What AI certainly can do is make us more stupid. As we learn to depend upon what passes for thinking from artificial brains, the weaker and less able our own working real brains will be. We all know this is true. Some of us don't care. Some of it have given in to what we deem the inevitable. Others of us eschew technology like the plague. But some of us, who are fully conversant with the technology of the day, know that it will be a very long time before a computer brain thinks like a human one. We only hope that humans don't give up their thinking brain before that day dawns or we will be in real trouble.
The problem is that we are a lazy people. When we are offered the option of robots doing our work or artificial intelligence doing our thinking, we seem to jump at the chance without even considering the effect of this on us. We seem to have developed an aversion to work and an addiction to pleasurable things (those do not have to be real and can be digital). I have read that pornography offers AI generated explicit images and promises they are better than real people engaging in sexual acts. Are you kidding me? Next thing and we will develop machines like Star Trek had to provide the food for us and we will forget how to plant, tend, harvest, and cook. Then what happens when the power is out? But if it gives us something for nothing, we will follow the example of the 5,000 and rush to make AI our bread king (if Jesus won't be).
Sadly, there are folks who are looking to AI for exactly the wrong things. Some pastors are trying out sermons written by AI (hopefully vetted and rewritten before being delivered). Some are looking to use AI in some way within catechesis. Some are depending upon AI to help them write -- literally everything from a newsletter article to a religious book. Preaching is in enough trouble already without preachers becoming even weaker in their craft and relying on computer generated sermons and studies. But we are lazy people and undoubtedly some, even many, will rush to the easy way out without considering the cost.
The cost is not simply error or shallowness or vague generalities -- we humans are certainly capable of producing all of these. The problem is that we will become slaves to the thinking of others and forget how to produce and therefore how to judge what is good, right, and salutary. AI is a rabbit hole for people who are chasing dreams of easy lives without work and with instant gratification. AI will produce it and people will consume it without even considering if it will help or hurt in the long haul. In my mind, the surest way to become stupid is to depend upon machines to do the thinking for you, conveniently forgetting that the machines were created by us in the first place. We marvel at their wisdom and ability to learn simple tasks or to survey mountains of data in a brief moment. Why we will no longer need books to teach us or teachers to teach us. No, indeed, we will have something we deserve. We will have a mindless, soulless, heartless machine. We will bless God for AI and follow it as if it were God but in so doing we will sacrifice our integrity, our personality, and our capacity to think until we finally confuse God with AI. No, I refuse to praise something that has the potential to make us even more stupid than we have become on our own.
One generation was rightly condemned for trying to make work into their deity. Then the next tried to make leisure into their god. Along with that, entertainment was treated as the almighty. Now we seem strangely willing to trade our souls for some machine that we create to relieve us of the very thing that marks us as human -- our ability to think, to think morally, and to think creatively. For what it is worth, I feel the same way about the decision of fhe NFL to replace the chains to measure first downs and go to a digital measurement. Ugh Here is what measurements will now look like. Not gonna lie, I’m going to miss the chain gang. The issue is the ball placement not the measuring method:
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AI has useful and practical features, but there is a nefarious aspect to this technology. No, not just nefarious, but potentially useful to a harmful degree never imagined. On social media today, AI generated imagery suggests a way to make delusions closely mimic reality. It is not far fetched to imagine evil in the world taking a “giant leap forward.” The world is fertile ground, and Satan is using every means possible to distract all of us, create more poisonous ways to create chaos, and draw many into a web from which they cannot, in their own power, find an exit. The other night, my wife and I went to the movies, a very rare thing for us. But we wanted to see the finale flick “Downton Abbey.” We had followed some British comedies and mysteries over the years on PBS, but even some of this programming is now too woke and no longer fun. We sat through a half hour of previews and tacky commercials. All the previews were loud, and one thing is sure; Hollywood is doubling down on perversity, still giving the audience all of the sewage it can muster, readily aware that offensive material, crass and coarse language, sex, violence, and anti-Christian sentiment still sells. Many of the scenes in cinema can be AI generated, and AI has a made a home on your IPhones as well. Before the previews were over, my wife turned to me and said, “ I think this is the last time. I don’t want to go to movies ever again, even if it is something I thought I would like to see.” I responded, “I feel the same way. No more movies for us. This is the last one.” Furthermore, some of our favorite British shows on TV will be tuned off as well. I ask myself. “How can one live a Christian life, and avoid being conformed to the world, when the world in which we live has rapidly deteriorated so badly?” To feed on media is like a hog slopping in the muck and mud just to find one edible piece of corn. AI may be the wave of the future, but in my old age, at 80, I can live without it. Lord help us to guard our hearts. The days are evil. Soli Deo Gloria
I read a good comment about AI recently: “I do not want AI to do my music, art and writing for me. I want AI to do my laundry and cleaning so I can do my own music, art and writing.”
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