Michael Guillén recently made a provocative argument in these pages: Christians should stop being afraid of artificial intelligence and start evangelizing it. He's right, as far as he goes. Christians have an opportunity, perhaps even an obligation, to engage AI rather than abandon the field to others.
The conversations we have with these systems, the corrections we make, and the Christian ideas we introduce into the technological ecosystem may shape how future generations of AI understand Christianity and explain it to others. That is a worthy calling. But it is only half the opportunity before us. Christians should be concerned about what artificial intelligence learns about God and humanity.
We should be more concerned about what human beings will believe about themselves once AI starts doing the things from which they presently derive their identity, purpose, and worth. Guillén wants us to evangelize the machine. I want us to evangelize the people the machine is about to leave spiritually homeless.
Because AI may confront modern man with a question far more unsettling than whether a chatbot understands Christianity: What happens when the world no longer needs you to do the things you thought made you valuable? For most of my life, I have believed that every human being ultimately wrestles with four questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Why does it matter?
How we answer them creates the metanarrative through which we understand everything else. Artificial intelligence is about to make those questions considerably more urgent. We have spent generations building a culture that says human dignity is intrinsic, while organizing much of our lives around the proposition that human value is measured by productivity. Consider one of the first questions we ask someone we've just met: “What do you do?” We don't