Having just survived my first Medicare supplement open enrollment period and played roulette with our lives, I can say this with confidence. I have even more apps on my phone than ever before. Each of my physicians and health providers have their portals and their apps and some have already gone through several versions of the ubiquitous apps. The insurers all have their apps. The pharmacies and the drug plans have theirs as well. Bills are texted to me to be paid by link and with it I gain access to my test results and prescriptions as well. It would seem that my whole life depends upon apps, portals, and, of course, the Apple wallet -- even more than the people themselves.
I am no Luddite. I know the shape of the world will never return to the past (unless that pulse bomb is employed to render the digital world impotent). Yesterdays ways are even more than ancient. Artificial intelligence is the present and the future -- at least that is what everyone says. I shudder to think how much AI runs commerce, information, and health. I have every confidence that there is some provision for an AI review of my doctor's diagnosis, orders, and treatment plan. The entity that has no soul will define whether and how my patient care will proceed and yours also.
While some have every confidence in the tools of our technology, I do not. I know that my time is surely closer to the end rather than the beginning or even middle of my life so it matters more to those younger than me than to me. My fear is not that my health care will suffer or cost me more than I want to pay. Both of these are already happening. My fear is that for the sake of the screen we are willing to surrender our very humanity, to ignore the pointing of our moral compass to machines, and the choice to let them all do the thinking for us. In such a world, the soul is not of great value and runs way behind health, healing and the cost of it all. The reality is that it is in these matters first of all that we either reveal our souls or betray them. No machine can have sympathy or empathy. The way we deal with matters of health, life, and death is not an unimportant sign of our humanity, The way we care for one another will not earn us salvation but it is a pretty good indicator of what and who lives within us and whose works we are about.
We have by and large already surrendered the caring ministries of the church to profit making enterprises or to the non-profits who live as NGOs on the government dime. The churchly institutions of old are but a memory rather than vibrant institutions of faith. We are good at names but bad at health care institutions that reflect the soul of the Church. Oh, we continue rally around good causes to fight against abortion and the cultural whims that have yielded the sacred definitions of sexual desire and gender identity to the whims of culture and feelings. Some have merely acquiesced to those cultural norms and set aside Biblical teaching. Though our meager food pantries and such seem powerless to help, their existence is a reminder that these vestiges of caring were born of love and caring that were once a hallmark of our Christian identity and the mark of our service to the Lord of love. It is, therefore, our place as the Church to raise our voices against that which may work in business but fails in humanity. Even if only the faithful are listening, we must not fail to be a conscience of faith and a witness to truth in a world which is willing to give up its soul for a reel or a meme or an algorithm to do its work for them. The screens have no souls but they have the power to steal ours.
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