Paul Hoffman | AI, the Imago Dei, and the Fight for Our Humanity

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I'm joined today by Dr. Paul Hoffman. Paul is actually a pastor of an evangelical Friends Church in Newport, Rhode Island, but he's also transitioning and going to be an associate professor in the Department of Biblical and Religious Studies down at Samford University. And he'll be working with their pre-ministerial scholars program pretty soon. So excited to have you here, Paul. I think, more importantly, probably the introduction I probably should give is that he wrote a book called AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep. And so if you've been listening to the podcast for any length of time, you know I enjoy talking electronics, technology, faith, all those kind of things. And so I'm excited to have this conversation, Paul. How are you doing? I'm well, James. Thanks for having me on. It's great to meet you. Absolutely. So let's just jump in. I mean, what prompted AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep? What happened that you thought this book was important? What were you seeing? Just give us a little bit of your journey toward writing this book. Yeah, thanks for asking that, James. So it all started a couple of weeks after ChatGPT was released to the general public, which was around November 30 of 2022. So this was mid-December 2022. I was hanging out with a pastor friend of mine. We're at a chicken joint in Providence, Rhode Island. And he pulled out his iPhone. And he's like, hey, have you tried this new program, you know, OpenAI and ChatGPT? And I said, no, I haven't. I've heard a lot about it. And he said, well, watch this. And he put in two prompts into ChatGPT and it just spit out in 85 seconds or so a full essay. Just couldn't believe it. I was astonished. And I said, that's nuts. So, you know, we tested it out. I think we did the juvenile thing. We looked ourselves up to see if there's anything on the internet. So we found out we're not as tall, dark, handsome, rich, or as intelligent as we thought we were. Nice of AI to confirm that for you, I guess. Right. Yeah. Thanks, AI. No, hallucination, hallucination. So, no, it was funny. But it stuck with me. So what happened is a couple months later, I ended up running into a friend of mine who teaches at Salve Regina University, a Sisters of Mercy Catholic school. His name is Sean O'Callaghan. Good Irishman from Cork, Ireland. And we'd lost touch during COVID because Rhode Island was in a pretty big lockdown. And just life takes you different directions. And we didn't plan to meet at this event in Providence on College Hill. And I know he's an expert transhumanism. Until recently, he was the director of the PhD program at Salve Regina. And, you know, he studies the intersection and is overseeing a lot of research and theses on the intersection between humans and technology. That's what transhumanism is. So I took him through what had happened just a couple miles west of where we were meeting at that moment in my previous conversation and interaction with my friend Cliff. And I was telling him how fascinated I was. And I said, hey, would you ever want to write a book about that, which is always a really dangerous question to ask anyone, especially if they've written a book or they're interested in writing a book. And he said, yeah, let's talk about that. And so then next thing I know, we start dialoguing and you're putting together a book proposal. And Baker Academic, who I've published a previous book with previous to the AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep. They grabbed it and we've now released the book. So it was a serendipitous discovery at a chicken restaurant and then another serendipitous run in with a good friend of mine. And now I've written a book on it. So clearly I am an expert. That's how it works, right? Well, talk a little bit about, so, you know, it's this area of interest. And I think when ChatGPT first came out and I started interacting with it, I had a lot of concerns. And I think one of my concerns was that ChatGPT was just so open. And I think one of the distinctions I started to make was more open AIs that, and not the company OpenAI, but more open AIs, publicly available AIs like a ChatGPT where you're almost substituting a search engine, but you're not really having to then search through and vet the information yourself as you move from one web page to another. Right. And then you have these more, what I would call like narrow use case AIs that Khan Academy had one. Khanomigo was tutoring students as they're going through lessons and those kinds of things. And as I looked at that, I thought to myself, well, Khanomigo seems like a really great way to use AI. Like really interesting, really fantastic. ChatGPT also very cool, but seems to open itself up to far more abuses than like a more narrow use case Khanomigo. Did you run across any of that kind of thinking or did you look at it in that way or how did you approach AI when you guys were writing this book? That's a wonderful question. Thank you. Just a brief disclaimer. When I come at this, I come at this as a practical theologian. So my PhD is from the University of Manchester. I did a study of Tim Keller's urban mission model. I actually think today, as this is recorded May 19, I think is the anniversary of his passing or right around that. So my PhD is in practical theology and urban mission or urban missions, if you will. So, you know, I'm first a pastor. I've been a pastor for 21 years. And then I love studying practical theology, evangelism, preaching, you know, ecclesiology, right? The study of the church. So I come from that position. So I want to be clear, I'm not a heavy technologist. And in fact, as we were doing the research and writing the book, I kept a bit of a critical distance because I didn't want to be pulled in too much. I wanted a little bit of separation, but I also know it's so fascinating. You could just spend hours, you know, falling into the wormhole. And you also have to write a book in 10 months, even though I coauthored it with Sean, it's still 65,000 words. And so I come at this more as a practical theologian. I also want to confess my wife teaches English in Rhode Island. And so she, I'm learning from her, who's trying to teach teenagers how to write essays. And every time she grades something, she has to run it through a program to see if they use, yeah, CLAW, ChatGPT, you know. So she, I get her frustrations. So I'm not a total, I shouldn't say I'm impartial because I have to, I love my wife and I have to help her process that. So I come at this from a place of practical theology and a wife that works in education. So I'm probably going to have a little bit of a different approach on it. So when, when we started the book, you know, James, one of the questions is how do we even, how do we eat this blue whale of a topic? Like we can't swallow it at once. And if we eat it bite by bite, we're going to be doing this forever, the rest of our lives. So what we settled on was a bigger question. And so let me start at 30,000 feet. The research question in chapter three is, in what ways might AI help or hinder human flourishing? So that's the research question, which is, as someone that did a PhD in the UK and anyone that's done high level research, you know this, the nature of the research question is critical. Otherwise it could just be anything about AI, anything about theology. That's right. Never get anywhere. You're just in a boat floating in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. So, and then we defined human flourishing as the Imago Dei, the image of God in Genesis chapters one and two. What does it mean to be made in the image of God? And we talk about that in the book. So I'm coming at this as a pastor, as a practical theologian. And my question throughout the book is how is AI helping us or hindering us in our growth into the image of God, which is God's plan for human beings? So that's where I go with it. You know, we could talk about the peculiarities of this program and that program and open source this and that. But for me, if we don't start by framing this theologically, I just think we're going to be talking about this program's cool and this program doesn't work. Or I use this for this and this for that. And there's value there, but in other interviews I've done, you know, if it goes down that direction, I say, first, let's just ask a bigger question. And like, what does God think about this? And that's very presumptuous to think that I would even know what God's thinking. But I, I've been a student of God's word since I was a sophomore in high school. When I became a Christian, I had to read

I have read through the scriptures multiple times. And to me, what scripture has to say and as best I can interpret it, that is what's going to frame my thinking. So I'm putting that back on your plate now. I just opened a probably even bigger can of worms. No, not at all. I think the human flourishing aspect is the right place to start, really. And I think that part of what I've found as I've interacted with all the different AIs is that what we're really, because we don't have a good understanding of what it means to be human, it's very difficult even to understand how AI is helping or hindering us from flourishing as humans. And so if we define what it means to be human as the progress and success that we get as we, you know, accumulate reputation or money or what have you, then AI could be construed as really helping us with that in some ways. But if we construe it from a biblical and, you know, a very deeply theological perspective, it's very easy to see how AI could hinder us from human flourishing. And so maybe let's start there and kind of work our way back into the technology. When you think about the Imago Dei, that's not an easy question either, right? I mean, it feels like it boils it down and then you start, you know, you start tangling out into other areas as well. So talk a little bit about when you're thinking about Imago Dei and you're thinking about human flourishing, how do you, how would you help people understand that and sort of crystallize it in just a relatively simple way at the risk of over abbreviating it? But what does that look like? Yeah, well, I would tell people first, I guess my first thing would say, it's always good to go back and read Genesis 1 and 2. First two chapters of scripture help us understand how we got here. It helps us understand quite a bit about God. I would say you see the Trinity there, the triune being is there. Obviously, you need to bring in other scriptures, John chapter 1, because we know Jesus is the pre-incarnate word, the Logos. So I'll say two things about that. First, I define in the book, you know, drawing from other theologians that the image of God has first to do with reason, which is our rationality, our ability as creatures to think, to create, to problem solve, to iterate. And that is critical that we use reason. Second is relationship. We're to have a relationship with God who created us to be in relationship with him. We have a relationship with the created order that we're given dominion over, right? It's God. If we think about, I call it the divine order because people don't like the name or the word hierarchy. I get that. But the divine order is God, right? We see this in Psalm 8. Underneath God is humans and then underneath humans is the created order that we're to have dominion. Although I would argue we have limited dominion. I can't, as of yet, control hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquakes, but we do have a lot of dominion and authority. So we have relationship to God, to creation, to one another. And then his role, this idea that we are vice regents or co-regents with God. We have authority to exercise dominion. We are to exercise a certain level of autonomy that has been designated from God. And so, yeah, the Imago Dei can go any number of directions, but I really, in the book, we narrow it down to reason, relationship and role. So that's really important. But then we frame it within what I call a creational narrative that we give at the beginning of chapter 3 where we say, OK, there's the creator who preexists, right? There's, and this I learned significantly studying in the UK, the emphasis on the Trinitarian relations and operations, which I had gone to a top-notch seminary, but I don't remember spending so much time on the nature of the Trinity and the functions of the Trinity. So I'm doing urban mission study and they're like, Oh, you got to read these 20 books on the Trinity if you've never read them. And I'm like, Oh Lord, save me. Save me, Jesus. Come back now. So, yeah, so we, we have to remember God preexists. And for me, I would assume this is true of you, but please give me feedback. The Trinity defines reality. God's nature and being defines reality. I, if you want to push back, you know, and I'll call you a heretic if you say, No, that's not true. I define reality. No, no. I mean, I think there's the, you know, there's the reality we experience, but the way I usually phrase it is, you know, we're to be true to reality, particularly to the reality of the triune God. And so I agree. I mean, I think there's a, there's a sense in which that, you know, we're not going to find the Trinity in creation unless the Trinity has already been revealed to us through God and his word. And so these things are reflective or representative or however we want to say that that's appropriate theologically. But there is a deeper connection to all reality pointing to the triune God and the triune God being the source of all that reality. Yes. Yeah. Amen. So I would agree with you that the Trinity defines reality. And so if I want to know what the ultimate reality is, I look to the nature of God, not to my warped, broken, very narrow understanding. But then after that, right, out of the overflow of God's love, we have creation. And so God is in and of God's self or himself, God is complete. But God out of the overflow is how theologians speak of this. God created everything. Genesis 1 and 2, ex nihilo speaks it. There's nothing in God speaks it into being. And then we have creation and everything fits and coheres. It's beautiful. It harmonizes. Everything is made to flourish. And so we have this idea of the creator and then the first creation. But then we have alienation. We have Genesis 3. And early on, thank God, we're not that it happened, of course, but that we know how it went awry in Genesis chapter 3 with Adam and Eve disobeying God, rebelling against God. We have obviously the serpent, who I believe is Satan, is part of that tempting them. And then we have God issuing the curse. It's really the natural consequences of their disobedience, which which brings us into death. And and part of that, as I defined in this creational narrative, disintegration. And by the way, this narrative isn't just Genesis chapters 1, 2 and 3. If you find if you look closely at Romans 8, it's one of my favorite chapters in Scripture. You can find these themes playing out in Romans chapter 8. And so you can see it mapped out there as well. So we have, you know, the creation, we have the fall and then the disintegration through the fall that creation now is groaning. Right. It wants to be liberated from its bondage to decay. I find that to be so profound, Paul's language there. And then that's why we have the cross is the liberation. And it talks there about the language that's used there is liberation. So when we have criticisms of quote unquote liberation theology, right, theologians, Central, South America and others. Well, that's kind of in Scripture, everyone. Maybe liberation theologists took it a little different, but it's it's all things that are to be liberated, not just the children of God, but all Christians to be liberated through the cross of Jesus. It's not just God just didn't send Jesus only to save individuals, pluck them out of the fire. Right. But it's to renew and to restore all things such that at the end of, you know, there's this reclamation is the next phase, reclamation. And then finally, we have like the fullness, the glorification is what Paul uses that language of glorification. And we go to the end of the story. And I'm so thankful to God that if you read ahead in the Bible, Revelation 19, 20, 21, 22, we have the new heavens and the new earth and God declaring, see, I'm making all things new. And so that's where it's all headed. So AI is part of that story. It's not separate from that story. It's to fit somewhere in that story. And the question is, is it is it tracking with God's story? Is it aligning with God's story or is it more on the is it more in the disintegration side or is it helping in in the disintegration and is it helping in the the liberation and the reclamation? And I think to me it's mixed that that AI can be used both toward God's greater ends of redemption and restoration, but also the world, the flesh and the devil are trying to use these tools to destroy and to disintegrate, to steal, kill and destroy humans and to allow creation to continue to disintegrate. So I've given you a lot there. I don't know if that makes sense. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. 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89586579. No, it does. And I think I want to go back early on. I want to clarify a couple of terms. So when you're talking about reason, role, and relationship within the image of God, I think, and then we talk about AI being a, you know, it can help be a part of that disintegration or it could be a part of what helps us move toward restoration. Does it not all come back to the way that we understand those three qualities of the image of God in relation to one another so that even, you know, you kind of said, it's like, it's the order, the divine order, God, us, create the rest of creation. And then you also had the role is we are to be God's vice-regents, vice meaning that we support his regency, right? And so then what happens to our reason within that structure is that it's sort of constrained. And it's constrained in a way that eliminates options, but also opens up opportunities that we wouldn't have without those constraints. Is that a fair way of understanding this? Yeah, I mean, because I don't think what we try and do in the book is not, we're not Luddites. We're not like burn the bots, burn the robots to the ground, but we're not like, yeah, insert it right here into my frontal lobe. You know, although my wife, there's many times my wife would be like, yes, we need some new operating system up there, Paul. So more empathy. Can the machine give you more empathy, Paul? I don't know. You know, I say that because in a couple of days, it'll be my 26th wedding anniversary. And I have an amazing wife who, my wife is the supreme. She's an advanced, I don't wanna say technology, an advanced being compared to me. So yeah, I think there's ways that technology can help us and there's ways that it will hinder us. And that's my concern. The other thing we talk about in the book, and I think this goes hand in hand with what you're, getting at is one of the concerns in the book is that, and this didn't come from us. This comes from a great book called The Age of AI that was co-authored by Henry Kissinger, Daniel Huttenlocher and Eric Schmidt of Google fame. And so their concern, one of their concerns in the book, and I encourage people to read it if you're interested in AI. They say one of the big challenges is that AI is going from being a tool to being a partner in how we perceive the world, understand the world, how we iterate because human beings, we, as Christians, we know the big picture, but we don't know every little detail in between. We know where it's all headed, but this whole, do we wanna rely on AI such that we over-rely and it becomes what I would consider to be a partner when I believe in God's understanding of the world, it's a tool, a tool to be used. But they would argue in the book, The Age of AI, that we are relying on it more and more and more. And so, their simple epistemological understanding of the West is that it used to be first religion, we depend on God and religious texts, but then we have the enlightenment, and this is obviously a very simplified understanding of the last 500 years. Yeah, but then after that, it becomes science and technology, human reason is added in, so we have divine, the divine, we have scriptures, then we add in human reason and science and technology and Galileo, et cetera. But now we're starting to rely on this new advanced technology even more to epistemologically and what we call heuristically, which is how we explore and iterate how we try things because human beings learn also by experimenting, right? You know, Thomas Edison, 999 versions before he gets to the thousandth version and the, oh, now I have a light bulb, but he didn't just come with it, you know, right out of the gate. And this is how we discover, right? We discover in marriage, we discover in parenting, no one is fully formed. And I think this is part of our sanctification is we learn by doing and trying and failing and then repenting and growing and reflecting. And that's how God sanctifies us. So I think all that ties back to our relationship with AI and how we understand it. And I'm concerned that too many people uncritically are making it a partner without seeing it as a tool. And I think it's better to think of it as a tool in our human flourishing. And it's a tool when it comes to my role. It's a tool when it comes to my relationships. It's a tool when it comes to reason. But when I over-rely on it, I'm transforming it wittingly or unwittingly, probably unwittingly into a partner, which is a greater reliance, like a relationship, a marriage. And so that's, again, I've thrown you a bunch of stuff here, but I think we need to think deeply about our use of it. So I think I'm with you there. I think there's a, you know, when we think about the tool versus the partner aspect, part of my concern with artificial intelligence has been that we're giving it too much credit. And here's what I mean by that. It's still, even if you have AI-powered robots roaming around and they appear to have thoughts and emotions and everything that a human might have, let's say, they're still going to be embodying that world very differently. And so if we go into the cog psych world and look at embodied cognition and those kinds of things, you just start to realize that you can't replicate humans. Right. You can approximate, you can get somewhere close, whether that close is, you know, across the Grand Canyon or, you know, four inches, right? You can get closer than maybe you've been in the past, but that these things won't ever think the way that we think simply because they're not embodied in the world in the same way that we are embodied in the world. Their threats are different, their fears are different if they even have those, you know, their concerns are different. They come from a different place in a different way. And so as we look at AI, it seems to me that we always need to keep it in the category of a tool that's going to serve humankind and better humankind as opposed to thinking of it as a partner where now we open ourselves up to, I mean, you mentioned you've been married for 26 years. I'm going on 26 right now. So yeah, this will be our 26th. But you know, when you have a partner, you're trying to better the partner as well. Yes. And I think that's sort of one of those things where you sit back and you're like, well, the technology can get, quote unquote, better. That's fine. But the reality is you're not usually trying to actually better the technology for the technology's sake. You're trying to better it for your sake in most technological relationships. And it feels like we're making a shift with AI because we've been almost hoodwinked by our own sophistications that this thing has its own personality, its own thought process, that it is human 2.0 in some way. Yes. Yeah, that's a great insight. I really appreciate you bringing that up. What's concerning about it to me is that it does do things that we don't understand. You know, for example, Hallucin, it developed a new antibiotic, which I think is great. For the potential medical uses of AI, I'm a big fan, medical imaging, organization, storage, diagnoses, you know, developing new medicines and so forth. I think that's huge. But for example, it can run all these complex algorithms and then it creates something like Hallucin, but we don't even exactly know how it did it. And this is where the computer scientists and the programmers, the AI technicians are coming forward and saying, yeah, it's doing things and we're not even sure how. And I think that's problematic that it can come up with something and we don't know how it got there. And to me, there has to be some kind of way of assessing it or having accountability, because if we don't know how it got there, I mean, we know as humans for the most part, how we, we can trace the invention of the car. We can trace the invention of the plane. We can trace the invention and development of other technologies. But with AI, I guess we can to a certain extent, but it's still coming up with things in ways that we don't understand. And so it's going to get crazier because right now we have narrow AI, which is very good at, you know, it's an inch wide and a mile deep at doing certain functions, but it's they're, they're trying to develop general AI where eventually it will think and interact in the world very similar to how a human functions, where it can do multiple functions at once and, and can operate in some kind of bodily form in the world through, I assume a robotic presence. Now they say we're 10 to 50 years out, but the problem is when it gets to that point, it could outsmart us. And that's where you have Elon Musk and other people signing now, all these kinds of petitions saying, all right, let's, let's pump the brakes, everyone. Let's pump the brakes. Yeah. Because they are concerned about how it could be used by rogue actors. And so, yeah, it's concerning that we're developing something that we don't even understand how it fully works. And this is where Andy Crouch, who used to be part of Christianity Today, he

In some of his works on technology, he says it's kind of like magic, right? Ancient people would look at something and they'd say, oh, that's magic. And now we know there's a scientific explanation, but magic shows a power beyond human understanding that can do something better, faster, quicker, or something that we can't even explain at this point. And that's magic. And then you're almost imbuing a sense of deity or projecting a sense of deity, if you will, onto the technology. And I just think that's so problematic. And that's where it becomes more and more of a partner. I want it to do more for me because it can do it so well and so fast. And I don't even know how it's doing it, but I don't really care how it's doing it. I just want it to do more. And I just, you know, as human beings, you and I know this, we tend to be uncritical. We're easily swayed and persuaded and easily wowed. And we fall in love with something and then we put our affections and attach ourselves to it. And then only later on are we like, oh, maybe that wasn't a good idea. Right. Yeah. There's a, there's this great economics article. I want to say it was from the 1960s or 70s, uh, written by a guy named Kahn. And he called, it's called the, uh, the tyranny of small decisions. And essentially what he talks about is, you know, if, um, an alien race had come down and wanted to hand us the car and said, Hey, you can get where you're going faster. It'll, you can spend more time with your family or whatever. You know, everybody, everybody, every individual is going, yeah, that's a good deal. And he said, now what the aliens don't tell you is, you know, and he was, he's kind of like using pollution as an example or what have you. You know, all these negative effects. Everybody might take a step back and go, well, do we want it now? But his idea was that because each one of us makes an individual decision and we don't see the aggregate of all those decisions, eventually each of us contribute to getting to a place we wouldn't have chosen to gone if we'd have seen the bigger picture, which I think is an interesting sort of, um, way of thinking about it. Yeah, that's a great thought experiment. I call it, you know, the law, I think of it as the law of unintended consequences, right? We create something and, and, um, and then we don't know what we've done. And that's, that's what I see this like the analogy of, um, Frankenstein's monster. Um, and the classic tale, they, they create the monster, um, was it Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde or whatever. Um, and they create the monster and then unleash it in the town and they're like, oh, that was a bad move. It's like clubbing people to death and burning thing, you know, like, and then it's, then, then you've got a different problem because now we don't know how to control it because we released it without the controls. But the problem with AI is right now we do have controls. They can set parameters, but when you get to general intelligence, it's going to outsmart you. And that's where you have, I think it's the book Life 3.0, um, you know, written by a MIT, uh, scientist. Um, I'll think of his name in a second. Um, he basically says, um, there's a range of options here. And, um, the range of options, there's like nine of them. And he says, um, you know, we can harness the AIs on, you know, on one end is like, there's a, a peaceful partnership, um, where we have control over AI, but then there's a spectrum where it moves further over to the other side, where AI, uh, can become like the zookeeper and we become the zoo animals. And then on the other end is the extinction. AI looks at us and says, you know what, they're polluting the planet. They're taking up space. Um, they're heating things up. They're dumping pollution in the water. They're blah, blah, blah. Let's just get rid of them. And by the, by the calculations of AI, which to me, this is conceivable because humans have done this many times in history where we invent something that's great, but it can also backfire. I just think of nuclear weapons, nuclear power. Um, and so eventually it, it just decides like these people are too problematic. Um, we just need to get rid of them and we'll all be better. And so then they'll have robot abilities, but they could do it covertly without us even knowing because when it's at our intelligence level, we know human beings can do things, um, maliciously, covertly. We can be mendacious. And, um, uh, like what would stop a robot from being mendacious? Maybe they don't see themselves that way, but they don't want us to know that they're going to eliminate us. And then they have their embodied presence. So I know that's a very wild speculation, but the people that are inventing these technologies, and it's Max Tegmark, uh, he teaches at MIT. Max Tegmark wrote the book Life 3.0. Now this is a genius in like four fields. Right. This guy understands computer and physics and blah, blah, blah. And I'm not the best scientist, so again, he's speculating, but he's doing so based on reasoning it out. So I do think we have to, I'm one of the people, we need to create controls early on, but as you know, James, the tech, the problem with technology is it always advances faster than our social relations, our moral relations, our legal relations. And then we've released into the world. We're like, oh, wait, wait, what? Okay. Uh, what do we do now? And this is just human nature. We release it and then we have to reverse engineer based on the consequences. But I think AI is so powerful. This is going to be the harder Pandora's box to close. I just don't know how we, we do that. And I think we need to be doing that kind of stuff right now. But again, we have to get China to collaborate. We have to collaborate with the EU in a world now that globalization in a sense is breaking back down. And we're seeing in the geopolitical scene, we're not as collaborating as much, you know, NATO could be fraying depending on American politics and NATO's politics. So then what happens when we're collaborating less and there's more competition, it's more fractured. The landscape. So I know I'm getting high level. No, no. Uh, I mean, my, I tend to agree with you. I mean, my tendency is to say that we work better conflictually than collaboratively anyway. And so, but the problem with that is if we go back to something you mentioned earlier, the transhumanism idea, if we think, you know, if we construe technology broadly and we say something like, um, blood doping or steroid use is really just in the application of a technology to overcome biological weaknesses in the body. And you say, well, so then it shouldn't be illegal for athletes. Right. And if we went that far and we said, okay, let's let athletes use these things. The trouble is that essentially what's happening is you get one or two athletes doing this. Now every athlete has to do it. Yeah. If they want to be competitive, they have to do it. And so what I tend to see is we, yes, I'm, I'm all for regulation too. I think it slows things down. I think it does do constraints, but to me, the horse is out of the barn at this point. And what we, what we have to sort of reckon our way through is how do now we build these other AIs to do conflict with the AIs that are built in other nations, the AIs that are built by different corporations, the AI spyware versus the AI protector that's no longer, you know, allowing that spyware to work. It gets really complex really fast, but it also plays into the exponential increase of AI and the role of AI as partner, because to your point, I can't protect myself from AI. Yeah. I can't, I can't sit and code on a computer fast enough or secure a password well enough. Like there's nothing I can do and AI is going to beat me, but it may not beat my AI. Yeah. Yeah. And so you end up in these sort of modes where it's like, yeah, collaboration would be ideal, I suppose. Yes. But even then, you know, so my tendency has always been to sort of, and I've talked to a couple of government folks who are doing this. They said, yeah, they're building artificial intelligences to combat, you know, essentially to make sure that if there is an AI that's trying to get into a U.S. system, let's say that it's always a stalemate. Yeah. The new AI doesn't have to win. It just has to not allow the other one to win. So it's this fantastic sort of underlying world that we're creating. And I think that aspect of it is super uncompelling in a lot of ways. Right. Because you could see how it could get to a stalemate. Right. Obviously, it could be extremely devastating, too, if it doesn't get to a stalemate. But at the end of the day, I wonder, and we'll get back to sort of the pastoral perspective on this. I wonder if we can even really recapture a sense of humanness and ecclesiology and Imago Dei within this kind of setting, given what

If I don't like my church, I can drive 20 minutes in another direction to another church, and there's no skin off my back, and really no skin off anybody else's back either. We're sort of cloistered in suburban neighborhoods where we don't have to get to know our neighbors, right? Like we've created these artificial buffers around us anyway. And it just feels like our communities have, I don't wanna say shredded, but we've certainly pulled away from that communal aspect of being together, of doing life slowly, of being really deeply interdependent on one another in ways that are tangible. And we're in this tech world where we really do depend on the computer a lot. I mean, even without AI, right? And so that, hopefully that frames my question out for you. How do we come back? How do we recapture a theological vision of who we are and what the church is within this technological realm? Let me ask you a serious question. 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It's so critical. And I think we're going to have to fight. I think we're gonna have to fight with all of our power, because, I mean, I have two teens, and I've just seen how they get sucked into the phone. Now, that's just a device that has, they can text, or be on a Snapchat, you know, little chain, and Instagram, and all that. So it's the whole attention economy is already… there was a great book, Shoshana Zuboff, I think it's called The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism, where the whole attention economy is the most brilliant psychologists in the world are working with social media companies to capture every ounce of our attention, every moment, every millisecond. And so now, with even more powerful technologies like AI being infused into this, it's gonna get harder. And it is a big social experiment. And I'm a big fan of… I'm sure you must be familiar with Jonathan Haidt's book, you know, The Anxious Generation. And now it's just being verified that this has been a huge social experiment that's not benefiting our teens, not at all. And both of my kids are on the bubble of that. My younger son was born in 2009, and it was 2010 to 2014, 2015 that we unleashed this whole thing of, you know, the iPhone or Android and social media at the same time. And they can literally pinpoint 2012, you know, the whole mental health crisis is when we gave these devices to children and teens with their access to anyone in the world. They could be compared to any person on Instagram, even though you can use filters and, you know, you're not really a size 30 waist, you're really a size 36 waist, and I increased the biceps and said, I don't think you really work out. I think you're just using a filter. Your biceps aren't that big, dude. No. So, okay. So in the book, more to your point, we talk about this in chapter six, this idea of formation. How are we formed as individuals and within the body of Christ? And so we propose there this idea of what we call hearth habits. And so hearth habits are habits that bring us back into our bodies, back into community. And so I think we have to have countervailing, I think as a James K. Smith says, they're like counter formation habits. So we need to have habits that work against our overexposure and perhaps overreliance on technology. So we call them hearth habits because the word for focus derives from the word hearth in the old Latin. And the hearth used to be the center of the home. In the colonial and pre-colonial periods, the fireplace, everything was centered around the fireplace because that's warmth, that's cooking, that's light. And so everything was, that was the focus of the home, generally speaking. So now that we have technology, electricity, we don't have, we don't necessarily have the hearth or the fireplace as the center of the home anymore because we don't really need it. It's more of like an aesthetic thing. I don't really need that to cook or feed. I've got electricity. I click a button and, and I know this because I just toured homes in Birmingham. I went home shopping and my wife and I really do want, we're going to lease for a year because there were so many home options, so many neighborhoods and we're like, we got to get our son who's a freshman in high school registered. So we need to focus on that right now. But we do want a fireplace because we do want a place where people can gather. I want to have undergraduate students from Samford come over to my house and we sit around a fire, whether it's a, you know, a gas fireplace or a regular fireplace or whatever. And we just sit there because there's something about a fire that does draw you in. So in terms of the hearth habits, we talk about things like cooking together. Do we cook together anymore? I don't know, James, do you cook with your wife or with friends? Do you grill? Do you barbecue? We're all in the same room while I'm cooking. I cook for the family usually. And so we have some in and outs, you know what I mean? But everybody knows when I'm in the kitchen and I'm cooking and you know, that's when I have conversations with my kids and you know, my wife's around. Awesome. Yeah, yeah. But do you have, are you talking to AI or you're talking to a chatbot or no, it's just us? Oh no, it's just us. Yeah. We don't, we, so we, we've probably taken an approach similar to yours. Like we didn't have a lot, we don't use Alexa in the house at all. Like we don't have any of that stuff. I just didn't understand. I'm a Gen Xer, right? I mean, I grew up with cassette decks and like, why do I need to talk to something? I don't even use talk to text on my phone. I'm like, I'll just type it in because I don't understand what's happening right now. So yeah, we don't have any of that stuff. No, none of those kind of distractions. Yeah. See, that's great. And I would call that a hearth habit where maybe a couple times a week, you're like, hey kids, let's all gather. We're gonna barbecue. We're gonna cook. We're gonna sit down and eat together. That's been harder with our, one son's in college, uh, younger son. It's like, okay, does he have AAU basketball or does he have lift for his football team? I don't know. Uh, where should I be right now? So, um, we, we have to fight for that and it's been harder just with, with sports schedules. But yeah, you know, gardening, my wife has been good at this. Um, she's better at gardening, but gardening, um, we'll do tomatoes on the back porch. Um, we'll do, um, what else? Um, You know, mint or, uh, I'm just trying to think of other, you know, um, kind of spices, tomatoes, um, you know, gardening keeps you connected to the soil. Uh, gardening is very, um, location specific. It's very place specific because I'm thinking about where's the sun moving. I'm thinking about what season is it, what grows in this season and that keeps me grounded in a place. Um, so in our town home, we're gonna have to make sure we get some potted plants, geraniums or whatever grows there. Let's do basil. Let's do tomatoes. Like there's something that keeps you grounded and the weather, not just like, what should I wear today, but like what's going on? Um, you know, other things, nature walks. I'm a big fan of going on nature walk and being present. Like turn off the phone, look around you. What are the birds? Uh, what kind of trees? Um, is it October? Are we getting some turning of the deciduous trees? Like anything that keeps us connected to the built environment, to the soil. I think we need to do that on a regular basis because the danger is we, we ask that we talk to the computer, right? Like I don't do that on my iPhone. Like I don't, I don't do that because I'm giving my device permission to record me, which I don't think is the best thing. Um, I have my own thoughts around that. And I work with a lot of military, um, people in the military defense con, um, industry, but also a lot of officers, um, that have high level security clearances that have told me things off the record. Um, and so I, I don't want to give permission, but I also don't wanna encourage myself to talk to a phone because there's this thing we talk about in the book called the Eliza effect. Um, and the Eliza effect is where I anthropom

You're on top of this because I know a lot of people now that they're using it for, you know, different interviews. I talk to it. I talk about sports scores, fantasy football. I talk about recipes. I'm doing this. I'm doing that. And suddenly I'm just having full on hour long conversation with something that's not a human. And it's like, just call a friend, man. Phone a friend. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. I love the idea of hearth practices and I appreciate the I'm not a gardener, so, but I like the idea of like a place-based sort of practice, which is what you're getting at there. Gardening is one of those, but like how do you actually connect to the place where you are? I think it's really significant. I think as much as I also think that sports for especially for teenagers kind of get in the way sometimes of church and ecclesial life. I do think that sports have been a really good outlet for my kids, especially my daughters. We just keep them off social media and we're like, yeah, go do gymnastics, lacrosse. They weight train with me in my home gym. Like they do that. Yeah. I mean, it's so it's just a lot of fun and you don't really have a lot of time for, you know, clicking around or scrolling or whatever. And so then when they, when they happen to get on the internet and they're doing that, or we see them on their phones or something like that, we're not as concerned because it's not an obsessive compulsive. It's not an always thing. We know that they're getting something in real quick before they go off to practice. They're, you know, they're always out and interacting, which is awesome. And so I, I really liked that idea. We've got to, we've got to sort of find these areas where we can kind of reconnect with one another, reconnect with our place and where we are. And then what do we do then for that sort of vertical dimension of that connection? Because, you know, we are seeing, depending on kind of where you, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this, but discipleship isn't exactly the strongest thing in the church most of the time, you know, and so we have a lot of small group connection and that kind of stuff, but it doesn't really feel like we have a good feel for how to live under the authority of Christ and how to teach other people to do that. So how does that vertical dimension happen? Yeah, that's an amazing question. I think we have to work hard at it to keep it at the forefront. So I'll just give you a couple of ideas. First off, at our church, we don't, we do use screen. We have a big screen for lyrics. So we use a pro presenter, you know, because easier with copyright and the lyrics up on the screen. We don't have traditional hymn books. You know, that's probably a weakness now, but when we do the scripture reading, we actually put just up on the screen. We put the page number of the text and then we have hardbound Bibles because I don't want them, I don't want them looking on their phone because then they're going to get a text notification. Then something's going to pop or and then I'm not paying attention. I'm not present with God. And so what we actually do, and this is something I like about our friends or Quaker background, is we start the sermon by about a minute of silence. So after we've been singing and all this, we say, all right, we're going to be still before God. We want to recognize God is living. He's alive. His voice is living and active. He is going to speak to us through his word, but we need to be centered on him and his voice and his word. So we're silent for about a minute in silent prayer, lead us in prayer. I normally introduce the text. I'll have an introduction and then we'll put the screen, we'll put the text up there and then they take out a hardbound Bible and turn. And that's very tactile and it keeps us focused on this. And then we will put points overhead. That's one thing. I do encourage churches that, and our church tends to be low church, meaning we're not overly big into the church calendar, you know, high church, Anglican, Catholic, Lutheran, you know, they follow strictly Episcopalian. But I encourage churches to consider doing that more because even in the church calendar, it makes us present. So for example, our church really never fully celebrated Advent, right? The four Sundays before Christmas Eve, if you will. And so at Advent, I talk a lot about, we, we talk, we talk about a text rooted in Advent and we talk about the incarnation, the embodiment of the son of God. And we say that's so critical because he didn't just come to save us. He come and he, he lived 33 years, 33 years of a, of an ordinary, in fact, 30 years are ordinary. He went through all the stages of development and therefore I think making them sacred. Jesus was, Jesus had to have his diaper changed, right? In the British where I studied his nappy, he had to have his nappy changed. You know, Jesus was a preteen. That blows my mind that Jesus had to have hormonal changes. Jesus went through all the teenager stuff, pimples. We don't know what his complexion was, but you know, pimples, puberty, hair starts appearing places that never appeared before. And that to me makes that all of human life sacred, all the stages that God would live 30 years. And then for the final three years, final 10%, as it were, you know, be full bore into his ministry cycle. And so I, I try and talk about that a lot, that God understands he's, he's uniquely qualified to be Hebrews four, our great high priest, because he went through everything in human experience, except for sin. He was tempted to sin, but never sinned. So we need to talk about that. And there's something about Advent and then, and then, you know, different churches will, will practice depending on Holy week, Lent, we'll talk about Lent. Some years at our church, we celebrated Lent a little more, you know, serious, but I want churches that don't practice that to think about it more because it takes us into the life of Christ. A lot of the church calendar is about entering the story and memorial memorializing and even participating in a sense, the life of Christ, which is a bodily life. Like Jesus lived a fully human life. I know you know this, James, you know, let the hate mail come in. He didn't have an iPhone. He didn't have email. He didn't have a computer. He didn't have a car. There's the famous thing. I forget who said it, but three mile an hour Jesus. He walked at probably an average of three miles an hour unless he was a ski walker. And Jesus lived a fully human life without AI. James, you and I can do the same thing without AI and we cannot forget that we're not better than the people that came before us because we have computers that can talk to us and, and do these tremendously complex things in a short window of time. It does not necessarily make us more human than our predecessors and certainly not more human than Jesus, the son of God. That's good. We're kind of coming up at the end of the interview, so I'll just ask one more question and get your take on it. I hear what you're saying. I think, and I think it's a really important point again. I said, you know, I said I grew up Gen X. I don't think I had like, I mean, I had dial up internet until I think I was out of college. Right. So I mean, like I, my first real smartphone was a Blackberry. Right. I mean, people may not even remember what those are now. Right. I do, but not younger generations. Yeah. And so, uh, I mean, I'm just sort of, I kind of look at some of this stuff and I'm like, where it's convenient, I'll use it, but I don't get that. I actually need it. Right. And so my last question is this, I mean, how do you think about something like a category like effort when you're thinking about artificial intelligence? It seems to me that artificial intelligence, what we're doing is we're outsourcing so much to it just so that we don't have to put forth the effort. Now I don't mind that with like certain administrative tasks or, you know, I think there are uses for it, but I guess my point is, and I've said this on the podcast a number of times, like I, I used to be a personal trainer. I'd never bring a client in and go, okay, your workout today is to sit in the corner and watch me lift. That is no benefit to them, right? There's no benefit to them. And so how do we think about this category of effort with regard to discipleship and spiritual growth in a world with AI? Oh, that's so good. So, uh, so many different directions, but I think we, um, there's a great book by Jacques Ellul. I'm not sure if you're familiar with a little French Catholic theologian, The Technological Society. The problem with the modern West is that we think in what we call instrumentalist terms. Everything is about efficiency, quicker, cheaper, faster, better. And we forget that to be human is to be messy, that to be human is to make mistakes, that to be human is to try and fail, right? You're not going to build muscles by watching you work out on my behalf. It just doesn't work that way. I need to come into the gym and I need to do all the sets, the lat sets and the, the set,

remind us that to be human is to be a struggler. I don't know, to be human is to struggle and it's to risk and it's to create beautiful things, but to do that, it's the process of trying and failing and not just delegating your life to a machine. And as I see it, part of our sanctification is that process of trying and failing, of risking and working out and building the relationships and then being rejected and having to learn how to handle rejection and rejecting other people and them confronting me and me having to repent and ask for forgiveness. And this is how God molds us and shapes us into his image and his likeness. And so I think we need to think deeply about how much we want to delegate of our lives to machines when so much of our lives God has structured them and ordered them pre the technological age to be a beautiful struggle and to be sojourners and to be Abraham. Go back and read Abraham who's called to move to a place he's never been to. And nowadays I can go, I'm moving to Birmingham, Alabama from Newport, Rhode Island. I don't know anyone that's ever done that. Newport is gorgeous, beautiful. Birmingham is a great city as well, but Newport is, is known as the billionaire's playground. And I could go on YouTube and see what Birmingham looks like. I can look at a block of Birmingham, but Abraham didn't have that opportunity. And yet what does it tell us in Hebrews 11? Did Abraham by faith got up and went to a place depending on how you map it out on the fertile crescent, 600, 800, maybe 1100 miles step by step. He didn't get on a plane. He didn't get on a train. He didn't go on YouTube and see, he didn't, he didn't read reviews. He went there and I think let's never forget that is an example of what we're called to be. We're called to live by faith, which is step-by-step struggle by struggle day by day and not give everything over to machines, but to realize there's something beautiful about the struggle of our lives. It's where God meets us in the mundane. It's where God meets us in the failure. And I don't want to short circuit any of God's great work to sanctify me and to make me into the image of his son, Jesus. So let's be thoughtful in our use of technology. And certainly let's not delegate everything in our lives over to AI. Very cool, man. I love that answer. And, uh, I really appreciate you being on the show. I'd recommend, I got the chance to read Paul's book, um, and Paul and Sean, uh, Paul and Sean's book, uh, AI shepherds and electric sheep, uh before the interview. I would really recommend it. Uh, I read a lot on AI. I found this book to be really, really strong and enjoyed the pastoral heart that you brought to it. Paul. I thought it was just really great. Uh, it was a version of a treatment that I don't always see because I, I'm, I think I've just been reading some of the books you noted, you know, um, they're written by more technologists. And so you kind of dig into the technology and the theory there. But I think you guys did a wonderful job of really framing this pastorally. And so the link to the book will be in the show notes. I just encourage everybody to go out and pick it up. And, uh, and Paul, thanks for, thanks for being here. And, uh, I know you usually say good luck. I guess God bless at Sanford, right? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, James. And I just pray the Lord blesses your ministry. Blesses the podcast. I would just say if people want to give feedback, um, they can follow me, uh, speaking of social, if you, if you happen to be there, no problem if you don't, but you can follow me on social at, at pastor Hoffman, H-O-F-F-M-A-N at pastor Hoffman on, um, Instagram, Facebook, or on Twitter, uh, as it's now known as X at pastor Hoffman 77 and feel free to reach out, give feedback, because I hope, um, the book is widely read such that we get to make maybe a 2nd or 3rd edition. And I need people's feedback to say, you know, you, you didn't think about this or I wish you talked more about that. Um, and I, I really do like to dialogue with people when they reach out. So, uh, James, I'm honored and privileged and humbled that you'd bring me on this awesome podcast. Pray the Lord blesses it and blesses all who hear this and listen to your ministry and, uh, keep doing what you're doing with your family. I love that you cook with them. I love that you lift with them. Um, these are the things that make us distinctly human. Thanks, man. All right. Well, we'll close on that and, uh, we'll catch you all in the next episode of thinking Christian. Thanks for sticking with us. Take care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at life audio for their partnership with us on the thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. Hi, I'm Nicolette Bell, host of the Everyday Prayers podcast. Each weekday, we take just a few minutes to focus our hearts on God's Word through powerful scripture-based prayers designed for real life right where you are. Whether you're in the car, folding laundry, or taking a rare quiet moment for yourself, Everyday Prayers is here to help you connect with God and center your day with truth. Follow Everyday Prayers with Million Praying Moms wherever you listen to podcasts.