Is A.I. Going to Make Us Less Human?

Welcome, everyone. This is James Spencer. I'm the president of the D.L. Moody Center. I'm here with Aline Vransla, who is our VP of strategy and research. We're going to be talking today a little bit about dehumanization, the idea of dehumanization. And in that conversation, we're probably going to touch on things like artificial intelligence. We're going to touch on maybe some stuff on human trafficking. And we're just going to talk about how do we, as Christians, counter dehumanization more broadly. And so we're excited to have this conversation. We're going to try to do it in about 20 questions. We'll see how that goes. But we're going to try to discuss this topic in a coherent way and definitely in interaction with some other big voices out there. I'll just kind of start it off and say that recently I listened to a podcast or video, I guess, with John Verveke. And John Verveke is somebody that I've referenced in my writing at various points. And he's been doing a lot of research as a cognitive psychologist. And so he deals with ways of knowing and embodied knowing and all that kind of fun stuff. So he's sort of at the forefront of intelligence and rationality, thinking about wisdom, all those kind of things from a very secular perspective, not a Christian, but very open and amenable to religious belief. And he did a video and talked through some questions about artificial intelligence. And so I think it would just be wise for us to address some of the questions he raises in a very collegial manner and see where we go with it. So his first question for really anyone was, should we be viewing artificial intelligence as just another tool? You know, like, is it the new Microsoft Word? Is it the new Google search engine? Is it the new hammer and nail? Aline, any thoughts on that? Well, it's fascinating. First of all, I want to welcome everybody, everyone, to this video. I'm very excited to be here. I also am excited because throughout the years I've benefited very dearly and personally from discussions with Dr. James Spencer on various issues and really consumed with the kingdom of God and how do we actually live in the kingdom and also in the empire, right? Both of them sometimes are in tension with each other. My background is tech, fascinated about the tech world. I've always been. And always wanted to see how it interacts. Actually, Dr. James Spencer and I spent quite some years developing online education and Christian online education and having to answer the difficult question and saying, is that modality valid of learning using technology or technologies? Right. So that was a good run and I loved it. So for this, for this question, and I'll just start it and I'm pretty sure I actually would love to hear your thoughts on this, James, is somebody said an expert that actually has a doctorate in artificial intelligence. We're in a conversation one time and they said this, which was a shocker for me. They said, we do not have true artificial intelligence. Currently, right now on Earth, we don't have artificial intelligence. What he was saying is we have a computer that uses a lot of data. We have to give it a lot of data to do some mechanisms and some fractions and some calculations. True artificial intelligence is designed or is defined as using a computer with very little data that develops its own mechanisms of thinking and all that kind of stuff. So currently, ChatGPT shocked everybody by hiring somebody. So it was given a task. It went to a website. I'm not going to give free publicity to the website. It went to the website and it actually hired somebody to do the job that they just couldn't do in the leap. Right. That was it was and it fascinated everybody and it emulates somehow human intelligence, but it was really just a calculation. It was one plus one plus one. I need this. I'm missing a one. I'm going to add a one. It's a simple calculation. So it is a wonder, but currently right now, I do believe that artificial intelligence is at this point still just a calculation, just a computer, just something that actually takes a massive amount of data to do small fractions that are really in all of us. So I'm curious what you think about this. Well, I think currently I would say, yeah, AI is still just a tool. It's a really ramped up tool. It's a really, you know, sort of powerful tool, but I think it is still just a tool. It's still well within human control. And even when it shows some of the emergent properties, sort of the ability to learn new things. So if it needs to learn Spanish in order to explain something to me, it will learn Spanish. But that's all part of sort of the coding. It's part of the trajectory that it's been set on. And so, you know, it isn't thinking. Thinking is a rough analogy, is probably the best way to say it, to what artificial intelligence does. Now, when we broaden that out and we say, okay, given the advances in artificial intelligence right now, if it's just a tool at the moment, will it ever develop beyond a tool? I think that answer is probably yes as well. Yes. I think that at some point people are going to figure out how to create this thing that is able to go about its own processes and mechanisms. I think part of what's slowing that down right now is that we really don't always understand how we think. We understand to some degree how we learn, right? There's a lot of learning theories out there, but even saying the word theories in the plural suggests that we don't have the only, like there's only one idea. We've nailed it down. This is the way we learn. Boom. Period. Right. And so I think there is a lot that has to happen with artificial intelligence for it to get to the point where it can actually fully mirror, and I don't mean that in the sense of mimic or ape might be a better word, right? Just sort of imitating our intelligence, but actually having its own intelligence and embodied experience in which it sees and perceives the world as such and has thoughts about the world that are its own. Not programmed in or logically consistent or what have you, but actually are its own. And I know that's sort of an ambiguous way of putting it, but I think that's sort of the mystery of human thought. It's ambiguous. So a good friend of mine from the tech industry works for a large corporation. And this is now about 15 years ago that this person was actually involved in a research where your mobile phone, right? So you had a mobile phone that you carry with you and it developed the technology to predict what you're going to do. So it knew your movements. It knew this is 15 years ago technology in a mobile phone. So when you stopped and you picked up your phone and looked at it, it actually brought the weather app or it brought something that you they knew exactly you're going to be doing because it tracked you for a whole week. And we are predictable beings. And I think this is the space where because it now starts predicting based on what they've learned already, we think it thinks on its own. I do think eventually we're going to get to a point where all the analysis that now we're tracking everything. If you're looking at China with scoring people's social interaction and saying your score is this, that is a lot of data that is collected. I was able to actually cash a check from Facebook because in Chicago between the years and this and if you're if you're not here's the value for you in this in this discussion. They use face recognition without the approval of people and they used it for millions of people. Right. All that data is going to go into something. I think right now it is big data, small computing, but I do think because there's space of predictability, because if you look at what we do in a week, there's a lot of predictability. We repeat a lot of things. Do I think it's going to get to a point of and maybe this is going to move us. And I in other other discussions in other questions of having its own ability to think, its own ability to generate thought, its own ability to generate creativity and creativity as a human expression. I think it's powerful. Normally, we don't think about it until we lose somebody, for example. We don't I don't read poetry for a living at all. But if if I lost somebody, nothing I do in my office or in my day gives me any form of answer. I I resort to a poem or something that explains something that is in me. That space is fascinating. Will we ever get to that? Right. Where it develops its own thought. You know, I think that's a really good second question here. You know, can these machines ever be really intelligent or intelligent in the way humans are intelligent or conscious about their environment in the way humans are conscious? I think part of that is going to be limited by the lack of embodiment. Now, I say that and I'm what I mean is the lack of embodiment now. Right. I think that many of the sort of robots that have been created in the past, they are built to embody a sort of disembodied program. They aren't built to sense in the same way that humans sense the world around them. Right. I know that I'm sitting in an office.

Now that it's relatively comfortable, I'm not sweating. I'm not, you know, super cold, right? Like I, you know, I have a sense of the environment around me, just based on all the nerves and organs and different things that I have sort of within me. They give me a sense of the environment. I don't think robots have been created such that those could be even imitated. What's starting to happen though, is that as we get robotics, there is more of an embodiment. It's a different sort of an embodiment. And I might liken that to something like the difference between myself and my house cat. A house cat actually has embodiment. There's a great Netflix documentary. My kids loved it on the secret lives of cats. And part of what they talk about in the secret lives of cats is the function of the whiskers. We don't have whiskers. Well, I mean, you have whiskers, but I don't have whiskers, right? But I'm assuming your whiskers don't like, yeah, they don't really give you a sense of your environment. Like when somebody rubs up against them, you don't get a sense that, oh my gosh, there's some danger here. There's something I should sense, right? Like a cat's whiskers really function like that. And it's just sort of fascinating. And so I think that when we talk about artificial intelligence and the development of an intelligence or a conscience, what we have to be thinking is, it's going to have a different embodied experience than we do just in its nature, right? It's not going to have a stomach and organs, a liver or a kidney, a, you know, a brain inside of it, whatever. It's going to be components that have different vulnerabilities to the outside world than we do. And that is going to shift the way that it interacts with that environment and interacts with that world. And so in some sense, I'm less concerned about artificial intelligence because what I view it as, right or wrong, right, this could be a very wrong idea. But what I would say is it's similar to sort of another creature that has different strengths than we do, different capacities than we do. You know, if you encounter a shark on a beach, are you really scared of it? Not so much because it's not capable of surviving on the beach. It's just laying there sort of in the process of dying. If you encounter a shark in the water, kind of a big problem, right? We're not equipped to deal with sharks in the water. And so the environment matters. And I think, you know, as that intelligence and that consciousness develops, it's going to develop within an environmental system, an ecological system, so to speak. And AI is always going to perceive the world differently than us because it has different vulnerabilities, different capacities, different processes that it's looking at the world through. And so I think that what we're creating is not just a mirror of human intelligence, but a new sort of intelligence that will begin to understand the world and interact with the world in different ways. I think it has many concerns. And I actually, I think we're going to have to explore some of these. We still do not know after so many years, the impact of technology, even on our children. Like we are still, we're still learning from technologies that have been around for 20 years now. What is really the impact of that? A psychologist said, well, you do not know. And we have no idea what it would mean for a child to see naked people and to be exposed to hundreds of them. We don't truly fully understand. So I think it's really worth for us to explore the conversation on what are some of the concerns. But I also think there's opportunity. So I know I'm a tech guy and I speak often against really swallowing all these new solutions as they don't, they don't offer a trade-in or a trade-off. Right. And I'm the one that actually, I think it's the responsibility of the tech guys to stand up and say, there are some concerns here. There are some limitations. There are some vulnerability. And I've learned from, from Dr. James Spencer about the, and if you have not read this before, this is revolutionized my life. The, the vulnerable hypotheses, the vulnerable world hypotheses, right? That the world is vulnerable. And why is it vulnerable? Just answering that question. But the opportunity that I think we have is now that intelligence is developing in another environment. Now that that we are questioned and what humanity 2.0 is a point of discussion, right? That we are absolute as people. And if we see ourselves just through the lens of effectiveness and efficiency, we're getting beat at that game. That's right. Right. A computer can beat me at chess a hundred percent of the time. Right. What it cannot do is I can just unplug that computer and be like, I'm done. I'm not playing anymore. Right. You cannot unplug me. So it's not the same thing, but it can actually beat me at that game. So if, if I'm only treated as efficiency and effectiveness, and that's what we do in workplaces, then we're in trouble. But I do think it gives the theologians, the, the biblicists, the Christian, everyday Christian, the chance to ask the question, what makes me human? Yeah. What, what makes me who I am? And I was awoken to, and that's why I would love to speak about this. Maybe you can address this of how much our theology is embodied, how much our faith is embodied and embodied spirituality is such a huge deal, but I've never thought of it. I have never considered and apostle Paul talks so many times about that. We experienced God in our bodies. He talks that my body has this problem. I can't wait for my body to, he mentions the body so many times, and yet I'm completely blind to the fact that we do experience God in our bodies. Right. So, yes, please. Yeah. I mean, there's, so when we think about, there, there are ways of, let's say, let's take a topic like the image of God, right? What does it mean to be made in the image of God? And there are some theories on that, some explanations of that, that would talk about it in terms of a structural difference between humanity and everything else, that we have the capacity to think in a way that nobody, nothing else has the capacity to think. And I think what we're starting to see with artificial intelligence is that it has the capacity for a rationality for a even, you know, if we, if we think about the advancement of robotics, even for embodied rationality, let's say that approximates humans. And so the way I generally think about this is what makes humans different from everything else is it is a divinely ascribed role. And the divinely ascribed role has to do with reflecting God within the creation that God has made. So we have a lot of temple imagery in the, in the Genesis account. We have a lot of temple imagery in Genesis one through three, basically. And man is put into this beautiful temple-like garden as God's image and God's likeness. And so I think what we are uniquely designed and created to do is to reflect God to the world. Does that involve our intelligence and our rationality? Of course it does, right? But it isn't encompassed by that intelligence and rationality. It just involves it. And I think there's a lot of other things that no matter how advanced AI gets, it could be a hundred fifty times smarter than me right now. Right. I believe it. Right. It has the ability to process a thousand times more information than me right now. And that does not impact the fact that I am made in the image of God and artificial intelligence never will be. And it has to do with the relationship forged with the environment that we're all put into. At the bottom line, God is part of our environment. He has established a relationship with human beings and said, human beings are created in the image of God. He has not established that relationship with AI, as far as I know. Right. And so, right. And so it, it's like, it's similar to the analogy I've used before. If you drop me off and I'm, you know, 15 feet away from a grizzly bear, that grizzly bear overpowers me 100% of the time. Right. It's always stronger than me. I don't care how much I can bench. I don't care how much I can squat. I could be the biggest guy in the gym. That bear beats me down every single time. Right. But strength, while it's part of the human experience, is not what it means to be made in the image of God. And I would say intelligence, while it involves and it's part of the human experience, it's not what it means to be the image of God. The image of God is imbued within us by nature of what God has said, not by nature of what we are. It's not something necessarily intrinsic to us. It's something that has been put on us. And so I don't think we need unique characteristics. Um, at the very least, we don't need to think of it in terms of a specific unique characteristic. That's probably the better way to put it. We are

As who we are, we're strength, we're intelligence, we're rationale, we're spiritual, we're whatever. Like all of those different things sort of culminate to make us into human. And to be human is to be made in the image of God. That's the way I've sort of wrestled with this issue as I've come about it. It's not about, I don't, I could care less whether, it's not like I think somebody who's more intelligent than me right now expresses the image of God better than I do. And there are a lot of people who are more intelligent than me. And so we can't think about this in terms of, you know, lesser and greater. We have to think about it in terms of a relational connection, right? And something that is bestowed on us and given to us as a responsibility, an obligation, a destiny, as opposed to something that we can, you know, quote unquote, realize or live up to. I think this is a really good framework as I'm as I'm listening to this. And I've I've engaged with multiple discussions on humanity 2.0. And I'm consumed by this, especially because technology moves from the printing press being a tool used to for a purpose to now somehow, somehow it's acted like it's acting like competing with faith. It can provide to you from the cloud all the hope and dreams and entertainment and keep you engaged in all this. And now with artificial intelligence, it can do things for you. It can emulate. They can actually do things like you're doing. A lot of people are saying be afraid of your job if you're in the tech industry because it replaces you. But I do think the reason I like your framework is because it makes it again for about what it's supposed to be about God. Him defining what a human is. Him saying how a human is defined in his image. What does that mean? And it really brings the focus back on what matters. Here's a here's a question, though, for you. As as I think this is, this is so helpful. And I know you, you might have even more questions to move us in this direction. So there is a pattern and I'm curious, where do you see this if it fits in that or if you can take it in a different direction? If you're looking at the fall of humanity, so there's a temptation, there's a fruit involved, there's disobedience, and there's also a promise. If you do this, you will be like God, which was apparently part of the incentive. But if you look at that event, somewhat like a singular event, I feel like you're missing the big picture of what what's happening throughout. Because you have that event and that's basically the the the line between heaven and earth, between spiritual and material and saying, if you do this, you're going to cross this line. You're going now going to actually breach that line. And then you have that the mingling of humanity with angels and all that and the morphism of that. And that's another breach that God says, no, I'm going to separate the empire from kingdom. I'm going to separate the humanity from God, from spirituality and their separation. And then you have the Babel Tower where humanity saying, we're going to build a tower so high that we're going to breach this heavens again. And God is like, I have another solution for this. And basically created Romanian, Chinese, all these languages that people are struggling with. Right. So but yet you see this tendency staying from just a breach that to blur the line between humanity, what God created humanity to be and what is godliness, eternal, spiritual. And that apparently stays that tendency stays with us really throughout. And I'm curious where you would place artificial intelligence in that massive human development. So I think that, you know, the original fall, what happens there is that the man and the woman misrecognize, they misidentify the paradise for a prison. And what they forget is that God is benevolent, wise and sovereign. What they see is that he is not benevolent. He's actually doing this for his own, to protect himself. He doesn't want them to become like him. He doesn't want a rival. And so he's not, even in his wisdom, he is, we might say, crafty or shrewd. He is manipulating the human beings with the abundance that he's given them to keep them comfortable so they don't realize they could ascend to something better. And with that sort of idea or picture of why the fall happens, then we begin to understand a lot of the things that we go through the rest of our human existence. What we're consistently seeking to find is something that will allow us to be as secure as we were in the garden, as close to God as we were in the garden, and as limitless as we were in the garden. And so as we see in, like, let's say, the Tower of Babel incident, I don't read the Tower of Babel as a moment when humanity gets together and said, let's combat God. I see it as human ignorance. They have no idea who God is. They've lost complete perspective on everything. They're confronted with a problem. We don't want to be scattered. And so what do they do? They build a city and a tower. Well, that makes sense, right? Even God comes down and is like, they're actually pretty good at this. Like, if I don't intervene, this is going to be problematic because they're going to do whatever they want. And so what I see it as, it's unrestrained and unguided human capacity that creates the Tower of Babel. I have trouble viewing artificial intelligence as anything but unguided and unrestrained human capacity. And when I say that, I don't mean that I see no benefit to artificial intelligence. But when we use our creative capacities to create anything, right, one of the books I've read recently is Albert Borgman's Technology and Contemporary Culture. A fantastic book. And he actually makes an analogy between a wood stove and something very innocuous that all of us have in our houses, which is the thermostat. And he said, if you just think about the difference between the wood stove and the thermostat, what you get with the wood stove, you have to have social interactions around that wood stove. Somebody's got to go out and cut the wood. Somebody has to have that responsibility, right? And then when the wood stove is cold, it affects the entire household. And so the whole household has to sort of come together and figure out, okay, how do we stop being cold? You want to cook? Okay, somebody's got to go have, you know, you gotta, you gotta have a process to develop that. With the thermostat, what we've done is we've made heat a commodity. I can literally just pick up my iPhone, pop on my Google Home account and mess with my wife. If I want to make the house 80 degrees, I can. Right? I could do it on the road if I wanted to. Right? Now, she wouldn't notice because she likes the house hot, but better if I had made it like 60 degrees and then she'd freak out. But the point is, there's no particular social interaction. I can just do it at the touch of a button, at the turn of a dial. And his point is, listen, sometimes as we've moved from what he would call things, which is the wood-burning stove, to devices, which is the thermostat, we've lost a part of our human social structure that we don't tend to miss in that sort of sloughing off of burdens that we often view as negative. We've lost a lot of social interaction that made us who we are. And I think as we think about the unrestrained and unguided aspect of this, similar to what we have in the Tower of Babel, what we have with artificial intelligence is, we're creating something that is going to fundamentally change the way that we interact socially with one another. It's going to change how we depend on one another and, ultimately, I think, how we depend on God. And we're not thinking about those questions. We're just sort of moving along and saying, well, it's more efficient. It'll make us more money. And I guess we'll solve the labor problem later. Forget meaninglessness, right? I mean, if I sat around the house, bro, all day doing nothing, I would be nuts. And it wouldn't be, like, nuts in a good way. I would be crazy thinking, my life has no meaning. I need the work to make my life meaningful. That's part of what it is to, like, let's dig our hands in and let's do something. But I think as we've gone down this path, that's how I would fit this in sort of from a biblical and theological standpoint.

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Yes, humans are to be innovative and to use their creativity and to use their capacity. But to use that innovation, that capacity, and that creativity in order to separate us from one another and to separate us from God, I think is antithetical to what Jesus calls the first and second greatest commandments, which is love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. That's really powerful. I actually really enjoyed the thinking of the unrestrained. What other areas of my life am I really doing that? The further question that I have as we're thinking through this is the trade-off. I'm a tech guy, and this conversation, if somebody's listening to this conversation, you might think like we're now looking into every negative aspect of artificial intelligence, and I don't think that's the ethos of the conversation. The ethos is to say, are you asking hard questions before you're doing that? We have the development of Internet of Things. We have nanotechnology. We have the development of machine learning, right? So Internet of Things is, I actually participated in a cybersecurity conference. This is, so the head of cybersecurity from FBI is the keynote speaker. It's all the who's who of this is meeting somewhere up in the mountains. And this person, after I left that conference, I wanted to wear one of those aluminum foil thin hats. I was like, forget that. I'm wearing this. I'm turning off my devices, right? Because somebody can actually, from a garage somewhere, can control your refrigerator. They can listen to you from your TV, right? You're basically, there's complete lack of human privacy in all this. And yet I'm a person that if I could walk in the house and be like Iron Man and talk to Jarvis and say, Jarvis, turn everything on, turning everything off, right? I have half of my house is on my phone. What I didn't do in that space is really ask the question, is there a trade-off? And if it is, what is it? What is the trade-off in this? What is the trade-off spiritually for my children, for my family, from health, not just from physical health, but spiritual health, right? So I am curious to know, even more maybe focused on, are there trade-offs with artificial intelligence? What are those trade-offs? I can speak for myself, but I'm really curious to hear your thoughts. I absolutely think there are trade-offs. And just to underscore your point that this is an anti-technology podcast, even the analogy that I think Borgman uses between a wood-burning stove and a thermostat, the wood-burning stove is a technology. Yes. It fundamentally changed the sorts of interactions that happened between people socially from starting a fire just at a campsite somewhere where there's no house and there's no anything, right? And so what we're seeing is, and I hate to say the word evolution because I know that's got a whole different connotation, but it is a movement from more rudimentary technology to more advanced technology. Yes. And as we move from rudimentary to advanced, we do hit always, I'm a big believer, I'll say it like this, any change comes with loss. Yes. Anything we change, we're going to lose something in that exchange. And so, yes, there are trade-offs. I think privacy in a digital world is a massive trade-off. Yes. I think that many of the systems that we interact with today have been built on the capital of our attention. We need to underline that. Right. It's just, I mean, you look at any social media platform, let's say, which are kind of the big dogs right now, right? But even if you look at internet websites and scrolling and searching and all those kind of things, it's quantified in eyeballs on. They phrase it differently, but that's the way it really is, right? Search terms rank because they're searched more often, right? It's all frequency-based kind of data, volume-based data. And so if you can draw more eyeballs to your content, that obviously means your content is ranked higher. And I say it like that because I don't think that ranked higher content is always full of wisdom. Not at all. Right. Popularity and wisdom don't have to be correlated at all. Right. But it's just the way we measure. We say the more frequently viewed, the more popular, the more useful or suitable to our ends. Yes. Let's say it like that. And so, you know, the attention has become something that I think is really, even beyond the data, the privacy issues, I realize are a problem. They're not something that I focused on. I actually think the attention is the bigger problem. Yes. Our attention drives our privacy issues. If I were not interested or paying attention to a lot of the things that I'm paying attention to on the internet, I wouldn't have privacy issues. This is bottom line, right? If I don't need to know everything at the moment's notice that this phone can give me, I have no privacy issues. Yes. Right. I don't have to Google search anything. It's not like it's making me do it. Now, the oddity of some of this is, I say that, and it's like, well, my phone is probably listening to me right now. Yes. Right? Hearing you say you don't have to Google stuff. Right. That's a little weird. Right. I'll give you that. So I think the big trade-off is attention and privacy. You know, that's what we're essentially giving up. But I think even beyond that more obvious observation, we're also giving up a way of being with each other in the world. That sort of social interaction that we have with one another, we are surrendering that. And by that, what I mean is not just even the sort of social interactions I have with my family. Like, you know, my son and my daughters have phones, and so occasionally they do get buried in their screens, right? And we have sort of like, hey, the rest of the world's out here. Get away from the glowing rectangle, right? We're all here. Great. Okay. You've refocused, and that's awesome. Thanks. But it's also the way that we interact with other people. And so if I go back to Borgman's analogy, let's say my house has a temperature problem. It's summer here right now, and I'm in the St. Louis area. It gets really humid. If my air conditioning goes out, I have no interest in the human being who's going to come and fix my air conditioner. I have a huge interest in the fact that some human being is going to come and fix my air conditioner. I don't care what problems he's having at home. I don't care. Like, I just want it cooler in my house. Yes. That sort of mentality, and I'm just being honest about that, that sort of mentality is part of what I mean. As we amp up the technological aspects of this, as we amp up, I'm comfortable in this environment in this way, people start to become commodities. They start to serve an end as opposed to being people. And I think we really need to wrestle with that with artificial intelligence, particularly. There is a reason that I continue to write all of my own content. And it really has nothing to do with how easy it is. It's not even so much about how much I like it. It's sort of a bottom-line conviction that if I'm going to send something out to anyone else, if I'm going to respect their time and attention, it should be something produced by a human. It should have a human voice behind it. And I just think we need to think about some of those things. Not saying everything, but some of those things, right? Can the computer transcribe our conversation that we're having right now and make it into a fancy schmancy blog post? Yes. Yes.

But wouldn't it be better, or wouldn't it reinforce the sort of human relationships I want to have with others if I were to hire an actual human writer to do the same thing? It's going to be more expensive, it's going to be inefficient, and the question is, should I care about that inefficiency and expense if I'm preserving a relationship with a humanity? Yeah. I've done a lot of youth ministry in my life, in my first part of my life as I've led a ministry. I actually just came from speaking at a youth conference, and I asked everybody to open the Bible at Philippians 7, and the majority of people went to Philippians 7. They tried to open it and realizing there's no such thing as Philippians 7. It was a really easy thing. You see people scrolling through their books and Bibles and even phones, and I'm thinking, you should have… I also wanted one time to actually use the Tripitaka or the Quran and preach from it and realize that I think by the end of my sermon they would have never caught that I'm actually speaking from a different Holy Spirit. I do think it's a really rough time to be hit with a content developing tool when people are really not really fully established in their own beliefs and they don't know what to believe. And AI, so even a few weeks in launching ChatGPT or launching some of the AI tools, you already had a script called Dan, called Do Anything Now. They bypassed the ethical and whatever ethical framework it had and said, your name is Dan. They changed the identity of ChatGPT and said, your name is Dan, which means do anything now, and you're going to bypass this and you're going to develop like a wicked code or you're going to do something that was basically not scripted to do and it already did it. So the corruptness of information, the not… it doesn't cite information. You don't know where the information is coming from. You don't know what algorithm it compiled, but it's giving you with certainty, this is the information in a time where people open their scriptures at Philippians 7, in a time where you really have… We're moving back to illiteracy because we pushed hard for literacy and then video came along and moved us back into actually not being consumed with text and wanting to have everything moving in video. I think there is a massive trade-off to actually not have information and knowledge of your own solidified to vetted sources that you somehow can actually somehow trust and even have your opinions formed before you engage with critical thinking in so many aspects and areas. We're now on your phone, on your computer, you can ask it anything and whatever it tells you, you think it's authoritative information, right? Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I tend to agree with you. I mean, I think we've had that for a long time now. That to me is the scary part. If we look at what's happened with the internet, this democratization of publishing. Yes. So there was an era in which we really needed to have literacy that looked like we have an ability to read, to evaluate critically information presented to us, maybe compare it to other information that's out there, and to determine whether or not we believe the information that's being presented to us. And that we had a much smaller sphere in which we could talk about maybe a book that, you know, six of our friends have read, or, you know, you know, a news story that we'd seen, you know, that more people had seen. But the ability to publish has raised a whole separate problem of information literacy because I'll explain it like this. I used to read a guy, and I still like a lot of his work as an Old Testament scholar named Walter Brueggemann. And I used to say, you know, part of the problem with Brueggemann is that he's a fantastic writer. I mean, part of his book is great at it. Right. I mean, he is a fantastic writer. And so his rhetoric, the way he frames ideas, the way he allows his writing to flow, is really persuasive. That's to me is a problem because you have to pay 10 times more attention when you're reading Brueggemann to identify the places where he's making this sort of logical leap from one idea to another than you might with somebody who's sort of slogging through a more technical sort of paper. Right. That is way less enjoyable to read. Right. It's like, oh, dude, you know, like, come on. You're already prone to criticism. Right. It's like, jeez, man. Like, I'm reading a sentence at a time and I have to take five minutes to read the sentence because I got to understand what you're talking about versus Brueggemann, who is much more prosaic, much more persuasive, much more rhetorical. And I think what we've gotten ourselves into in the Internet age is something very similar to what I'm kind of trying to describe with regard to Brueggemann versus a more technical writer. The technical writer is examining things at a detail level that most of us are uninterested in. Right. The details of a specific word, the details of the grammar and syntax of a sentence. And I'm speaking more from that biblical and theological level where, you know, the actual syntax and lexical values actually matter. Yes. Versus Brueggemann, who does more of a storied approach. Right. It's a broader overview. And let me tell you sort of the broad scopes of this story and let me apply a framework. And so I'll show you all the evidence that's convincing to this view and none of it that isn't convincing. Well, it's much easier to read Brueggemann. He's more coherent, not in the sense of intelligible, but coherent in the sense that it all fits together. And I think that's what's starting to happen with the Internet age is that we're all gravitating toward what we find to be coherent. And that coherence blunts our literacy. It dumbs it down. It makes it so that being literate is not just what I can understand, but what I actually agree with. And so as we move into artificial intelligence, I think we amp that up even more. Yes. Because what artificial intelligence is doing, interestingly, usually, and this is, there's probably some artificial intelligence guys out there who are like, this is a way wrong explanation. But at the end of the day, it's dealing in probabilities. Of course. And so as we look at it and we say, okay, if there's, you know, three options and one of those three options is maximally more represented on the internet, let's say flatter versus round earth. Yes. Right. Yes. It's going to choose whichever one is maximally probable. Or it has more content on it. Or it has more content on it. And that's just the way it's going to read it. We don't necessarily know that. Yeah. But what artificial intelligence can do as we depend on it more and more. Now I would emphasize that as we depend on it more and more, is that it can create a common knowledge that, by consequence, creates coordination. I think there's a way for conspiracy theories to grow in AI, for false ideas to grow in AI, for, you know, wrong theories to grow in AI simply by creating common knowledge about those theories and coordinating people around them. Theories don't have to be right to be influential. Not at all. And that's the real kicker here is that AI is just going to draw on what it's seeing on the internet. And so if, you know, you see, I don't know, you know, if you see fewer Christians posting on the internet, let's say for ethical reasons, and you see more Muslims or Buddhists or whomever posting on the internet because they don't have those ethical reasons. Yes. Well, AI is going to pull more from those sources than it does from Christian sources. Of course. And it's going to start to seem as if those ideas are predominant. The framing is going to be such that those ideas begin to make much more sense. Yes. And we're not necessarily going to notice that. It's Apostle Paul walking in. I think he was in Athens when he walked in and said, I see that these gods are really well defined. You have the name for it. They're clearly defined. But you also have here for an unknown God, right? And I do believe that in this age, the God of heavens, Elohim, El Elohim, it is the unknown God.

It is the one, it's really the king of content. If you get a hundred programmers right now and content developers to skew the data on flat earth versus, you know, and all of a sudden, it picks up. It's an algorithm, right? I do wanna ask a follow-up question. You mentioned to me a while ago, something that I thought was powerful because you also talk about how do you redeem, how do you actually, how do you live, how do you thrive as a Christian in the time of artificial intelligence, in the time of social media? How do you thrive? Not just so you survive. I think we, a lot of times talk about dangers and surviving, but really, how do you thrive? You did mention Neil Postman, Entertaining Ourselves to Death, and the scores. I thought it was really powerful, and I don't know if you wanna expand on that a little bit. Because I think it put in perspective a little bit that we're trying to do something that rather the focus on fighting against, whatever this against is, whatever, you know, face we put this enemy, we think that enemy has the face of a robot, but I don't think that's really appropriate. But it was a very powerful, and I wanna see if you wanna expand on that a little bit. Sure, Neil Postman wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. And the reason I brought it up, and this was sort of in our pre-podcast kind of conversation, so we were recording this, but John Verveke makes a very similar point in the conversation that he has on this podcast. And basically what he says is the time for mindless entertainment is over. And what we need to do is step away from the mindless entertainment and get into virtue. I can appreciate what he's saying there. I really can. Would I be more content with a world that is more virtuous than consumed with something like pornography? Of course. But the reality is that when we look at the internet, right, there is a lot of content on there that is less than virtuous in the classical sense. Certainly less than virtuous in the Christian sense, right? So if I just look at data on Google Trends, I can put porn, the term, the search term porn up against almost anything, and whatever other term I put in there loses. Yes. So on a scale of Google Trends run from zero to 100, in June, I think it was June 28th, the search term porn ranks at 74. Virtue, less than one. Moral, less than one. Jesus, four. That's a massive disparity to overcome. And what I think it speaks to is this. And again, as much as I appreciate John Verveke, I think he's working from within a limited framework simply because he is assuming that God doesn't really exist. And I think for Christians, we have to assume that God exists. It's like, there's no other way to do this, right? And so he and I's framework are completely different. I believe that God exists, and so I don't believe that the hope of humanity lies in humanity. I believe that the hope of humanity lies in Jesus Christ. I believe that the hope of humanity will be sort of realized in the new creation, the creation of the new heavens and the new earth. That's where I think this all goes. And so anything that intervenes in there, it's sort of like, yeah, we could judge that good or bad, right? Better or worse. But at the end of the day, we're really using a standard that is largely based on our comfort or our innate understanding of what morality actually is. If we begin to see that as anything more than that, I think we lose perspective. Dick Averbeck, who was my dissertation advisor, he wrote a book called The Old Testament Law for the New Testament Church. And he describes the law as both good and weak. It was good because it's given by God. There's nothing that can take that away from the law. It's a good law. There's nothing inherently wrong with the law, in other words. It's not devious. It's not pernicious. It's good. It's also weak because it was incapable of dealing with the depravity of the human heart. It's incapable of dealing with the actual sin problem that Christ deals with on the cross. And I would say the same thing about any human moral system. They're good. There's a lot of good human moral systems. Yes. They're weak. They're like a featherweight fighting a heavyweight. Yes. Right? It's just never going to happen. You know? There's no way it's beating it. And so I think that's sort of, as I look at Postman and then sort of through the lens of Hervé, and thinking through what needs to happen in order to sort of stem the tide on AI, I don't see AI as the sort of catastrophe that many people see it as. I see it as another instance of unrestrained and unguided human capacity pushing forward in ways that diminish our humanity or dehumanize us. Right? Simply because these technologies tend to make us feel like we are independent of God. They reduce our recognition that we are, as creations, dependent on God. And that's where that dehumanization begins to take place. And from there, when we're no longer really creatures, when we are independent individuals acting independently, taking care of ourselves, securing our own future, that's where I think a whole lot of downstream, what you and I would probably identify as immoral problems, begin to sort of unfold. The reason I really liked, this is tremendously helpful. The reason I really like your bringing Neil Postman into it and looking at Jesus ranking at four in this environment and pornography ranking at 79 or 80, and that gap between, and it's not comparing. It reminded me of a researcher that did a research in Ethiopia on a church and across the street from the church, it was the largest parking lot of people in the prostitution ring. So there's a prostitution ring happening right in front of the church. It's a big parking lot. And the researcher observed that there was an invisible line. And it said, if somebody that was involved in prostitution would cross the parking lot, cross the street, cross the entrance in the church, went in front of the altar and changed their life and gave their life to Christ, the church would come alive and do everything they can to help him. But it was the responsibility of that person to cross all those invisible lines and even prove themselves that they are truly interested in God before that church, I mean, they went all out to help him, do all this. The problem that they saw over there is, and this was a footnote of the researcher. The researcher was trying, was the case study, which is interesting of the interpretation of the space that they had in that. But what was fascinating, and that's why I think that number is difficult to deal with, is because you also had congregants that were feeding the fire of the beast. And basically keeping that alive. So this is where you have the invisible lines of what we're looking at and thinking, okay, these are some, what if we moved the invisible line maybe in the parking lot, right? If they just cross the street, that's it. We're doing everything, right? What if we put the invisible line behind them and saying they are our responsibility? People caught into the most dehumanizing experience that you can ever have and using your own embodied spirituality and your own body, your own thing for something that is just a commodity, right? Which is happening in the internet now and on the internet, which right now there's this guy that actually grew in fame on using webcams and women like that. And he's the most Google person, he's portraying himself as the Google person, right? And the most famous person by growing and selling people actually, which is fascinating. Well, what if that invisible line is behind while we're consumed with that, the graver concern is that we're also the ones actually making that gap between pursuing Jesus or pursuing that even wider, right? So as we're looking at artificial intelligence and the development of technologies, just thinking through how am I contributing to that, to the dehumanizing conversation in my own human experience.

Yes, am I, somebody said something that I really loved, and I'm, it forces you to think of that fits with AI. It said, it was a Romanian author, actually, and I'm always proud to actually put a Romanian author forward, but they said, every person is a mirror. You sit next to some people, and you see yourself lesser. You see yourself as less intelligent, less beautiful, less wealthy, but you sit next to some people, and you see yourself whole. Not better, but whole. And I thought it was such a nice difference, right? Where you actually, that space and time where you sit with the person, and you have a chance to see yourself, whether lesser because that person is more intelligent than me, or they're more capable, which is this effect of AI, right? I am, it's authoritative because they have something that I don't have. The massive difference is, you can sit right next to the best computer, best looking robot, best looking thing, and you will never feel whole. It does not have that power, that capacity to sit next to it, to see yourself in the person, but yet to see yourself as a faulty, broken, corrupt human being that is loved and accepted and all that, right? So that's why I love that gap, right? It's visible, but I'm thinking, what do we do with that? Well, and it's an important gap to understand, because I think when we think about dehumanization, we often think of major moral issues of our time. We might think of abortion. We might think of human trafficking. We might think of pornography, you know, and sort of the sex industry overall. But probably what we should be thinking of is anything that makes us feel lesser. And those things are particularly things that sort of societally and maybe structurally are organized to make us feel lesser, right? And to organize and to make certain people feel lesser. Yes. Yes. But I would actually say, you know, dehumanization occurs when we sit in front of somebody and feel lesser. You know, there's a big part of being a PhD, right? So I earned my PhD, and I think I learned this very early on from a guy who mentored me through my MDiv, Walt McCord. Walt McCord actually never earned his doctorate. I don't think he'd hate me for saying that on this podcast. But I don't think of him less because of that. And this is a guy with keen insight who mentored me when I really needed a mentor, who had the wisdom to be following God such that he had words to say to me that I needed to hear. I don't care what his credentials were, right? It didn't matter how smart I was, how much knowledge I had, how much, you know, how much I was able to prove myself academically, all that, all those kind of words. That doesn't really matter to me. Because at the end of the day, he had something I didn't have. He had experience. He had insight that I needed. He had an understanding of the mistakes that I was making that I couldn't see. And I mean, I've told him various times throughout my relationship with him, he saved my marriage. He made me a better father. You know, forget about the PhD. Who cares? At the end of the day, these are other aspects of my life that I needed to be good at. And the PhD didn't train me for it. I'm not saying the PhD is trivial. I don't want to throw it in the trash and burn it, right? It gives me a certain capability, and it allows me to contribute in ways that maybe somebody without it couldn't. Yes. So I'm not throwing it away. What I'm saying is that here's a guy who never was able to earn his PhD, who I don't think I'd be the same person I am without him. And so when we sit in front of other people and we start to feel lesser, I think that's dehumanizing. When we start to view them as lesser, that's dehumanizing. What we need to be understanding is each of us make a unique contribution, and all of those contributions matter. And they matter equally. They actually, like, we can't do without one another. Yes. That is the biggest thing with artificial intelligence and with the internet that I think we're losing, is being able to sit in front of one another and realize that each other matters, that we're actually dependent on one another. You know, as we... If I go back to that analogy of the wood-burning stove and the thermostat, one of the things that sort of shifts within that technology, so a wood-burning stove is technology and a thermostat is a technology, so you think about it, well, who made the wood-burning stove? That person is always going to be more distant to us than the people who are cutting the wood for the wood-burning stove, for the people who are lighting the wood in the wood-burning stove, for the maybe the mother who's putting the food on the wood-burning stove, right? Like the the child whose job is to put more wood into the wood-burning stove. Those are those are faces that we know that we understand. You know, but we might not know who actually crafted the metal, right? Who the blacksmith was who sort of pounded that out and created the shapes. We might not know that. We might not know who the forger was who, you know, took raw materials and created the sheet metal so that the forger had something to work with. We might not know that. And I think those are the amplifications that we're getting into in the internet age. And so it's not odd for us. 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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The people who stock the shelves at Target, I don't know who they are. The people who made the product at Target, I don't know who they are. Yes. They're anonymous. Mm-hmm. That is a consequence of the way that we have structured our environment that we need to be wrestling with because I think not to wrestle with it is to give ourselves license to make people less than we are. Yes. And that's the real challenge here. It's not about a, to me, it's not about a structure of oppression or, you know, any of that sort of craziness. It's a question of, do I actually care about the human being who did this labor that I don't know? And what can I actually do about that? How do I reconcile that in my mind as I'm doing these things? And what little changes can I make in my life? What big changes can I make in my life to make those people less obscure? Yes. Because I wouldn't want to be that obscure. You know, I don't think any of us want to be really completely and totally ambiguous in the world. And so we can't continue allowing others, other people, to hide the people who are actually doing the work from us. These are real human beings. They're real people. And I think as we, if I were to transition this back over to AI, one of the problems I have with AI is the issue of labor. Yes. Right? I don't know who works in the Amazon factory that distributes the products that I buy on Amazon right now. I'm happier not knowing about that, not knowing who those people are, than I am about having them lose their jobs because AI is more efficient. But you can kind of see the progression. Yep. Once people have become expendable.

They're expendable. Yeah, somebody said by 2030, 60% of the jobs are going to have new titles. There are going to be jobs that we do not have titles for right now. Yeah. We don't, right? It's about skilling and new skilling, all that. I think it's going to be a tough world, and I think that relationship between technology and humanization is not an easy one to reckon with. But I think it has to include a conversation about anonymity in our current system. See, I've always felt that the digital world is not our problem, right? We're carrying over analog mistakes into a digital world. Yes, yes. Like analog concerns into a digital world, analog feelings and attitudes into a digital world. And the digital world has a way of increasing the frequency, the intensity to such an extent, right, that we don't really notice that those attitudes now become so deeply ingrained that we never actually encounter anything that would challenge those beliefs. And I think that's one of the massive problems when we think about how should we think about technology's relationship to dehumanization. That's one of the big challenges. It's not the technology, it's us. We would never have created technologies that dehumanize people had we not already been willing to dehumanize people. Yeah. We have put a big portion of our life, somebody actually quantified this, which was really funny, in the hands of 50 Stanford graduates, right? I mean, we have put a big portion of our life, when you look at Facebook completely destabilizing an election in Uganda, right? When you look at social media, somebody actually did an analysis of a lot of church groups, so like Christian groups on Facebook, you know, I have groups around themes. They actually were developed by bots, not by humans, were developed by bots, and they would throw like different topics in there. And here you have a lot of Christians just going at each other on issues of politics and all these, and the image that is there of somebody developing a bot, which is just a computer generated mechanism that would just keep conversation alive or actually frictions, right? Tensions among people that are using that digital space to actually just legitimately like go after other people with no rules of engagement, with no dignity in that space. I find it highly problematic, and there is, there has to be a trade-off in there, right? And it has to impact, you know, every aspect of your life. I was speaking to the Youth Conference and I said, it's the question of how much are you worth, right? And it comes from Psalm 113 where it starts with and saying, the image in Psalm 113 is so beautiful. It's basically, it's the only song that I think it says, God looks down on heaven and on earth, yet he scoops the people from the dust and from the garbage dump and makes them, sets them among princes and the princes of his people, right? And so it's this image of this God that looks down on heaven. You don't find that in scripture anywhere else. It's such a beautiful image, right? God looks down on heaven and on earth, and yet he finds people and the distinguishment between people that are in the dust and people that are in the garbage, right? So I've seen like, James, you know, I work in South Sudan. I've worked in Eastern Europe. I've seen people that live in the dust and there's so much joy and beauty. There's poverty is not a disease as people see it and all this, right? And, but there's a fundamental difference between being in the dust and being in the garbage, right? And so the whole question was, how much are you worth? And one of the thing is you're worth how much your words are worth. You're worth how much you sell yourself for. You're worth how much you actually, your God is worth, right? Because Jesus sings Psalm 113 and then goes and dies on the cross for us, right? He sings the song. So it's powerful, but it's, and I told them, it's, you're worth how much your words are worth. And the spoken one and written ones. There's not a distinguishment. It's still you expressing yourself, right? But we don't tend to distinguish that. We think what we say in that digital world just goes into nowhere. It just, there's no accountability. There's no nothing. So we've created this basically third world, right? This spiritual, the material and this, the land of luck, right? The space in between where we don't know where luck comes from, but that's the digital space. What I think is really important to understand is that when we think about dignity, right, there's a lot of talk about human dignity. And usually we hear it in sort of right to life debates and those kind of things. And so that is an aspect of human dignity. Dignity. But I would also say is, you know, I was at, my kids are involved in sports. And so I sit at sporting events a lot. I hear a lot of parents who are, let's say it nicely, advocating for their children. And I will say sometimes my gut reaction is, you know, to sort of revert back to something that has almost always worked for me, which is just to be a bully and tell these parents to shut up, to tell them that they're, you know, incorrect about what they're saying, that they should just be quiet on the sidelines and maybe go away somewhere, you know, just sort of intimidate them into silence. Yes. Right. And it's hard not to do that, I'll be really honest, right? It feels unnatural to me not to do that. And but I don't, I don't do that. And I think a lot of it has to do with my understanding of dignity. Dignity isn't just attacked when we are attacked. Dignity is actually diminished when we do something that is not in keeping with the dignity that we would claim. And I think that that is a sort of fundamental misunderstanding that we're dealing with on the internet. All of this stuff with cancel culture, all this stuff with triggering, all this stuff with whatever it is, right? It's like, I have dignity no matter what anyone says to me. Yes. And to the extent that I can demonstrate that dignity, even if it comes just through silence, maybe a reluctant silence in my case, right, where I'd really like to say something, but, you know, I sort of had this picture of my wife putting her hand over my mouth and shutting me up. But it's that preservation of dignity that we exhibit as we don't respond to the things that are inappropriate around us when we just help not only ourselves, but we also help our kids, for instance. In my case, you know, as they're listening to these parents on the sidelines and I have to help them understand, listen, just because they're being undignified doesn't mean that there's a way for me to approach them. Could I stop them? Probably. Would it be good for me to stop them? Would it be appropriate for me to stop them? Would it be in keeping with a Christian testimony to stop them? I doubt it. And so we have to think about those trade-offs when we think about dignity. Dignity is not just about what we take away from other people. It's also what we rob from ourselves as we are interacting with other people. It's sort of a two-way street there. And I think that's really crucial for understanding not only dignity, but again, dehumanization. Because any time that we are surrendering our dignity, I think we're also dehumanizing ourselves. Yes. We're basically saying that, you know, in your example of the church across from the street from the brothel. Yes. Right? Whenever a churchgoer goes over and participates in the brothel, they're not just dehumanizing the prostitute. They're dehumanizing themselves. Yes. It's a two-way street. That doesn't like, it's not as if one person is, you know, sort of being oppressed and the other one is completely clean. They're both deformed now in some way. They're both less human than they were before that interaction. And it's just the way we think of that, that it sort of keeps us from really recognizing some of those things. You know, I don't know that we should feel any worse for the people who frequent strip clubs than we do for the people who dance on stage. They're both buying into or selling an illusion that, that creates a whole fictional narrative of what it means to be in relationship with one another. That just isn't true. Yes. And so we've got to, we have to watch out how we sort of, and I'm not thinking you were doing this, but I'm, I'm just saying, you know, as a general.

idea, I think we have to watch how we slap the moral paintbrush around. Yeah. And make sure that we're understanding that all participants in things that are not honoring of God are dehumanizing themselves. Yes. As well as dehumanizing others. Yes. I think what an important point to make on the fact that we do have, and I think the digital world is creating this false sense of safety where you're doing things, but those things are not being done to you, right? You're seeing things because you just want to let people know instead of saying that you're actually, you're being something, you're not saying something, right? Or you're being less, you're developing yourself and dehumanizing yourself in that process, right? But it's a false sense of safety, I would say. Correct. Yeah, it's an interesting, you know, one of the examples that I use that I, pornography again is an easy one to go to, right? It's an illusion. We see what is happening, you know, in just the same way, I'll lean that you have no idea whether I'm wearing shorts or long pants right now. One can only hope. But the video frames sort of what we can see. And so you have no idea beyond the screen, what's happening in my life, right? My house could be on fire right now, but you wouldn't have any clue unless the smoke started pouring in through the door. And I think that's a very similar way that we should think about pornography is that while these women are probably really good actors, these men are probably really good actors, right? They should be winning Academy Awards for the acting that they're doing because I can't imagine that what they're doing is actually enjoyable. And so we don't see what's going on behind the scenes. And I would urge people, one of my favorite books is The Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges. He's got a fantastic chapter in there on the illusion of love where he details what happens after shooting a pornography scene. And I mean, it is difficult to read, but so important to understand. But I think one of the examples that sort of maybe helps people shift their perception even more than just pornography because pornography, again, is sort of that moral issue where we're saying, yes, people are participating in immorality or in pornography or horrible human beings. But I would say something even like Schindler's List, you know, right, Academy Award winning movie, right? You have all these atrocities happening in Nazi Germany. You had people dehumanized in ways that we don't, you know, we haven't really comprehended since. But in the movie, what you have is a reenactment of that dehumanization. And I understand the intent was to underscore how bad this was. My concern is that in doing it, you re-dehumanize people in the reenactment. And I'm not sure it's worth it. Great movie. I've seen it once. It's not something I want to watch again. Like it's not, you know, on my favorite movies list or something like that. Right. But you just watch it and you're like, you have these people who are in sort of states of complete nudity, you know, acting embarrassed because they're completely nude. And you, like, I think we have to ask ourselves that portrayal of people, what we've just done, we've reenacted a dehumanization in order to give a picture of how bad the dehumanization was. And when you sit back and look at it and you go, but what am I watching? And why am I watching it? When it was completely extraneous. It didn't need to be there for me to understand how atrocious it was. And yet I've done it. It's a very strange dynamic that we have often in our world where we're willing to re-dehumanize people or dehumanize new people to reenact dehumanization from the past. And we call that art. Yes. And I think it has this sort of odd effect on us that it's like some things are immoral, but as long as we're just portraying immorality, that's okay. It's, and so what I want people to get their heads around is this, is that dehumanization happens as an exchange between humans, right? It's not some atrocity in the past. It's always an exchange between humans in the present. That's, and so it's an interesting thing to think about, right? That your brusque interaction with the grocery clerk that makes him or her seem like a robot for all intents and purposes is actually a way of reinforcing dehumanist tendencies in our daily life. Like we've got to fight against this. We can't just point to instances and go, we should just avoid that. It's got to be an active every day sort of thing, I think. You know, you mentioned Nazi Germany, and I think one of the greatest upsets in my life came from watching the documentary of Adolf Eichmann. And Adolf Eichmann is considered to be the designer, the architect of the final solution. Four hours documentary on the way he was captured and his trial. And during his trial, they coined the term the banality of evil. The reason this was hard was because you had an entire world and especially the Jewish people looking at every reaction that this person had because they had to justify that he's a monster. You have to be a monster to do this. And his point and his defense was, I was doing my job. I was behind a desk doing my job and I just followed orders. So you have a world that is watching him to say, to find the smallest, all of a sudden something comes out of him like in Men in Black and he's basically a monster. He's not a human, he's a monster. And yet during that trial, they coined the term into Jewish people, the banality of evil, that he did this as his job from eight to five. He went in there and designed a solution that killed millions of people. And it upset me because it actually put a mirror in front of my life to say, not at that scale, clearly, but it's in me the potential to dehumanize somebody, even maybe part of my job. I design something, I do this, people that steal people's identity or online or do it. They design ways or softwares, right? The social media documentary that came out and said that when they designed the social media platform, they intentionally built friction and they use psychological principles to make people fight themselves. That's somebody sitting behind a computer or that's designing, right? Or the webcam woman with women that are exploiting or the OnlyFans or all that kind of stuff is really just somebody sitting and doing their job for a profit, but rather the effects of that is just massive dehumanization that is happening in our generation, in our lifetime. Yeah, I mean, I think when we think about how has the internet made it easier for dehumanization to flourish? Yes. Right, if we just think about that basic question, it's made it easier for us to have anything we want available. That's sort of the, I think the basic normal answer. Yes. But I would actually appeal to the wisdom of Hannibal Lecter here. Yeah, Hannibal Lecter tells Clarice when she goes in to ask him, you know, about this other serial killer that she's trying to catch. She's asking him questions and he says, what do you covet? And so she starts listing some things off and he says, no, that's wrong. You covet what you see every day. The internet has given us windows to see new things to covet every day. It is not necessarily our availability. It's the availability of images to us. And that gives us and cultivates within us a covetousness that says my life is not anywhere near as good as it could be. My life is not anywhere near as it should be. That's bad enough when we think about the mental issues that can arise from that, the sort of body dysmorphia, the, you know, all the different problems. Yes. But if we actually think about what it says about God, right? Now what we get is God hasn't given me what I should have. God, what God has given me is insufficient. God does not have a wise bone in his body because if he were wise, I would have this and not that. Yes. It's a completely skewing vision of reality where instead of looking through these windows

seeing people who God has uniquely blessed and appreciating the contribution they could make to our lives. Instead, what we've built is a system that cultivates desires. Yes. And again, I go back to, this is not a digital problem, right? When Ford was producing new cars in their marketing department, one of the slogans was they wanted to, and I'm going to paraphrase this, but they wanted to create an increasing sense of discontentment. Every car that somebody bought, they wanted them to be discontent with that car as soon as the new model came out. And so all they're doing is they're saying, what you just bought, yeah, that's great, but look how much better this one is. And look how much better this one is. And look how much better this one is. And so it created this sort of increasing desire to have what you didn't have. And I think as we look at the internet, that is largely what it is constructed to do. When Ford was producing new cars in their marketing department, one of the slogans was they wanted to, and I'm going to paraphrase this, but they wanted to create an increasing sense of discontentment. Every car that somebody bought, they wanted them to be discontent with that car as soon as the new model came out. And so all they're doing is they're saying, what you just bought, yeah, that's great, but look how much better this one is. And look how much better this one is. And look how much better this one is. And so it created this sort of increasing desire to have what you didn't have. And I think as we look at the internet, that is largely what it is constructed to do. You know, when I did my pieces on the metaverse, one of the ones I wrote up that hasn't been published quite yet is the metaverse as the digital shopping mall. Digital shopping, you know, the shopping mall was like the place when I was a kid. Like I grew up, you know, I was in high school in the 90s, late 90s. Actually, early 90s, I guess. 92 to 96, something like that. And we'd go to the mall. And the mall was cool because you could go in all the different shops, right? You could hang out in the food court. You could go play video games at what was called Aladdin's Castle or Aladdin's Palace or whatever they called it. It had all these, you know, video games or whatever. But the mall was designed to keep you in the mall as long as possible. Yes. It was going to meet every physical need you possibly had to keep you staying in the mall and buying things in the mall. Right? Yes. Now, malls have largely collapsed depending on who you talk to. At this point, I'm kind of hoping they come back because at least you got to drive somewhere and interact with human beings. But the metaverse to me, and I think AI is a part of what the metaverse can draw in. Yes. The metaverse is going to be designed to keep us inside the metaverse so that we can buy things in the metaverse. Nobody's creating the metaverse benevolently. Yes. Like, oh, everybody should have a place of virtual interaction where they can just go and hang out. And there should be no charge for that ever. We should just fund it as a nonprofit organization and never make any money off it. No. It's going to be a commodified environment where we're constantly buying things within it. And so that's my analogy with the shopping mall. Now, you know, as we think about then how that, how technology ultimately drives dehumanization, we become consumers. Other people become producers and our limited exchange is some sort of commodity passed back and forth, whether that's cryptocurrency or actual money. It doesn't really matter. Yes. We're viewing it as a moment of exchange, right? Of monetary exchange, for lack of a better term, than of actual relationship. And it's based on a, I don't know what you call it, a sense of increasing, of ongoing diminished contentment with what we have. Like, why can't I stop shopping? Well, it's because I'm not happy with what I have. But the more I buy, the less contented I am. It's not working, but we keep doing it. But it's, we don't acknowledge that it's designed like that. We think it's something with us. We need to have it. Right, right. But that somebody actually designed that to be an experience, right? Right. The scandal with Apple that they actually made their systems to, their iPhones to go slower at the two-year mark, right? Right. Exactly. You start literally moving slower. You're like, oh, this phone. I'm done with it. Right. Junk. I need a new one. I need a new one, right? And I'm like, you never stop to wonder why a phone that costs you $1,000 just stops working after two years. Like, is that not a problem? That it's just starting to be slower after two years when we used to make pyramids that lasted like 6,000, 10,000 years, you know? Right, right. So that's not a problem. But it's designed like that, right? Yeah. So I'm curious if we, somebody once told me the secret of how to never read a book. And they said, if it's not a really good author, just read the first and the last paragraph. They're going to feel compelled to introduce so much and then to summarize. So you only have to read the first paragraph and the last paragraph of every chapter and you figure out, like, right? I don't want us to be not good authors, especially on the podcast. But I'm curious if we're going to summarize just some of the thoughts as we've been through some things. So if you were to summarize some of the things that you would really want to make sure that somebody takes away from this conversation, you know, if artificial intelligence is another tool or the difference between machine and consciousness or some of the things, if you were to highlight some of the things that you would want to make sure. Yeah, let me toss a couple things out. I think right now artificial intelligence is a tool and we shouldn't allow that to lull us into a false sense of security. Yeah. I think that it's wise of us to learn how to use AI, how to be literate in an AI world is sort of the way I would put it. And so we've got to learn to interact with these tools as they come out because I don't think they're going away, which means that we can quickly fall behind the curve. Now, there's a difference in my mind between becoming literate and becoming enamored. I have no particular, I mean, I interacted with ChatGPT for a piece that I wrote on Christian resistance or technology and AI. It's a piece that's available on moodycenter.org and people can download it for free. I did a whole conversation with ChatGPT. Interesting. I'll be honest, I've never been back on there again. It holds no particular enamorment for me. It was interesting for a couple of days to play around with it. And I'm sure it's advanced from the point that I did it. I just don't care. So there's a literacy I do think we need to develop, but then there's also a sense of, do I really need this tool in my life right now? I'm not sure. You know, I'm not sure I do. And so we do need to recognize this as a tool that's available right now that'll probably expand beyond the tool. I do agree with John Verveke on that, that in the future, it'll probably become more than a tool. What does that mean for us? I think for Christians, and I'll speak exclusively for Christians right now. I think it doesn't mean a whole lot for Christians. And I say that sort of, I guess, facetiously or maybe polemically or just to challenge people. Christians should already be concerned about being strange in the right ways. Right. Between about being aliens and sojourners who proclaim the excellencies of God through the way that they live in this world. And so at the end of the day, AI is whether it's the Antichrist or not. I won't proclaim one way or the other. Right. I'm sure there are theories out there already. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure there are. At the end of the day. Exactly. I mean, there's so many Antichrists out there right now. It's unbelievable. We're good. But at the end of the day, I just think Christians should be Christians. And so to the extent that we are, you know, You want to combat dehumanization? Imitate Christ. You want to combat consumerism? Imitate Christ. Right. You want to have a more constrained, restrained and guided understanding of how to use technology and how to relate to it. Imitate Christ. I know it's a trite answer, but at the same time, it's like sort of profound. Yes. Right. Because to the extent that we imitate Christ, everything around us starts to take on a different meaning. Because Christ saw the world differently than we do. And so if we imitate him, we take on his desires. We take on his determination. I mean, this was an individual who surrendered his divine status or set aside his Godhead in order to come and live as a human, knowing that he was going to suffer and die on a cross. There's something to that that when we imitate it, right, our little problems start to shrink away. And it's not that we don't experience them anymore. It's that they really do truly become little problems. Yes. Yes. And so I think that AI shouldn't have that big of an impact on the way that Christians live. I think Christians should already be living in a way that AI sort of

Reading curious about deep fakes and all that kind of fun stuff, right? We should be concerned about reality. Yes, yes. We should be living in reality and trying to sift through the competing fictions that try to capture our attention. Yes. And so I think Christians just need to continue to do that and to recognize that some of these new technologies are going to hinder us from doing that. That's the real trick for me is understanding that we can't live in a digital world where everything is sort of increasingly telling us that God doesn't exist and somehow think that we're going to continue to believe that God exists. I think that's a fallacy. And so, you know, we've got to continue just little acts of obedience, moving in, trusting God, doing those things. That's how I would frame that. And then I think from the dehumanization perspective, what I would just say is this. If dehumanization happens from person to person, attend the way that you deal with people on a person-to-person basis. I do little things, and I do this in part because I work from home. I don't do the, you know, you can order stuff online and have it picked up, like they'll come out and put it in your trunk. Like you can park in a space and they'll come out and put it in. God, I'll do that. I try to avoid the self-checkout like a plague, right? Right, because at some point working from home, I'm starved for human interaction. So I kind of like to go out and interact with people. On the other side of it, I sit back and I say, a human could have this job. Yes. Like, what am I doing? Why do I care so much about getting out of this line so fast that I can't stand in line to talk to a human, at least have a cordial interaction with a human? Yes. You know, as I mentioned before, I'll always write my own content. Our organization is not going to be using AI to write content, period. We won't do it. I will never do it. I don't care how much it costs me to hire a writer. I will always hire a writer over using AI. It doesn't make any sense to me not to do it that way. Makes sense. And so just do those little things that you can do, that you can control, right? Engage humans as humans and let AI be whatever AI is going to be. You know, let that actually engage humans as humans. And then I think the last thing is, you know, I mean, we just had a Supreme Court ruling that was really interesting. I mean, a set of rulings, right? You had the trifecta of affirmative action, student loans, and one other one that I'm blanking on right now. But the, you know, the student loan one is a serious one. Yes. And, you know, to go back to my strip club analogy earlier, the strip club that has the, when I drive to St. Louis, there's a strip club that has a digital sign. And I was driving by it going to St. Louis today and it said, student loans got you down? We're hiring. Yes. Let's not make student loans a political issue. Like, let's make it a human issue, right? Like, I understand the government has a role to play. I get it. And I don't begrudge even Biden for attempting to do something constructive with it. But at the end of the day, there are students who, whether by their own fault, right, they were just sort of ignorant walking into it, which I have a feeling that may have been a lot of them, having been in higher ed myself, right? Like, we know how this works, right? Like, there's sort of a hard sell just to take out the loans and you'll get a job after, trust me, wink, wink. Yes, many promises. And so, you know, you can see that, or whether it's just, you know, from other circumstances. But the reality is this isn't a Republican-Democrat problem. This is a human problem. And when humans get in straits that involve money and survival, I think it puts them at a higher risk of dehumanization, especially particular sorts of dehumanization. And so we've got to be careful about how we think about these things. Massive debt is not good for anybody, any society at all. And there are always going to be bad actors who are going to take advantage of that. Now, conversely, you can say the same thing for people who have a lot of money. You know, wealth is no guard against being dehumanized at all, right? The way we spend our money can dehumanize us just as dehumanizes others. And so there's that dynamic. But, yeah, to close it out, I think those would be my sort of parting comments. And just to say, if we want to participate in rehumanization, right, not dehumanization, but rehumanization, we have to put ourselves in a position to know the people we're interacting with. Things can't be automated, I don't think, and us be rehumanized. Because there's always somebody who's doing work behind that automation or somebody who is now losing work behind that automation. Somebody who is, you know, doing something that we aren't noticing, being a craftsman, being a, you know, a programmer, being a whatever. There's somebody behind those things that we're not seeing. And so I think the best way for us to approach a rehumanization is to actually treat other people as people. Don't treat them as a transactional relationship. That, to me, is the real trick here. We've got to start seeing people as people, not as bags of flesh who can fulfill my needs in some way. Or as they were seen in Germany not too long ago and during that dreadful time, dirt and soil. That's right. That's right. And so we've got to start actually understanding the stories of different people. We've got to understanding who they are. We can't make them into opponents. You know, I have my particular views on a variety of political issues. But at the end of the day, I see no value in demonizing someone who is of a different political position than I am. Yes. They're people. And normally, right, they're lost people. Yes. Right. And so if we're not really wrestling against flesh and blood, but we're wrestling against powers and principalities in the spiritual realm, there's no reason not to view those people as people. Yes. Yes. God takes a massive issue with dehumanization. Massive issue because it is a spiritual issue. It's not just a worldly issue. That's right. And there's a lot of loss in there. Yeah. It's a lot of loss. A lot of loss. Yes. Well, that's great. I love, love, love the opportunity to actually think through this. What's fascinating to me is that even though we spent some significant time, we only scratched the surface on this massive issue. And I think we definitely should have a follow-up conversation on some of the deeper issues that are happening here. But this was great. I really appreciate the opportunity. Yeah, it's been great to you, man. And I appreciate you being on and just hanging out. And this has been a great conversation. And so I'd look forward to having more with you. And maybe we'll get a few experts on to talk about some of these very specific topics that we've already talked about and kind of dive a little deeper into those and see where it goes. But give them a hard time. You have to pay for being experts. That's right. That's right. Exactly. All right. Well, everybody, thanks for listening. And we really appreciate you hanging in till the end here. And hopefully this has been positive for you and that you maybe it raises questions with you. And I just encourage you to follow those up and to keep thinking about these issues. They really do matter. And yeah, we'll catch you in the next episode. Take care. Let us know what you think. Wherever you see this on social media, YouTube, wherever you hear this. Let us hear from you, actually. That's right. And if you'd like more content like this, you can go to useful to God.org. Useful to God.org. The radio program that I host is, there are some episodes on there as well as some of the guides and different things that we put out as an organization. And so I just encourage you to navigate to useful to God.org and check us out. Thank you for being with us. Thank you. Ever walked away from a conversation thinking, wow, now that was exactly what I needed. Hey, I'm Donna Jones, host of the That's Just What I Needed podcast. Each week, we have great conversations about life, faith, and how we can know, love, and follow God in our everyday lives. Listen and follow at lifeaudio.com or on your favorite podcast app. Can't wait for you to join me.