and actualities. And new dreams were born about both the benefits and dangers of artificial intelligence.
Now, among the potential abuses of AI that we learned about this year was how mentally vulnerable users were manipulated into thinking that they're profits and had access to the secrets of the universe. Rolling Stone told us chilling stories of spouses and parents who watched their loved ones lose touch with reality through AI. Cashmere Hill wrote in the New York Times about chatbots that lured users down conspiratorial rabbit holes, encouraging them to take drugs, assuring them they could fly, even egging some on to suicide. Oh, yeah, and we also learned that Grok relied on Nazi sources for much of its intelligence. AI has also disrupted learning by normalizing cheating, the technology news site Futurism declared AI is destroying a generation of students.
New York Magazine warned everyone's cheating their way through college. I know of at least one Christian college religion class in which there are no textbooks and the professor actually encourages students to use AI to produce their assignments. New technologies always require humans to wrestle again with ultimate questions, not just what's right and wrong, but also what it means to be human and what the meaning of life is. You see, our work is vital as humans, not just as a way to love and serve our neighbors, but also as a fulfillment of the creation mandate, how God made us to be. The fault turned much of human work, of course, into what scripture refers to as toil, frustrating and futile effort that's unnecessarily complicated and often falls short of our best intentions and can even be a source of great evil.
Therefore, any technology that can alleviate futile, dangerous, and pointless work is a real blessing, a redemptive way of living in the world.
However, our human activity cannot be measured only by narrow utilitarian means. Easier is just not always better. Knowledge cannot be reduced to mere data or data processing, and we do not always need to be quote unquote set free from effort or inefficient conversation. Sitting with an author, following an argument, experiencing a narrative, these things reflect the fullness both of the truth, goodness, and beauty that God infused into the creation and also who he made us to be in his image. To optimize or distill down or automate reading, for example, that's simply not to read.
It's like asking AI to free us from eating a delicious meal or taking a walk in the park with our kids.
Some things cannot be optimized, nor should they be outsourced because they're irreducibly embodied activities, conscious and fully human. Think about it. It would have been far more efficient for God to have offered us a bulleted list of distilled theological insights and moral pronouncements. But instead, he revealed himself in the Old and New Testaments. He chose a library of stories, proverbs, epistles, histories, many authors using diverse types of literature written over centuries, all of which comprise holy scripture.
And part of what makes the Bible such a gift is the kind of work and humility it requires of us to properly wrestle with it. In the end, AI is not human, and it can never become human. As one writer put it, quote, AI is a mirror. All it can do is reflect our own depravity back to us. It's a computer learning from billions of humans all around the world, all endlessly sinning with their hearts, minds, tongues, and keyboards.
Garbage in, garbage out. That's a bit pessimistic. But in this new age of AI, we have to hone the kind of discernment for which Paul prayed for the church at Philippi, specifically for a love that abounds with knowledge and all discernment. That will allow us, he said, to approve what's excellent and be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. Remember, Paul also warned the Colossians, see to it no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.
Now to be clear, AI gets its philosophy and its empty deceit from human tradition.
So Paul's prayers and his instructions for us, they've aged quite well. The mission of Breakpoint is to cultivate that kind of biblical discernment, to inform Christians and equip them with clarity and confidence in the truth. If Breakpoint has helped you make sense of this culture as a Christian, would you please consider making a year-end gift? Thanks to a generous $500,000 match, every gift before the end of the year will be effectively doubled. You can give today to support Breakpoint by visiting colsoncenter.org slash December.
That's colsoncenter.org slash December. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. And if you appreciate these daily commentaries, would you please leave us a review wherever you download your podcast? That allows even more people to find this significant resource.
