I have had a few conversations concerning faith and A.I. I suspect that those conversations will continue. We have all become aware of the dangers of being addicted to screens. We have yet to learn how to correct what it has done to our youngest generations. The abuse of technology is nothing new. Ever since writing was invented, people have been creating fake stories to harm others.
What adding speed of light distribution to mechanical power has done is increase the spread of information beyond what people over fifty could have imagined when they were children. The bar for getting a message out is now lower than at any time in history. One need not know any truth or facts at all to share their wisdom — or foolishness.
Some people see the demise of mankind on the horizon. It has been on the horizon since Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and their first son murdered their second. Progress, if we want to call it that, has been resisted by every generation that has lived long enough to see the world they were born into change enough to be foreign to them.
The Abbot Johannes Trithemius wrote a speech lamenting the invention of moveable type by Gutenberg. In his book, In Praise of Scribes (1492), he wrote. “He who gives up on copying because of the invention of printing is no genuine friend of holy Scripture. He sees only what is and contributes nothing to the edification of future generations. But we, beloved brothers, shall keep in mind the reward of this sacred occupation and not slacken in our efforts, even if we were to own many thousands of books. Printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten codices, especially since printed books are often deficient in spelling and appearance. The simple reason is that copying by hand involved more diligence and industry.” (Trans. Roland Behrendt, pg. 65).
Much closer to our time, a speech during a workers’ strike in Manchester, England in 1818 by “A Journeyman Cotton Spinner” we read about the evil of the steam engine. “The English spinner slave has no enjoyment of the open atmosphere and breezes of heaven. Locked up in factories eight stories high, he has no relaxation till the ponderous engine stops, and then he goes home to get refreshed for the next day; no time for sweet association with his family; they are all alike fatigued and exhausted. This is no over-drawn picture; it is literally true. I ask again, would the mechanics in the South of England submit to this?”
The problem addressed here is still with us today. Mankind has become enslaved to working with (for?) machines that do not grow tired. This did not reduce the labor we needed to put into production. It made production increase beyond our wildest imaginations. It allowed us to extract more power in the form of coal and oil than we had time or energy to use up. It also made the economic system of capitalism possible. Resources were no longer nearly static. It was possible to move food and raw material faster and further than ever before. People could specialize in building specific parts for machines and did not even need to be in the same cities.
The progress made famines less deadly because we could grow more food and move it around the globe quickly enough to stop starvation and disease from becoming catastrophic. This also made exploitation of workers more profitable than ever before — hence the strikes that often accompanied the building of new factories.
A.I. will likely follow the same trajectories as other world-changing technologies. The advent of A.I. being put into the hands of anyone with a mobile device has vastly increased the need in society for both knowledge and discernment at a time when both appear to be in short supply.
In doing research for this column, I used A.I. to locate the examples I quoted above. But here is what happened. After I prompted the search, I got back twenty quotations with citations that looked real. As I began to try to verify them, I discovered that zero of the twenty existed. This does not decrease the need for study and diligence. It increases it.
A.I. is a tool that has vastly increased productivity. It has also vastly increased responsibility for those who use it. It is like every other technological advance. It is not a machine that can maim or kill a person who does not know how to use it, but it is still just a tool. Any tool can give us confidence that we have not earned. It probably won’t destroy us, but it will reveal us — and that can be dangerous.
Sean is always interested in feedback and conversation. He can be reached at sean.niestrath@outlook.com. He publishes a daily devotional via Substack at seanniestrath.substack.com.