Does artificial intelligence make you nervous? – A Theology of AI, Preview

When you hear the words “artificial intelligence,” how do you feel?  Do you feel uncertain?  Maybe a little nervous?

If you’ve been watching or reading the news over the last few years, you’ve almost certainly come across a story about the rise of artificial intelligence (AI).  If you’ve been reading or watching science fiction, you’ve been familiar with AI for a long time.  Remember the android Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation?  Or think about the Terminator movies.  Perhaps most popular of all are the intelligent, emotive, relational bots, R2-D2 and C-3PO, of Star Wars fame. In our cultural consciousness, when we think of AI, we tend to think of robots or computers who have some kind of awareness about the fact that they are not human, that their minds are actually just programmed by humans.  Sometimes that leads the robots to desire real emotion, feeling and awareness.  Sometimes it makes them enslave or destroy humans.  Yikes.

Fear not!  What I am describing is all fiction.  I am not describing our real world.  There is, however, in our real world, a growing presence of artificial intelligence, and we need to talk about it.  This coming week on the blog we’ll have the next offering in our quarterly current events blog series where I talk about a headline that is impacting our world.  

You might think, “Artificial intelligence has nothing to do with me.”  Well, do you have a smartphone, a computer, a car or a TV connected to the internet?  Most likely you are being impacted by artificial intelligence, and you just might not realize it.  Again, that impact is vastly different from the robots of sci-fi.  So what is artificial intelligence?  What is the impact of artificial intelligence in our world?  Perhaps most importantly, what, if anything, does the Bible have to say about it?

This week as I’ve been studying the intersection of artificial intelligence and biblical theology, initially I thought, “Oh boy, why do I do these current events posts?”  But as the week progressed, I’ve actually learned a lot and really enjoyed it.  I’ve had moments of concern, and at least one moment where I laughed out loud. Artificial intelligence is wild. I also found that there are numerous important connections between biblical theology and artificial intelligence, connections that I believe are deeply meaningful for us to consider. 

We’ll begin talking about a theology of artificial intelligence this coming Monday!

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash