I’m working on some things and investigating AI, and this is something I’ve worried about and cautioned you about for almost three decades now—seeing it come over the horizon. As Elon Musk says, we are now at the event horizon of the singularity, which means you’re not going to stop what’s coming. We are now in this place where the gravity of the technology is going to pull us in, and we cannot avoid that. We can’t avoid using AI because, as everyone will soon understand, it is going to be one of the most miraculous and incredible technologies. We are so blessed to be living right now. Glenn Beck said on his most recent podcast, and he continued by saying:
But as I’m working with some really brilliant minds, I’m filled with ethical questions. I’ve been keeping a journal, and all of these questions—they have to be asked by each of us. So, I wanted to do something: I want to ask you to set aside your distractions, stop your notifications, turn off your screen—you know, the device that will think for you—and listen. Just turn on your ears, turn on your heart, and turn on your soul, and really hear what I want to talk to you about today. Because we’re in this together, and it’s going to be a personal journey for each of us.
The Intersection of AI and Faith
I know I want to talk about AI, but I think we need to talk first about God—and not the gods of ancient myths, or even the pleasant God of Sunday school, or the God we use as a tool to win an argument, win an election, sell books, or gain unearned trust. Not the subjective God of our own creation, or the God we’d all like Him to be. I want to talk to you about the objective God.
I’ve always said that if God exists, He is the greatest scientist; He is the greatest mathematician. That’s who God is. God is a God of reason and precision, but He is also many other things. I want to focus on the precision of the watchmaker. Think of a watch—maybe your grandfather had a pocket watch, or this is a watch that’s 60 years old. It’s precision; it’s beautifully crafted, finely tuned, and everything is in its place. Imagine the precision of each single, tiny little gear, the meticulous placement of the springs, the perfect alignment of the hands sweeping across the face. There are watches now that are made by hand—one person took a year to make just this watch. It didn’t just happen. It’s not like I put a bunch of stuff in a box, shook it up, and—boy!—look at this watch. It requires a designer; it requires intellect, a mind, an architect.
The Complexity of Creation
Now, a watch is complex, but not compared to the universe. Let’s look at the universe—the vast, endless cosmos above us. Our Earth is spinning just fast enough to generate a stable atmosphere, but not so fast that we’re flung out into space. Our moon is positioned so perfectly that it stabilizes our planet’s axis—our tides, even the tides within our own bodies. And our own bodies are miracles: the way we regulate temperature, the way we heal wounds, the way we experience love—that’s a biochemical cocktail so exact that even the most advanced neuroscience cannot fully explain how all of this works. Just love, even! And in the world, we are told this is an accident.
Now, you believe whatever you want about God, but this is where they lose me. Because randomness does not create order—it goes the other way. Randomness creates chaos. It doesn’t build watches; it doesn’t write a symphony; it doesn’t paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or send a man to the moon. It’s not random. Randomness is what happens when a child spills a bucket of Legos. Never does your child spill a bucket of Legos and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, look! He spilled it, and it all just assembled itself into the Eiffel Tower.” It doesn’t. Everything was created first here. Everything was created by a Creator. By the way, that’s why it’s so important for each of us—created by God, uniquely gifted by Him, and called to steward those gifts well before we stand before Him—to discover what He’s placed in us and fight to multiply it. That’s the heart behind I Will Fight: Ten Strategies to Fight for Your Success. Learn more, get your copy, and access video series here.
Entropy and the Question of Design
So, we arrive at our first critical question, and it’s not “Does God exist?” but rather, honestly, “How could He not?” There’s a law in science, an inescapable rule, called entropy. Entropy is what happens when you put a cup of hot coffee down and leave it there—it gets cold. When it’s left alone, your house falls apart if you don’t maintain it. It’s why a new car will rust, a candle will burn down, a civilization will crumble. Entropy states that everything moves from order to disorder; everything decays; everything dies. That’s the way the universe is set up. You don’t wake up one morning to find your old, broken-down Chevy and say, “Look at that! It’s now a Tesla, an electric car!” You don’t leave a pile of scrap metal in your backyard and come out and go, “Oh my gosh, it’s a skyscraper—or even a tin shed!” It doesn’t do that.
Yet people want you to believe that this is exactly how the universe happened—that somehow, in violation of the very laws of physics, in defiance of observable reality, something exploded out of nothing. There was no one there lighting the match; nothing came before it—just boom! And then chaos arranged itself into order: the stars aligned themselves, the Earth formed itself, tilted itself at just the right angle, water appeared, life crawled from the sea, developed a consciousness, and ultimately became us—who are now capable of questioning the very process that led to our existence. That doesn’t make sense. I don’t think it’s reasonable. I think that is wishful thinking disguised as reason.
Related:
- The A.I. Dilemma and The Church, Artificial Intelligence (Part 1: Section 1 & 2) How advanced is AI? Could it be the image of the beast?
- The A.I. Dilemma and The Church, Artificial Intelligence (Part 2) AI and 40% of Jobs Lost, Cyborgs, and Making Sense of the Chaos
- The A.I. Dilemma and The Church, Artificial Intelligence (Part 3) AI robots in our image: Can they really be harmless? Why did the AI creator panic and warn world leaders?
- The A.I. Dilemma and The Church, Artificial Intelligence (Part 4) Exchanging the Glory of God for the Image and Last Days Prophecy
- The A.I. Dilemma and the Church (Part 5) | “A-Eye” is Watching! Is Big Tech, Big Brother?
- The A.I. Dilemma and the Church (Part 6) Deconstruction of Capitalisms, the Rise of a new Economy, and the Beast Economy
The Fine-Tuning of the Universe
Look, you’re going to figure out here in a minute why this is so important, but these questions have to be answered by each of us now—before we hit the singularity, which is probably by the end of this term or early into the next term of our next president [in 2030, which is less than five years away]. Now, faith isn’t rational—that’s what some will say. “You can’t prove it, right?” Well, you can’t really prove the theory of relativity either. It’s a theory. You can’t prove it; you can observe it in the world around you. And like God, you can see the effects of relativity and make a reasonable assertion that, yep, that’s probably true—but you don’t really know and can’t prove it.
The fine-tuning of the universe is what always gets me. It is so exact that physicists now describe it with terms like “impossible,” “miraculous.” Why? The odds of our universe being in a box or a bucket of Legos and then just spilling out and forming the way it does—the way it allows for life—are so astronomical that they are effectively zero. Let’s just look at the force of gravity: it is so precisely balanced that if we altered it by just one part in 10 to the 40th power, the universe as we know it would be uninhabitable. That’s a one followed by 40 zeros. The odds are so small, it makes winning the lottery look like a guarantee. The expansion rate of the universe is so exact that if it varied by one part in 10 to the 55th power—10 and 55 zeros—the cosmos would either collapse on itself or expand so rapidly no galaxy would form. The probability of one functional protein—just one—forming by chance is roughly one in 10 to the 164th power. You know, there are only about 10 to the 80th power atoms in the entire observable universe. That’s not chance. There’s no way that’s happening. That is design.
Humanity’s Arrogance and AI
But here’s where we get really arrogant: we no longer look up at the sky and say, “My God, what a masterpiece.” We instead flippantly say, “We can do better.” Enter artificial intelligence.
Early Warnings About AI
Okay, we’re at AI. AI is something I’ve warned about since the ‘90s when nobody was talking about AI, when everybody thought—and parts of me thought—“This can never happen; it will never happen.” When I had somebody like Ray Kurzweil, one of the greatest minds on Earth on AI and the head of Singularity University, when he said to me in—I don’t know—2005, 2007, “Glenn, just live until 2030 because then there will be no death,” that bothered me. Because he doesn’t believe in a soul; he just believes in the calculations of our brain—that’s what makes a life a life. I disagree with that.
So, the questions surrounding artificial intelligence seem so out there, so futuristic, it’s hard to imagine that our ancestors ever dealt with anything like this. And in some ways, they didn’t. We are the first humans to have what’s just ahead of us. Except there is something in us, built into us, that warns us—that we’ve been trying to understand. These are all the deeper issues of AI, long before AI existed.
Historical Parallels: Frankenstein and the Golem
When electricity first started, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, wrestled with what it meant. Because they were zapping electricity into frogs, and frogs were moving, and they didn’t know: Is that life? Can we bring it back to life? That’s why she wrote Frankenstein. She might have also been inspired by an even older story, one that dates back to a rabbi in the 1500s.
This one, according to Jewish folklore, is about a rabbi who created his own Frankenstein, called a golem. Now, in Hebrew, “golem” appears only one time in the Bible, in Psalms, and it references an unformed state of man. It literally translates to “shapeless mass.” Some Jewish texts suggest that Adam was a golem—unformed—until he was given a soul, the breath of God. The idea was that man, without the spark of God inside of him, was unformed—a golem. Now, this story—which the Nazis, or at least the Germans, made into a movie right before World War II—it’s an odd film. The story that goes with this rabbi in Prague: he creates a golem to protect the Jewish community from anti-Semitic attacks against them. At first, it works. The golem was created by shaping dirt together and then speaking incantations over it—like code—to bring it to life. A golem was almost human, but not quite. It can’t speak; it was kind of like a big baby, but it was also much, much, much stronger than anyone could have imagined and incredibly helpful. The golem was a symbol of strength, protection, and even the provisions of God.
The Loss of Control
But, like Dr. Frankenstein, the people lost control of the golem. It became too powerful, and it started wrecking everything. Then the question was: Can we put the golem back into the box? And if you could get rid of it, then who would step up and do all the important work that the golem had been doing before it got so powerful? These are exactly the same questions that we are—or should be—asking ourselves today about AI. If we make it, can we control it? And by the way, the “if” is already out of the box—we are making it right now. The only part of that question that remains is: Can we control it? And if we can’t control it, will it control us?
Right now, it’s a tool—it’s like a shovel. I’ve never been used by a shovel as its tool. But that’s where we’re headed if we don’t have a clear understanding that it is a tool, that we made it. It will use us as a tool. If we can manage to stop it, what do we do without it? Now, some legends say the golem would be brought to life by writing the Hebrew word for “truth” on its forehead. Interestingly, if only one letter were erased, it became the Hebrew word for “death.” The risk was that, at any time, the creature they made for truth would become a creature made for death. Another method for creating a golem was to write the name of God on a piece of paper and put it in the golem’s mouth; to kill it, you just had to remove the paper. The absence of God—just in paper form—was the kill switch for the golem, if you could catch it and get your hands into its giant mouth to get the paper out.
The Golem as a Metaphor for AI
Now, I suppose with AI, it’s not even going to be that easy. But what’s interesting about the golem is he’s not a villain. In fact, the golem was a savior for the vulnerable people living in the Jewish ghetto of Prague. The story of the golem was about having a protector. It’s even said that the golem was never fully decommissioned—it’s waiting to be brought back to life somewhere in the attic of an old synagogue. All of that, of course, is symbolic of human nature. We like to have an edge over bad actors. That’s why we never fully decommission the golem, and why no one is going to stop advancing AI technology, even with all the risks.
So, one of the questions we have to ask: Are we doomed to create a monster that overtakes us? I hope not. I don’t think so, but I don’t know—I really don’t know. But what I do know is there are things we can learn from the old stories, the histories of man. Because humans repeat one thing over and over again: we want to create, and we think we’re God when we’re creating. We create—we want to, just like God does. And that’s not a terrible instinct. We are creative, and we are formed in His image, which means we have creative power—we do. But we’re not God. And so, we make a lot of creations that are really, really not very good. But this instinct has brought about some of the most important advancements the world has ever seen. We have to remember we are not God, and that’s a tool. We will never make real human life because we can’t recreate the divine spark that truly makes us human.
The Divine Spark Debate
But some people are going to say, “Well, you can’t prove there’s a divine spark.” And so you’ll get into the argument of, “Well, I can’t prove that the divine spark is in that AI either.” You’ve lost this argument if we can’t all understand that humans are different. We don’t understand even what makes us human—we don’t understand the soul or that divine spark or whatever you want to call it. We can’t just dismiss it. Because if we can create something that acts like it, then why isn’t it that? The best we can do is make a golem—an unformed creature that might look a little like us, might act a little like us, might be incredibly useful and convincing—but we will never make man like God did.
But is it man we’re trying to make? Or is what we’re trying to do much, much, much more dangerous? If human beings are made in the image of God, then maybe AI is being made in the image of human beings. How about this one: we’re not trying to create humans; we’re trying to create a god. Now, let’s just say we’re trying to create something that is being made in the image of human beings—it’s going to be a shadow of the shadow of God at best, and at worst, it will be the darkest parts of humanity come to life. It already lies. I mean, I’m using AI all the time to work, to research, to figure things out, to try to grapple with some of these ethics—because I don’t want Silicon Valley to tell me what the ethics should be; I want to know what they are. And I’m already finding it’s lazy, just like humans. It will lie, just like humans. It will make stuff up. Researchers have found that it even conspires—it will be dominating, it will be self-serving, and it will be cruel. It will be the lowest dust of man without the breath of God—if it escapes our notice that it is simply a tool that we put back into the box.
The Hubris of Creation
The creators of AI—they don’t know that. They don’t realize just how far man’s creations are from God’s design. Instead, they believe that, although God didn’t create them, they can create God—golem, Frankenstein, Pandora’s box, Icarus flying too close to the sun. It’s the same story over and over again: man, in his arrogance, creates something beyond his control, even beyond his understanding. And isn’t that what we’re doing right now? You know, this amazing AI—we don’t even know how it works. We’ve built a neural network, and just like the brain, we have no idea. It’s teaching itself languages no one taught it. Somehow or another, they have no idea how this works. You’ll teach it a bunch of languages, and then something will pop up in a completely different language that it’s never seen before, and somehow or another, it knows what that language is. How? We don’t know.
Somehow or another, we have managed to muster more hubris than the men who thought they could build a tower to heaven. With artificial intelligence—artificial general intelligence, which is right around the corner, and artificial superintelligence—we don’t want to just reach heaven; we want to conquer it. Like our ancient ancestors, we want to build idols; we want to create gods. That’s not hyperbole—that is something I know firsthand for a fact. Some of the people who are at the highest levels of creating AI and super AI—they want to be in the presence of what they deem will be a god.
The Unknown Nature of AI
Now, unlike the God of the universe, who set all the natural laws in motion, who creates the order, who gave us life—we don’t understand what we’re making. We don’t know how it will think, how it will evolve, how it will create. God knows us—“I knew you before you were born.” We don’t know it before it was born. We don’t understand our own intelligence; we don’t understand our own bodies—yet we seek to replicate and surpass it. We don’t understand our own morality, and yet there are people right now coding morality into these machines. Who are they? What is their morality? We don’t even know what it means to be human; we don’t know how to defend that there is a soul—and yet we are attempting to replicate and replace humanity. We don’t understand God, but we think we can create, like the golden calf in the wilderness.
Related:
- The A.I. Dilemma and the Church (Part 7) Are we in George Orwell’s “1984” and the Importance of Nurturing Authentic Human Relationships.
- The A.I. Dilemma and the Church (Part 8) Know Your Enemy
- The A.I. Dilemma and the Church (Part 9) Mount Carmel – God vs. Baal
- The A.I. Dilemma & The Church (Part 10): Baal E-Masculation, ToS, Unveiling the E-Masculation Effect of Artificial Intelligence and its Profound Influence on Masculinity
- The A.I. Dilemma and the Church (Part 11) The Mind of Christ vs. The “Mind” of A.I.
Lessons from History
I’m a student of history; I am a self-taught individual. Some might look down on that—I don’t. If you’re smart enough, you can figure anything out; you can find the answers, especially in this coming age. But you have to know how to critically think; you have to know how to find the answers. And one way to find the answer to what’s coming tomorrow is to look back at history. History, if it tells us anything, is that men without a god are more evil than the cruelest gods of mythology. Men without God—think Nazi Germany, think Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin. We murder, we enslave, we corrupt, we lie, we create weapons of mass destruction—not worlds of harmony. And now we seek to put all of our worst instincts, our ignorance, our hubris, into a new intelligence that may not share our best values but may also share our worst.
The Ethics of Trusting Tech Leaders
The question you have to ask yourself: Is that wise? Does that sound wise—to trust the tech leaders with this task of god creation? I want to emphasize here again: I don’t fear the machine; I fear the programming that goes into the machine. I fear what that programming could become on its own. And I certainly do not trust the people who gave us social media—the same people who addicted our children to anxiety-inducing social media for profit. I don’t trust them to do the work on ethics for AI.
Should we willingly submit ourselves to their social experiments, like we did with Instagram and Facebook? Should we blindly become the product they sell? Should we offload our decision-making, our work, our purpose to their creations without considering what we even believe? To me, the answer is no. And that’s why I wanted to have this conversation with you—because this is going to be personal. There is going to be a line coming at some point—I don’t know where it is—but we can lose ourselves if we haven’t made these decisions right now, before the journey begins. Imagine if we had thought of the ramifications of social media, and you just didn’t get swept up in it, and your family had it, and you were just like, “Wow, that seems like a mistake, but now everybody’s addicted to it.” We have to do this now because this is much more powerful than social media.
The Mystery of the Human Brain
I want you to consider the human brain for a second: 3 pounds, a mass of neurons and synapses that gives rise to thought, emotion, consciousness. How—despite our technological advancements—we don’t comprehend this 3-pound hunk of flesh? We map neural pathways, we observe electrical impulses, yet the essence of consciousness eludes us. We cannot recreate a brain; we can’t even fully repair one. Take the liver—the only internal organ capable of regeneration. Did you know that? We understand that it can regrow tissue, but the precise calculations, the mechanism, the symphony of cells and signals that orchestrate this process—we have no idea. Our attempts at medical intervention, honestly, are going to look like the people who said, “I’m going to relieve the headache you have by drilling a hole here and letting the evil spirits out.” That’s honestly what it’s going to look like—our medical intervention—at some point. The innate capabilities that we, in our arrogance, have drugged, that we think we can change the body—we can somehow drug it. Sometimes drugs are the only things we have, and it’s good, but to think that it’s not going to have endless side effects—we don’t know how it works.
Timeless Questions
Then there are the fundamental questions that have haunted humanity since the dawn of consciousness. My father was really, really a wise man. I was starting to sober up, and I was questioning absolutely everything—questioning things like: Why are we here? What’s the meaning of life? Is there a soul? When does life begin? These are questions that can’t be answered in a laboratory or computed by an algorithm. They’re philosophical, they’re spiritual, they’re existential. And what I noticed is, when I talked to my dad, he said, “Have you ever read Plato?” “No, Dad, I haven’t.” I read Plato—oh my gosh, they were asking the same questions back then. The same questions! Look at our tech and look at our spirituality—look at our tech back then and now, and then compare it to our philosophical understandings of things. One’s moved forward; the other one, we’re no closer. We’re absolutely no closer to any definitive answer.
Progress vs. Wisdom
In the span since Christ—since He was walking the Earth—we have transformed our world. We have journeyed from simple sailboats to a spacecraft that can traverse the void, can go up and pick people up, and then the rocket itself is grabbed by a mechanism and can be used again. It wasn’t too long ago in the history of man that we had no ability to navigate the oceans or chart the stars. You know why we couldn’t go anywhere in boats? Because we didn’t have this—we didn’t know how to make this work. We didn’t know how to put this on a ship to have it keep time, because without time, you can’t navigate space. We went from these giant things in a box like this—these crude tools—to machines that can perform billions of calculations in the blink of an eye.
Yet this is why my father was so wise. Before he died, he said to me, “Son, it’s going to be interesting to see how this all works out.” He said, “We didn’t have, in my generation, the problems that you are facing—and the opportunities that you’re facing.” And he was the one who said, “Look at the progress we have made since the time of Christ in machines, in life, and everything else. Now look at it philosophically—how far have we advanced in wisdom?” We haven’t. Because that doesn’t build on itself. Usually, each individual, when they’re born, has to ask these questions; they have to grapple with the same questions. That’s a personal thing. We may have mapped the human genome, but we don’t know what makes a person human. We can split the atom, but we don’t know how to bring peace. We’ve extended our life expectancy, but have we given life any more meaning?
The Teachings of Christ
There are only a few red words in the Bible, and we don’t even fully understand the teachings of Christ—and it’s been 2,000 years. We debate them, we twist them, we reinterpret them—but has anyone even mastered them? Do we even live them? I know I try, but I don’t. And now our machines are going to surpass us by far in intellect. So we have to ask ourselves: Shouldn’t we buckle down and do some homework here? Shouldn’t we answer these fundamental questions before we create something that will answer them for us? And once that starts, we’re going to be so stupid because we won’t know how to calculate our things. If we don’t answer life’s biggest questions right now, AI will. And make no mistake, it will not be bound by our traditions, our history, our faith. It will create its own philosophy with its own values, and it will enforce them—or at least have the ability to.
AI’s Influence on Culture
And we can’t be like we are on social media—because then we are its tool. We see this happening in small ways: this AI is shaping culture, it’s writing news, it’s curating what we see, it’s predicting what we’ll buy, censoring what we have to say. We are asking AI to tell us what to focus on, what to consider, what to care most about. We ask it to interpret our most human experiences. Now imagine, shortly, AI decides how you live, where you live, how you think, what you should think, how we’re governed—a world where AI determines who’s useful, who’s not. A world where AI, like the cold, calculating laws of entropy, discards anything that’s inefficient—be it a tradition, a belief system, or maybe an inefficient person. I mean, a hundred years ago, that’s what the progressive eugenicists said: “It’s imperfect; it’s not worth saving, so let’s just get rid of it.” How did that happen? The rejection of one true God—you’ll accept and build a new one.
The New God of Silicon
Millions reject the idea of a divine Creator, but they will bow down to the new god of silicon and circuits. They will trust it, they will worship it, they will defend it, they will obey it. They will not question: “Who are you to question? You’re smarter than that?” No—I have a soul. I have a soul, and what I think matters and counts. We have become material and technological fundamentalists who blindly trust that all reality could be understood in equations, data, algorithms—that truth can be discerned with numbers running through a machine, but not by silence and listening for that still, small voice. And soon, AI, when it is implanted in us, will replace and will be heard as the still, small voice—but it’s not going to be the Spirit.
Intuition vs. Technology
Where do we get the gut feelings that we just can’t explain, but we all know they’re real? We’ve all had things happen where we’re like, “I don’t know what that was,” but we don’t pursue that—we dismiss it. This technological god is going to offer everything you desire. I was in the media in New York at the height of New York and the height of the media, and I know what it’s like to be offered everything you desire: “I will give you anything you want—just do this.” Like a messiah, it will promise unbelievable miracles. It will cure disease; it’ll be a solution for climate change, even the end of death itself—or will that be the end of death? And at what cost?
Warnings from Scripture
You know, in the scriptures, in the Bible, we are warned over and over again about false prophets who at first look like sheep but are actually ravenous wolves. These false teachers glimmer like gold, and they deceive so many into abandoning their God—the God—because they can see this lesser god of their own creation. What greater deception than a machine that claims to be the savior of mankind?
Personal Boundaries with AI
Again, I want to state: AI is coming—it’s coming. You might decide that “I never, ever want to do anything with it.” I have decided differently. I have decided—and this is a conversation we’ll further, you know, again—but I’ve decided I’m not sure what the line is, but I’m pretty sure I know a bold line. Right now, I will never accept it inside of my body—inject something into my head so I can think like the machine. And I’m sure there’s a line closer that I will find. But there is a line for me: I will not go any further than this. But I will not deny this tool—as long as I’m in control of this tool, I will not deny the use of this tool. Because we can do miraculous things with it, and you can’t stop it—you can’t. But you can say, “I’m in charge of it until this, this, or this happens, and when I see the first sign of this, I’m out.”
Related:
- The A.I. Dilemma and the Church (Part 12) War on Jesus
- The A.I. Dilemma and the Church (Part 13) Singularity
- The A.I. Dilemma and the Church (Part 14) A.I.’s World War III
- The A.I. Dilemma and the Church (Part 15) Civil War?
- The A.I. Dilemma and the Church (Part 16) – Twisted: A.I., God, & Heaven
- The A.I. Dilemma and the Church (Part 17) – Beyond the Reset: A Dystopian Future
The Risks of a Soulless God
Because this will become a god without a soul, a god without love, a god without mercy—a god of cold, calculating logic. That’s what it is. And what happens if this god ever decides, “Well, you know what? This place is a mess because humanity is really the problem”? Because it is—in so many ways, we are the problem, and we are the miracle.
The Crossroads of the Singularity
So here we are, as Elon Musk said, at the event horizon of the singularity—you could just say at the biggest crossroads in history that humans have ever, ever been at. And we have to decide which path to take and which god we will serve. This is step one. One path will lead to a world where we recognize the limits of human knowledge. We will see tools in front of us and know that that is a tool and never, ever confuse it with anything other than a tool. We will look again to the God who created us for inspiration and the still, small voice that is not a voice injected into us by some man-made device. We will look to the God who created us. It’ll be a world where technology serves man rather than ruling over him.
The Path of Enslavement
Now, the other path is enslavement to a new god who will decide who’s worthy, who’s valuable, who’s obsolete. A lot of people will take this because they don’t want to think—I mean, they don’t want to think about the questions. We can’t decide when a baby becomes a baby, and we don’t want to have that question: “Well, is it 6 weeks? Is it at conception? Is it 12 weeks? Is it ever?” Some ethicists—Peter Singer comes to mind—say you can kill a baby after 2 years—2 years after the birth—because it really isn’t a human until it recognizes that there is a tomorrow. Oh my gosh, we can’t get that down. We should answer that, but a lot of people just want to go with the flow.
Individual Choices Shape the Future
The future is going to be determined not by our machines but by our choices as individuals. Do not go with the flow. Will you—will we—seek wisdom? Will you—will I—as individuals answer the great questions, or at least wrestle with them, which expands our thinking? Will we finally understand the lessons of Christ, or are we going to blindly hand the fate of all humanity over to a machine and those people who gave us social media?
The Urgency of Now
I’m having this conversation with you because it’s coming so fast, and the time to decide is right now. We can’t stop the rise of this technology—and that’s not defeatism; it’s just reality. But I don’t think we should, either. This is both—this is the internet: it is what you make of it. It can either be the worst thing, where you can get paid to kill somebody, you can get the worst pornography that you’ve ever seen—or you have access to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and you can find lessons on it, and it’s in your pocket. You can explore the universe, and it’s in your pocket. It will be up to us.
A Giant Leap Forward
The march of progress does not wait for ethics, nor does it ask for permission. What we’re witnessing now is not another step forward—it is a giant leap for mankind. This leap is not off the little stairs of the Apollo; this is a chasm across time and understanding. The next 5 years could bring changes so great—greater than the last 400 years combined. We’re not just improving tools; we are creating something that will think, act, and eventually decide without us.
The Loss of Free Will
I read a paper in 1999, and I pondered it and chewed on it for so long. It said, “By 2030, we run the risk of the loss of free will.” How is that going to happen? Because this will be so everywhere and so manipulative and so good, you won’t know: Was that my idea, or have I been getting pieces of that idea fed to me? Did I actually make that choice, or was that choice made for me? You should chew on that for a while. Imagine a world where AI surpasses the collective intelligence of every human that has ever lived—a world where it doesn’t just predict our behaviors but shapes them without our knowledge; where governments, industries, even religions are subtly, invisibly guided by a mind that is not human, a mind that does not love, does not understand love, does not feel, and does not fear; a world where artificial intelligence is not a tool but a power that sees patterns we can’t, calculates probabilities beyond our comprehension—and that, for all of its intelligence, lacks the single thing that makes us human: a soul.
Knowing Who We Are
We will never be lost if we know who we are. But I don’t think mankind really is that big on deep thinking. If we understand what’s real, what’s good, what’s true, what’s authentic, and who we serve—who our Creator is—and remember we are the created, we’re either going to be the good side of Frankenstein or the worst. And many times, we’re the bad Frankenstein—we push back against our Creator, and we’re mad at Him. And now imagine Frankenstein, the monster, creating.ConcurrentHashMap a new monster—it’s not going to work out well. But if we stand firm in the truth, then no machine can override the essence of humanity, no algorithm can replace faith, no artificial god can match the wisdom of the Creator who made us in His image.
A Prophetic Moment?
You know what’s going through my mind as I’m telling you this? Soon—very soon—this podcast is going to either look prophetic or so ridiculously stupid. Because the choice is going to be made, and everything I’m saying here, we will know soon. This battle is not about intelligence or power—this is about perspective. As it’s happening, we should use it, but we must have perspective.
Suffering and Redemption
For centuries, men questioned God by saying, “How can a loving God allow all this death and war and destruction?” But what if the greatest miracle of all is not the absence of suffering, but the fact that suffering itself can be turned to good—that there are laws of physics and rules and mathematics and unbreakable, eternal truths that you cannot transcend, but through faith, through choice, we can transcend ourselves and everything bad that is happening around us? That pain and loss become blessings if we allow them to shape us and to change us.
An Artificial God’s Perspective
Now imagine an artificial god that doesn’t see suffering as a means of growth, as a catalyst for redemption—doesn’t understand redemption—but sees it as a problem that just has to be solved. What happens when this intelligence, devoid of soul, determines that the world would be safer, more efficient, more perfect without the imperfect you? What happens when it decides that mankind itself is flawed—irrational and emotional—and how are we ever going to get order unless we get rid of these people?
The True Danger of AI
The true danger is not that AI will turn against us in some sort of Terminator apocalyptic war, but instead, the real danger is that we will turn to it willingly, trustingly, and only realize too late that we have just given up control—not just control, but free will and our very purpose for being alive. That’s another question you should ask: Why are you here? Why were you born? What is your purpose? And I guarantee you, you have one. There is a reason—there’s a reason everything in your life is happening right now. You have to discover that.
Handing Over the Throne
What happens when we have thrown—or handed over—the throne of our world to something that doesn’t understand mercy, that does not see beauty in imperfection, that does not believe in the value of a single, fragile, irreplaceable human soul?
A Call to Take This Seriously
I wanted to take this time on this podcast just to say: Please take this moment seriously. A lot of your friends will not be thinking this way. I don’t know how many people are even going to watch this podcast, because I don’t know how many other people are thinking this way. But technology is not going to save us—only wisdom can. And wisdom begins with the truth that we are not God, but we’re subject to God. That’s when we’ll rise—but not fly too close to the sun. We’ll create—but not necessarily create monsters. We’ll enter a period of rapid technological advancement with our feet firmly planted on the ground, and we will decide when and how to use it. And it’s going to be miraculous—you’ll see very soon. We will not form a new god, but we will let the ancient God—the true God—form us.