Is artificial intelligence a threat to humanity?

Question 60032.

Artificial intelligence has moved from the pages of science fiction into daily life at a speed that has caught most institutions unprepared, the church very much included. Systems that write, summarise, translate, generate pictures and hold a conversation are now in the hands of anyone with a phone, and the question of whether this is dangerous is being asked seriously by people who build these things as well as by people who fear them.

I am not a technophobe. I use these tools in my own work and I think the reflex that treats every new technology as a threat is neither wise nor biblical. But willingness and discernment have to travel together, so let me try to separate the dangers that are real from the ones borrowed from films.

What these systems actually are

It helps enormously to know what you are dealing with. Current artificial intelligence systems are statistical models trained on vast quantities of human writing and images, which predict what should come next given what has come before. They are extraordinarily good at it, good enough that the output can feel like understanding.

But there is nobody home. The system has no beliefs, no intentions and no experience of the world. It does not know that it is producing sentences any more than a calculator knows it is doing arithmetic. That single point clears away a great deal of confused talk, because most of the fear and most of the hype depend on quietly assuming otherwise.

The line Scripture draws

Human beings are made in the image of God and machines are not. That is the hinge of the whole discussion. A person is a living soul with a conscience, a moral responsibility and an eternal destiny, capable of loving, repenting and worshipping. Artificial intelligence has none of these and cannot acquire them by getting larger.

So I am not troubled by the suggestion that a machine might one day be a rival to God, which is a category error rather than a danger. What does trouble me is what human beings will do with a tool this powerful, because Genesis tells me both that we are makers and that we are fallen, and every technology in history has borne the marks of both.

The dangers that are real

Deception comes first. When any voice can be cloned, any face put into any video, and any document fabricated in seconds, the ordinary person’s ability to know what is true takes a serious blow. A society that cannot tell what actually happened is easy to manipulate, and Scripture treats truth telling as the foundation of a workable common life for good reason.

Then there is the concentration of power. These systems are expensive to build, which means a small number of organisations control them, and the same technology that recommends a recipe can score a citizen, allocate a benefit, filter an application or direct a weapon. That is enormous power over ordinary lives placed in very few hands with very little accountability, and the biblical record on what happens next is not encouraging.

There is a quieter danger too, in what happens to us. If artificial intelligence does our writing, our thinking and eventually our deciding, we will lose capacities we do not notice losing until we need them. Add the loneliness of substituting a responsive machine for the friction of actual human company, and you have a technology capable of doing real harm without any malice at all.

The danger that is overstated

The scenario in which the machine wakes up, forms its own purposes and turns on its makers is the one that gets the headlines, and it is the one I find least persuasive. Consciousness is not a quantity of computation, and there is no reason from Scripture or from the systems themselves to expect a soul to emerge from statistics.

Christians should also resist the habit of identifying every new technology with the beast of Revelation. Prophecy warns us plainly against date setting and against confident identifications, and the church has embarrassed itself repeatedly by baptising the technology of the moment as the fulfilment of a prophecy. Artificial intelligence may well be used by wicked people for wicked ends, as printing and radio and the internet have been. That is not the same as being the thing itself.

Information is not wisdom

These systems can assemble an astonishing quantity of information, and Scripture is clear that this is not the same as wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and a machine cannot fear the Lord. James says the wisdom from above is pure, peaceable and full of mercy, which is a description of moral character rather than of retrieval.

So a model can tell you everything that has been written about forgiveness and cannot forgive anybody. It can produce a fluent paragraph about grief and has never lost anyone. The danger here is not that the machine is lying but that we come to mistake fluency for truth and confidence for authority, which is a very old human failing with a new and very persuasive occasion.

What Genesis leads me to expect

Human making is not condemned in Scripture. God filled Bezalel with His Spirit for skilled craftsmanship, and the tools we make are part of bearing His image in the world. At the same time, Babel stands as the account of a civilisation using its best technology to make a name for itself and to reach beyond its station, and God’s response there is worth remembering.

That gives me a settled expectation rather than a prediction. Artificial intelligence will be used for genuine good, in medicine, in accessibility, in translation, in tedious work nobody should be doing. It will also be used for fraud, surveillance and cruelty, because it is being handled by us. Neither the utopians nor the doom merchants have understood the doctrine of humanity well enough.

Should Christians be afraid?

No, though we should be alert, and those are different things. Fear makes for bad thinking and worse policy, and the believer has particular reasons not to give way to it. History is not adrift. The one who holds all things together is not caught out by a technology, and the future of the world is not in the hands of whoever owns the largest data centre.

What we should do is refuse to be passive. Learn enough to understand what you are using. Insist on human judgement where human beings are affected. Protect the young from a tool that can imitate intimacy. And in your own life, keep doing the slow things that form a soul, because those are precisely what a machine cannot do for you. The practical side of that is in whether Christians should use AI.

Artificial intelligence in the local church

The question arrives in ordinary congregational life sooner than people expect. Should the notices be drafted by a machine? Should a housebound member receive a generated devotional? Should we use artificial intelligence to produce the images on our screens, or the voice reading the Scripture, or the music behind the prayers?

My instinct is that the further a task is from a person, the freer we are. Rotas, formatting, transcription and translation raise nothing. The closer a task comes to a person, the more careful we must be, because church is not a service delivered efficiently to consumers. It is a body, and the value of the visit is that somebody came.

There is also the matter of the sheep knowing the shepherd’s voice. If artificial intelligence writes the letter of condolence, the words may be better than mine and they will be worth less, because what the family needed was evidence that their pastor sat down and thought about their mother. Some inefficiencies are the ministry rather than an obstacle to it. I have set out more on this in what biblical stewardship is.

My working rule is that artificial intelligence may prepare, but it may not represent. It can gather, sort and draft. It should not speak for the church, and it should never be the thing a person meets when they were reaching for a human being.

So, now what?

Get informed rather than alarmed. Learn what these tools are, use them where they genuinely help, and set your own limits before the habit sets them for you. If you have children, the question of what they are talking to at eleven at night matters more than any policy debate.

Then hold the whole subject in proportion. Artificial intelligence is the most impressive tool we have built, and it is a tool. It will not save us and it cannot damn us. The great questions of your life, who made you and what He has done about your sin, are exactly what they were before any of this arrived, and no machine will be answering them for you.

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.

Proverbs 9:10 (ESV)