When will AI replace my pastor?
When will AI replace my pastor?
Artificial intelligence touches most aspects of our lives, but here's what it can't do.
Earlier this week OpenAI released a massive update. X (formerly Twitter) lit up with reactions.
If you missed it, here's the summary of key product innovations and online reactions:
You and everything you've ever worked for are now obsolete.
As of May 2024, we will no longer need teachers, translators, or therapists.
Students need not worry about homework, especially math.
Tech bros now have the perfect AI girlfriend.
It’s impossible to see the new advancements in AI and not think about where this will take us. Artificial intelligence will integrate more and more into our lives, including our “faith” spaces.
AI leveraged in the realm of faith
The platforms we frequent shape our worldview and our spiritual outlook. Our faith journeys are already augmented by algorithms that steward our clicks and online habits.
A recent study by Pew Research shows that:
about 4/10 Americans have used an app or site that reminds or helps them to pray or to read the Bible.
1/10 Americans use an app or website daily to help or remind them to read scripture or to pray.
11% of US adults follow or keep track of their own religious leaders online, specifically to get faith-based content and guidance.
If you’re augmenting your faith online through popular apps and Bible readers, then AI is already shaping your spiritual disciplines, empowering you to share your faith and study scripture.
Take YouVersion as just one example. Back in 2018 it was already announcing how it uses a form of AI to help people engage with the Bible and declare their faith, sharing Bible verses on social media through the Bible Lens function of the app.
Pastors are using AI to create sermon outlines, translate ancient texts, hone their topics and even get sermon inspiration.
The developers of the Hallow app, one of the hottest faith-based apps on the market and the first religious app in history to chart at #1 on Apple’s App store, uses AI to speed up the coding process for its developers.
Hallow’s founder points to Pope John Paul II’s exhortation given way back in 1990 to embrace tech:
Whether we are young or old, let us rise to the challenge of new discoveries and technologies by bringing to them a moral vision rooted in our religious faith, in our respect for the human person… let us pray for wisdom in using the potential of the "computer age" to serve man's human and transcendent calling, and thus to give glory to the Father from whom all good things come.
The papal exhortation is exciting and like a gauntlet thrown down. Since machine learning iterates off of human-made inputs and a human-curated knowledge base, people of faith ought to be shaping AI, not just leveraging it.
Shaping faith or weaning it from us?
A recent study from the University of Chicago highlights an inverse relationship between automation and religiosity in societies, though.
Where people are more exposed to automation technologies, religious beliefs are weaker.
“Occupational AI exposure explained variation in religious belief across individuals, but also religious decline in the same individual over time.”
Take from that what you may. I, for one, am not rushing to declare an AI-faith apocalypse. However, it’s worth bookmarking this moment in time.
More than ever it’s important to be reflective about how the tools we create and the technology we bring into the world impact our spiritual nature, which can be overlooked in the dazzle and drive to advance tech outcomes for innovation’s sake.
I will not be dominated by anything
Paul’s famous passage about personal freedom around behaviours seems to fit here. Of course we all hope we won’t be dominated by AI overlords that harvest our organs and use us as meat batteries to fuel the machine future (the popular and “prophetic” picture of where this is all going according to pop culture).
Given how prominent that imagined future is, the visceral excitement tweeted by people throughout the week predicting the replacement of everything can be jarring just as it seems over-eager. Of course those pronouncements come from the natural excitement of incredible new technology and also are communicated in a space designed to capture attention through hyperbolic click-bait.
That enthusiasm then stirs up the inherent fears curated by speculative fiction in the culture that go all the way back to Isaac Asimov and is so powerfully envisioned by William Gibson (whose Neuromancer has shaped our imaginations of this future).
Standing on the firmness of scripture—especially when the future seems so fluid and worrisome—helps us here. I will not be dominated or ruled by anything, seems, to me, to be the way forward with our thinking about these technologies and the ways we shape them.
But who is going to know what to do?
Petra and I were walking at lunch, a daily habit when the weather is tolerable and a sweet reality in our work-from-home world. On the balmy afternoon we were chatting about the speed of technology. “Who is going to know how to do anything?” was the question we asked, a real concern.
If we’re heading toward “replace everything” then no thank you. I like teachers. I want a human dentist. I want real comedians to craft jokes, not a robot overlord.
And humour may be a way forward, too.
At the commencement speech he gave last week at Duke, Jerry Seinfeld said this about artificial intelligence:
AI, on the other hand, is the most embarrassing thing we've ever invented in mankind's time on Earth.
"Oh, so you can't do the work? Is that what you're telling me? You can't figure it out?” This seems to be the justification of AI - I couldn't do it. This is something to be embarrassed about. The ad campaign for ChatGPT GPT should be the opposite of Nike:
You just can’t do it.
Invisible, holy tech, that animates us all
AI is not the guru who sits atop a mountain, filled with deep wisdom from the ages and a life of experience that situated him as a font of knowledge and discernment.
As I stood under our newly leafed walnut trees, listening to the sound of the wind rush through them, enjoying the natural world and not the simulation, I started to think about where we are AI-free.
Maybe not very many places. And that’s probably okay.
AI might be able to free us from mundane tasks and accelerate our processes, but it cannot answer the questions burning in the human heart: Who am I? What am I made for? What is my purpose? What is good, right, true?
It’s the spirit that makes the woman and the man, so, our pastors, prophets and priests won’t be replaced by AI anytime soon.
I know for sure that it wasn’t AI-generated power blowing through the leaves, stirring up a music no woodwind instrument could create. And no algorithm will ever be able to give me the unction to turn my heart toward Heaven to offer words to pray.
Like everything human that’s made, AI is a mere reflection of the invisible, incredible, holy tech—the source code that has always driven innovation and imbues our lives with meaning.