Last Thursday, Moody Radio’s gracious and insightful Janet Parshall hosted me for another wide-ranging conversation about the impact of today’s artificial intelligence. You can listen to our conversation here, or anywhere you listen to podcasts if you search for “In the Market with Janet Parshall.”
In her introduction of me, Janet kindly said, “He’s also a superb writer, and he writes regularly on this topic, and I find them to be some of the most discerning, challenging, insightful comments I’ve read on a very intriguing topic [AI] right now.” Good thing it was radio—I was blushing.
Here’s a (completely human written) summary of our conversation:
- We discussed Barna’s recent polling data that reveals how practicing Christians are more likely to have a positive view of today’s AI than the general population. 66% of practicing Christians say AI is improving their lives, and that’s 13% higher than the national average. And most troublingly, 51% of Christians said that “AI understands me.” Janet and I agreed that our brothers and sisters in Christ are confused, maybe even being led astray by things like the Tool Trope.
- Next, Janet linked the Barna study to the revelation that Richard Dawkins believes that Anthropic’s Claude chatbot is conscious. We discussed how Dawkins’ misunderstanding is a natural outgrowth of his materialistic, naturalistic worldview. If humans are only “machines made of meat” and consciousness is just an emergent property of complex neurology, then why wouldn’t we be able to make silicon machines where consciousness arises too? But Dawkins is completely wrong. Machines cannot, and will never be conscious, and we are far, far more than machines. (If you want a thorough and scholarly push-back against conscious AI, check out The Immortal Mind by neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor and science writer Denyse O’Leary.)
- We then moved to Tim Challies’ recent article, “AI Is Coming For Your Systematic Theology”. Deepfake theology books are rampant on Amazon.com and other platforms. If you’re not an expert like Challies, it can be really hard to distinguish bot-generated books from the real thing. My advice: seek trusted authorities for personal recommendations, and don’t trust search results anymore.
- Finally, we talked about my recent job loss due to the requirement to use GenAI for software development. I shared 12 of my reasons here. Janet kindly let me share several of my high-level concerns, and encouraged my difficult decision.
Then Janet closed with this encouraging affirmation of the stance I’m taking:
The fact that you have prayerfully and carefully made a decision to walk away from a form of employment that put bread on your table because that’s how strongly you feel about this says something about your biblical convictions on the issue. And if you’re willing to do that, if you’re willing to say, ‘Father I’m going to have to trust you completely … I’m going to trust you to provide everything that I need for my life … but I cannot advocate for what I believe to be a problem, and I will not be part of the Pied Piper’s plan to lead people astray.’ I want people to understand that is coming at a huge cost, and the fact that you’re sharing this with us means more than I can explain because you’ve got skin in the game. (Janet Parshall, about 42:00 into the recording.)
I think our conversation will be thought-provoking and encouraging to my fellow Christians and anyone else who wants to hear an alternative to the popular promotion of today’s AI.