AI: Reject, Receive, or Redeem?
By Family Minister, Dr. Brandon Steenbock
“People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” – Neil Postman, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”
I am fascinated by Artificial Intelligence. I am fascinated by the possibilities of how it can improve our lives, how it can make work more efficient, and how it will help us make big strides in developing new technologies across the board. I am also incredibly wary of how AI will change our lives, rob us of privacy, and impact our ability to relate to one another. AI has both amazing potential to do good and frightening potential to do harm.
We might say that AI is a tool, and like any tool, what matters most is the hand that uses it. That’s true, but remember that no tool is completely neutral. A sword is a tool, and so is a shovel. Both can be used to harm, and both can be used to dig, but we know which was made for which. If we are going to use AI wisely, we should know why it was made and what it was made for.
As AI becomes more a part of our lives, we will be forced to deal with its impact. Most of us already use AI, whether we realize it or not. Our smartphones, social media, and computers all incorporate AI functions. Advanced AI models are already embedded in our devices and offered as digital assistants. Google has Gemini, Apple has Apple Intelligence, and Microsoft has Copilot. This trend will continue. But who is driving it? What is their purpose and goal? What motivates the creation of continually advancing AI?
The Ethos of Artificial Intelligence
I like to use the word ethos. It’s more than just motivation. It is a guiding principle, a foundational belief system that drives a person’s actions and pursuits. There is a specific worldview driving the advancement of AI: Transhumanism. This is the belief that humans are the product of random evolution but now have the intelligence to guide and direct our own evolution and that, through advanced technology, we are able to do so. AI is critical to this vision, as it will aid our advancement and perhaps represent the next stage of humanity.
This Transhumanist ethos guides people like Ray Kurzweil, former head of research and development at Google. In The Singularity is Near, he writes that AI “will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands.”
Similarly, Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian, philosopher, and futurist, has similar thoughts. In Homo Deus, he writes, “Humans don’t die… because God decreed it, or because mortality is an essential part of some great cosmic plan. Humans always die due to some technical glitch… Every technical problem has a technical solution. We don’t need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death.”
Transcend the limitations of biology. Gain power over our fates. Take mortality into our own hands. Overcome death. These are not just technological dreams, they are theological assertions, promises of salvation, and future hope. Transhumanism wants to make a name for humanity apart from God, just as the people who built Babel did. Further, it wants to make humans into gods ourselves, just as Satan tempted Adam and Eve to do. These are just the same old lies repackaged in new, shiny, technological paper.
The Telos of AI
The telos, the end goal of all our advancing technology, at least for the Transhumanists, is to escape the limitations of our humanity, achieve immortality, and ascend to godhood. This is not a rhetorical exaggeration. When asked once, “Does God exist?” Ray Kurzweil’s answer was, “Not yet.” In his vision, humanity – or something humanity will create – will eventually achieve an equivalence of godhood.
Does this sound like science fiction? What about speaking to your phone and getting directions spoken back to you? Or producing a novel image from a single sentence prompt? Or getting life advice from a chatbot that sounds like human wisdom? AI is not science fiction; it is reality, and the question is not whether or not the dreams of the Transhumanists will happen but how we will respond when they do.
I am getting ahead of myself. Can AI actually lead to human transcendence? Maybe. Jeff Kaplan suggests AI-driven machines will do our manual labor for us so that we have time for higher pursuits. Some say AI will help us solve the problems of disease, suffering, and death. Perhaps we will build AI advanced enough to “house” a human mind and upload ourselves into the digital world. Or maybe AI beings will simply replace biological ones. As Kurzweil puts it, “The intelligence that will emerge will continue to represent the human civilization, which is already a human-machine civilization. In other words, future machines will be human, even if they are not biological. This will be the next step in evolution.”
Remember that I said AI is a tool, and like any tool, its design drives its purpose and its use. If the purpose of AI is to evolve humanity toward immortality or even godhood, then nothing we see should surprise us. The question for Christians is whether we should use this tool.
This is not a new challenge. The world has always used advancing technology for worldly purposes, and Christians have always had to figure out how God would use it for his purposes. The Roman Roads were used to move troops and supplies throughout the Roman Empire so that Rome could conquer more nations; God used those roads to send missionaries out with the Gospel to far places. The printing press was invented for political and rhetorical publications to influence society; God led the Gutenberg press to print Bibles so that every family could have one. Streaming video was quickly adopted and developed by the porn industry; God is now using it to deliver online worship and sermons to homes.
See, we simply reject new technology because we see the potential harm. But then we miss out on the potential blessings. We could simply receive the new technology, embrace it without question, and risk harm to ourselves and others. There’s a third option: to redeem the technology for the sake of the Gospel.
It will not be easy. Flawed humans tend to neglect the good, the true, and the beautiful in favor of the easy, the convenient, and the pleasurable. But remember that humans are made in God’s image and have inherent dignity. Our purpose in life is to know God and glorify him and to care for his creation as his stewards. Let that guide our decision-making as we use AI, and we will find incredible ways to turn it toward God’s purposes.
I will continue writing on the subject of AI and how Christians interact with it. In the meantime, families should consider how AI on their devices is being used – by the parents, the kids, everyone. And individuals should be thinking about the ways they interact with AI in the workplace and for entertainment. Finally, we should all be thinking about how AI can and should be used to further the work of the Gospel and where the guardrails should be.