drawing together the threads on AI

I did some writing back in March about AI, as that tool came to dominate the national conversation and begin seeping into our lives more fully. The rise of AI really galvanized my thinking and focused my mind around a variety of ideas that had been floating around in my head. I reacted at first with intense pessimism, which has cooled slightly (I even found some good applications for Large Language Model tools in the classroom!), but, all-in-all, that is the mood the growth of AI has left me with: pessimism about the future it is ushering in, and how humanity will react to and integrate with this new tool. In an ideal world, AI would be introduced into our world slowly, with a lot of oversight and conversation. This conversation would be led by regular people, by community interests, by civil society, and by ethicists and religious leaders. We would be thinking long and hard about what we want AI to do, and how we want to get there, and we would be aware of the dangers cropping up left and right.

Instead, as expected (can you imagine any other way it would really be?), AI is being foisted upon by the worst actors out there: global tech companies, venture capital and financial interests, and techno-utopists driven by freshman-level understandings of ethics and utilitarian commitments where humanity takes a backseat to progress. AI will inevitably be wielded to make money for the global elite, billionaires who can’t imagine enough digits in their bank accounts, and who see their fellow humans as means to the ends of enrichment.

All the while, people who are being promised a bright, AI-driven future will instead get more loneliness, more monetization of our attention, and less meaningful connection. It’s already well-acknowledged that Big Tech has used the levers of addiction to make the gains they have made in our lives; this knowledge will surely be put to use in figuring out how to addict us to AI in the hopes of extracting a few more pennies from the areas of our lives that have so far escaped their pocketbooks.

I wanted to use this post to draw together some of these threads that have been running through my writing and rattling around in my brain recently. All of this pessimism about AI is intimately connected to my theological commitments, and my political and social ones as well. The primacy of human dignity, the direction of human attention towards the ultimate Good that is God, the importance of community and connection, the need in a liberal and capitalist world to focus on the lives of regular, everyday people in our politics: no matter which lens I look through right now, all of them encourage skepticism towards the growth of technology and the increasing hold it has on our lives. And that hold is driven by global corporations and moneyed interests, all of whom view the whole world as one giant market from which they can extract from the rest of us wealth and power and obeisance. My commitments all demand that I resist this, and that I use the tools at my finger tips – my words, my ideas, and my voice – to push back and fight against this.

I am writing this today from outside, in my backyard, where the Oklahoma wind is swirling around me, and summer is in full swing. And it reminds me: this is what lasts. AI hasn’t got shit on the wind, on the warm sun, on the smell of soil and flowers, on the birds chirping as they perch on the string of lights hanging around our back porch. The moneyed interests of the world – they are all going to get old, and confront mortality, and when we are all gone, this will all remain. The rat race everyone is caught up in – I’ll let others run it, because I have compost to turn over and weeds to pull. You can’t put that on a microprocessor, and I can’t get it delivered to my pocket. How sad for those who are trying to. They think I’m going to miss out if I don’t use AI; boy are they mistaken.

I really am pretty pessimistic about the state of our culture, and the power of technology in our lives. But it just takes a few minutes away from that bubble, out under the blue sky, or in the pages of a book, at the tip of my favorite ink pen, or in the words of this morning’s daily prayers, to find where my optimism lies, to remember the hope of the world and to be reminded about who has the final victory. There’s a task for you: ask ChatGPT to give you hope. It’s answer will be crafted to please you – but it’ll still be false. Hope is out here.