Pope Francis is in the hospital today with a respiratory infection. He also made news recently when he wore what the Atlantic describes as “a stylish white puffy jacket.” Except he didn’t. The image was generated by artificial intelligence (AI), as were pictures of Donald Trump being arrested. Time has helpfully provided tips on spotting AI-generated images, an issue that will undoubtedly be part of our future media consumption.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Elon Musk and more than a thousand AI experts and industry executives have written an open letter calling for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4. This AI moratorium has been requested because “powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” according to the letter.

Here’s one example of the need for an AI moratorium in today’s news: as many as three hundred million full-time jobs around the world could be automated in some way by the latest AI, according to Goldman Sachs economists. They estimate that approximately two-thirds of jobs in the US and Europe “are exposed to some degree of AI automation” and up to a quarter of all work could be done by AI completely.

“The global transformation of Christianity is here”

In my website paper, “ChatGPT and artificial intelligence: What you need to know,” I outline the history of artificial intelligence, explain how “chatbots” work, and discuss the opportunities and challenges presented by what is truly an epochal moment in human history. In yesterday’s Daily Article on the subject, I quoted Elon Musk’s apocalyptic warning, “Artificial intelligence is a fundamental risk to human civilization.”

Here’s what I didn’t have room to say: in the midst of such technological and cultural transformation, you and I are living in a day of unparalleled spiritual transformation as well.

For years, I have been focusing on the “fifth great awakening” sweeping much of the world. We are seeing unprecedented advances for the gospel in the Muslim world, the underground church in China, and much of the Global South.

In her New York Times column last Sunday, Tish Harrison Warren agreed. Titled “The Global Transformation of Christianity is Here,” her article notes that “the last century has seen a near-complete reversal of the global demographics of Christianity.” For example, Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa has grown from around 9 percent at the beginning of the twentieth century to almost 45 percent at the end of it. Warren quotes Sam George, the director of the Global Diaspora Institute at Wheaton College: “Christianity at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the most global and the most diverse and the most dispersed faith.”

The largest church congregation in the world is Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, South Korea, with around 480,000 members. Latin America boasts fourteen megachurches with a total membership of over twenty thousand. By some estimates, China will have more Christians than any other nation by 2030. Warren cites what she calls “conservative” estimates that there were around 98 million evangelical Christians globally in 1970; now there are over 342 million.

“A decadent slum of unforeseen consequences”

Secularists have been predicting the death of Christianity in Western culture for a very long time, but God refuses to abandon us. In fact, as Os Guinness notes in his marvelous new book, Signals of Transcendence: Listening to the Promptings of Life, our Creator continues to draw us to himself in ways we might expect and ways we might not.

Guinness tells us how Malcolm Muggeridge, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Leo Tolstoy, and several other cultural luminaries came to faith. In each instance, something in the temporal world sparked or “signaled” the transcendent longings in their hearts.

According to Guinness, our culture desperately needs to listen to these “signals” before it is too late. He writes: “Our present need for a massive spiritual awakening dwarfs the many other problems of our modern age and represents the only hope of redeeming modernity itself. Western civilization is in the civilizational moment it finds itself in because it opposes the Jewish and Christian faiths that made it, and it has no satisfactory replacement.

“Western civilization is in evident decline. The West will therefore stand or fall according to whether it experiences such an awakening and sees the renewal of the faiths that made it. Without such a spiritual awakening, the West is shown up as a cut-flower civilization whose once vibrant life and beauty can only wither and die. Brilliant as it may be, our highest ingenuity and mastery will fall short in guiding the world forward, and in its wake, they will produce a decadent slum of unforeseen consequences, unknown aftermaths, and insoluble social and moral problems that range from wars and revolutions to suicide.”

“Only God can save the world now”

The greatest “signal of transcendence” in human history was the ministry of Jesus Christ. More than any person who ever lived, he uniquely pointed us from the temporal to the eternal, then he uniquely made a way for us to experience the transcendent today.

Compare Jesus with AI: while the latter has access to current digital data, the former is so omniscient that he knows the past, the present, the future, and the thoughts of every human heart (cf. Matthew 12:25). AI-enabled apps can guide your journey, but Jesus alone can guide you to your best life in this world (John 10:10) and your eternal destination when this life is done (John 14:3).

AI can instruct you; Jesus can forgive you. AI can provide you with information; Jesus can provide you with his loving presence in every valley and storm of life (cf. Matthew 28:20).

This is why knowing Christ and making him known are the most urgent priorities in the world. As Guinness notes, “The truth is that our Western commitment to hedonism has proved empty and damaging, and our Western reliance on technocracy will always let us down. Only God can save the world now.”

He adds: “Man cannot live by shadows alone. For all who have seen the sun, the shadows will never again deceive and satisfy, but the challenge then is even bigger and more arduous: the task of building societies and a civilization that are genuinely sunlit too.”

How will you bring sunlight to the shadows today?

Denison Forum

If you could order and pay for food with your palm, would you do it? Panera Bread café is hoping you’ll say yes to palm scanning, but first you should know the conditions: you’ll obtain a MyPanera membership, then link it to an Amazon One account that will use your palm scan as payment. The company will then know your name and your favorite orders at checkout.

What if advances like Panera’s palm-scanning technology were to be used for more than purchasing a meal? What if digital technology were to be employed to monitor everything we do and then to punish those who act in ways the monitors disfavor?

This is happening today.

“The greatest threat of all to our collective future”

The Kremlin is using facial recognition to identify and detain thousands of Russians who disagree with Vladimir Putin’s policies. According to political scientist Ian Bremmer’s The Power of Crisis, China is similarly using digital technology to monitor its citizens, giving them a social credit score in response to their alignment with the Communist regime. More than 2.5 million people have been barred from air travel as a result of poor scores, and ninety thousand have been denied high-speed rail service.

Bremmer notes that the same system could be used for dating sites, buying a home, getting a job and/or a raise, seeing the best doctors, or helping your children secure these advantages. A bad score might send you to jail. This system is already being used to monitor Chinese Christians and to close churches.

You might be thinking that this could never happen in America. But consider these facts from Bremmer’s book:

• The largest companies in American history are already gathering our digital data in “surveillance capitalism.” Every day, Americans generate about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data (2.5 followed by eighteen zeroes). This is feeding algorithms intended to sell us products and services.
• The average American is caught on security cameras 238 times per week; law enforcement is using this data and artificial intelligence (AI) to catch criminals, but this system can be used for other purposes.
• 5G is building the Internet of Things that will capture even more information, including genetic codes, to produce a “true global central nervous system.”
• Quantum computing can make it impossible to protect information via encryption, with ramifications for the security of our nation’s infrastructure from power grids and water systems to food security, public transportation systems, and a stable financial system.

Bremmer warns: “The greatest threat of all to our collective future will come from the unexpected impact of new technologies that change the way we live, think, and interact with other people and will determine our future as a species.”

“A fundamental risk to human civilization”

Yesterday we began discussing the opportunities and challenges inherent in the AI revolution now upon us. As I read further, I realized that this is a topic too large to summarize in a Daily Article, so I wrote a paper for our website: “ChatGPT and artificial intelligence: What you need to know.”

In it I quote a former research and strategy officer for Microsoft who told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that AI “represents mankind’s greatest invention to date.” Friedman agreed that “this is a Promethean moment” that will change every dimension of our lives.

AI presents staggering opportunities, from medical diagnostics and treatments to advancing scientific knowledge and education. However, as the late physicist Stephen Hawking noted, “AI could develop a will of its own, a will that is in conflict with ours and which could destroy us.” Elon Musk similarly warned, “Artificial intelligence is a fundamental risk to human civilization.”

How can followers of Jesus redeem the epochal opportunities and cataclysmic risks inherent in this “Promethean moment”?

“We must attack the enemy’s line of communication”

In Easter 1945, C. S. Lewis delivered a paper on Christian apologetics to an assembly of Anglican priests and youth leaders. He could have just as easily been answering our question.

Given his assigned topic, the preeminent apologist of the century must have surprised his listeners by stating, “I believe that any Christian who is qualified to write a good popular book on any science may do much more by that than by any directly apologetic work.” He explained his reasoning: “We can make people (often) attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so, but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted.”

As a result, Lewis noted, “We must attack the enemy’s line of communication. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent” (his emphasis). For a materialistic secularist, Lewis predicted, “It is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian.”

Here’s the point: AI in particular, and our broken society in general, desperately need the moral compass of the Christian worldview. To guide culture most effectively, however, we must do so from inside. We need Christians who are charismatic political leaders, brilliant screenwriters, exemplary businesspeople, and superlative athletes. The rest of us need to pray for Christians in such positions of strategic influence.

In the context of today’s article, we need believers who are preeminent computer scientists and will bring Jesus’ moral authority to their work. In the AI age now dawning, bedrock biblical values such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the sanctity of life will be needed as never before.

As I close this article, I sense the words of Isaiah 6:8 in my soul: “I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’”

Denison Forum