Part 1: Framing the Question of Digital Technology
Discussions about the impact of what has been called “the fourth industrial revolution” on human identity continue unabated. This fourth stage of industrialization refers to the progressive digitization of life, of which so-called "artificial intelligence" represents something like the cutting edge of technological progress. AI is something like the final frontier of the digital revolution. AI marks the space in which we look to technology’s seemingly infinite potential for improving the human condition along with the possibility of altering our human identity altogether through merging human and machine intelligence.
Whether this last possibility is viewed as liberation or a threat depends on one’s worldview; for transhumanists, those techno-enthusiasts who expect technology to deliver humanity from all evil, including all suffering, bodily limitations, and even death, the hoped-for emergence of general artificial intelligence and its merger with human biology promises the salvation of humanity. Christians, at least that is the argument advanced here, have a different faith, one that is rooted in the body’s transformation into the kind of spiritual body (soma pneumatikos) Jesus Christ prepared for humanity through the incarnation (1 Cor. 15:42-49).1 And, no, to anticipate the objection of Christian transhumanists, God did not give us technology to accomplish this transformation. Such a view ignores the classic Christian teaching that Christ recapitulated all things in himself, establishing “in his body of flesh” (Col. 1:22), through his glorified humanity, the new creation into which we are to be transformed. Christ’s victory cry of “It is finished” cannot be reinterpreted as “I made a start and technology will finish it for you.”
Transhumanism, however, is merely the extreme utopian terminus of what digital technology is already doing to us. “Utopia” is Greek for “no place.” Transhumanism envisions a post humanity that dis-locates the body and uproots us from the flesh. Transhumanists anticipate the day on which technological enhancements through implants or mind uploads lift us beyond the normal limitations of our humanity, such as space, time, and our material bodies. We need to realize, however, that the increasing digitization of life is already “utopian.” We are already being disembodied, depersonalized, and thus dehumanized because our pervasive immersion in digital technologies shapes how we imagine ourselves and reality. The current fascination with AI, and with Large Language Models (LLMs such as Open AI, Grok, Claude, etc.) are merely one aspect of how digital technology mirrors deeply human phenomena like language and intelligence in order to re-create us in this reified image. Mistaking this objectified, frozen, and mechanized image for the real thing is currently our greatest danger in the face of this technology. In turn, recognition of this danger and refusal to accept this misrepresentation of humanity become our most important tasks, if indeed we are called to become most fully human by becoming like Christ.
Creation as God’s Gift
What follows is a distinctly Christian theological reflection on digital technology and AI, based on the central Christian mystery of God’s becoming human. Any Christian reflection on technology must begin from God’s affirmation of creation and thus also of humanity with the incarnation. Christians must engage technology, because Christianity, like its incarnate founder, ought to be concerned about the world we live in. In the words of theologian Jean Daniélou, “the Church takes the world seriously, because the world is the creation, that is to say the work of God, and because it would be a very odd thing for men to find bad what God finds good.”2 Thus, in accepting God’s gift of creation, they also accept the call to cultivate the world or what Augustine called the earthly city (civitas terrena). This charter of modelling life as intended by God began with Israel’s election as God’s people, to whom he gave his prescriptions for human flourishing. The decalogue showed that the essence of God’s natural law consists in the right ordering of one’s love by relation to the world through one’s proper relation to God. “Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind,” and “love your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:30-31) are not two conflicting demands, but as Augustine rightly saw, we become neighbours in the sense Jesus taught us in the parable of the Samaritan to the extent that we love fellow human beings and creation through God. Love of God and love of neighbour are one.
With God’s becoming human in Christ, humanity’s mandate to cultivate creation was most fully revealed as the struggle of becoming human by becoming like Christ. Jesus’s deeply personal and relational struggle to live life out of communion with God becomes the paradigm for the new humanity that he established (Eph. 2:15; 4:24). In recapitulating humanity in himself, Christ revealed for us the unfathomable depth of the interior life, the relationality of our personal existence, and God’s intended fellowship with a unified humanity that is already (ideally) reflected in Christ’s body, the church.3
Moreover, accepting God’s world as gift means accepting a world that has always contained progress and technology. “God has made a world,” Daniélou insists, “in which progress, and particularly technical progress, is an authentic aspect of the creation he wanted to have.”4 At the same time, however, Christians also know that precisely because this world is God’s creation, made freely out of love from nothing by the personal biblical creator God, it is imbued with divine purpose, a purpose most clearly recognizable in humanity as explicitly made in his image and likeness. Religions, and Christianity in particular, are thus deeply concerned with the nature of reality, and God’s people are mandated to cultivate creation by forming cultures that most faithfully represent God’s intentions for creation as demonstrated in Christ. In Christ, God became human, in order to restore and perfect creation by drawing it into communion with himself. On a Christian view, it is by being drawn into the Trinitarian life (see John 17:20-21) that humanity and then creation itself come most fully into their own. In short, the Christian’s vocation is to humanize the world. Hence the final criterion for our assessment of any technology is whether it allows us to make the world more humane, more personal, more free, more relational, and more peaceful by deepening the humanity that reflects God’s image. (A brief aside to those who worry about such human centredness as the main cause for our environmental problems: God Himself elevated humanity to the place of responsibility for creation. Rather than being decentred, humanity must be reminded of its unique responsibility for creation stewardship.)
All this is to say that a Christian engagement with current technology should begin with these questions: Does digital technology enhance our freedom, our responsibility for one another, and our respect for creation as God’s gift? Does technology respect human dignity and equality? Does technology encourage depth of thought and truth finding through dialogue? Or does digital technology tend to devalue creation as God’s gift? Does it distort or even separate us from the humanity God intended for us? Does digital technology hinder or further the work of the human spirit in realizing our humanity? This last question is particularly important for the educational context of Regent College, and of any other educational institution. Before we answer these questions, however, we have to deconstruct the supposedly apocalyptic threat of AI in order to grasp that digitization is the real threat to our humanity.
Cutting Through the Hype: Deconstructing “Artificial Intelligence”
In discussing technology, popular attention focuses almost exclusively on AI. Part of this single focus is market-driven profiteering by AI companies in order to keep up their stock value. Those selling AI engage in a hype-for-profit cycle: they make outrageous promises of what AI can accomplish in order to attract funding. When these promises don’t pan out, AI companies have to make new and even more sensationalist claims in order to keep investors interested. The same mechanism, I suspect, is at work in institutional funding for AI projects: AI will solve world hunger, sort out the world’s financial crisis, take care of climate change, and eventually achieve full human intelligence, allowing it to perform most jobs.
The reality, however, looks rather different. For those who want a more realistic look at AI, two books are highly recommended. The first is Erik Larson’s book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence. Larson, himself an AI developer, clearly shows that the label “AI” is a misnomer; it is a term invented by computer scientists like Marvin Minsky in the 1950s for creating interest in and obtaining funding for their technology research.5 Larson’s main point is that AI does not exist. Algorithms possess no intelligence; they have no capacity for thought. None. Every time you hear “Artificial Intelligence” replace it with “information processing, automation, and data collection” and you will be much closer to the actual nature of this technology. The second recommended book is The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna.6 The authors use their expertise in Linguistics, Computer Science, and AI research to examine in detail the exaggerated claims of the AI industry for social services, the arts, journalism, science, and education. They not only expose false claims of “AI creativity,” but they also show the exploitative nature of this technology. Instead of replacing workers, AI Is displacing them. The technology relies on a myriad of increasingly underpaid human beings who provide and assess data (data that is pirated for free from existing creators). These human servants are necessary to train and calibrate the algorithms in order to uphold the illusion that computers "create."
AI is, of course, powerful technology, but it is only information processing, statistically based allocation of information, and specific task automation, conducted at uncanny computational speed. There is no consciousness or thinking involved in this process; it is our human imagination that supplies this dimension, thus perpetuating the illusion of the magic trick that turns data collection and statistically based allocation of data into “writing an essay” or “creating a work of art.” Deconstructing the false concept of “artificial intelligence” will help us to see that AI is only a distraction from the real threat to our humanity, namely the digitization of life and therefore also the reconfiguration of reality.