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Welcome to breakpoint, a daily look at an ever changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. Today on breakpoint, speaker and author Abdu Murray warns against using technology to escape reality.
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Right now, Rita Realist is telling a young lady named Annabelle that the poem Annabel posted online is groundbreaking. So is Connie Patriot, and several hundred thousand others. Though they're all cheering the same poem, none of them really mean it. In fact, they are incapable of meaning it. This is Social AI, an app that looks like X but isn't. You post and millions of followers reply instantly. You literally build your follower base by picking from a menu that can include supporters, critics, trolls, conservatives or liberals, and your feed fills with bots calibrated to your specifications. Social AI's founder promotes it as liberating because users can't be canceled by their followers, and that's because no actual person is reacting. This is far different than fake bot accounts on X that either puff up follower counts or troll someone without their knowledge. With Social AI, in a sea of millions of engaged followers, there's only one human you, and you know it. Saying something, especially something true but unpopular in public, takes courage to risk being misread, written off, or socially ruined. Social AI removes those risks and thus the courage in fairness, there could be a legitimate use for Social AI floating a controversial stance past invented critics before posting to truly social media might sharpen one's point or heighten impact. But Social AI is not marketed as a risk rehearsal tool, but a risk removed world. This is part of a growing escapist trend. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen claims that some of us have reality privilege. We live in a world rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, and many fascinating people to talk to. Most others aren't so privileged, living in bleak or challenging circumstances. Reality has had 5,000 years to get good, andreessen continues, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people. I don't think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. The solution, according to Andreessen, David Chalmers, and Beau Cronin, is is to build virtual worlds for the reality deprived. Of course, no one is reality deprived. We all live in realities with varying ups and downs. Giving people a virtual world to escape to is the true reality deprivation. That irony is lost on many techno utopianists, perhaps because becoming godlike world builders is too seductive. Such escapism doesn't produce sturdier souls it atrophies them. As Joshua Pauling argues, the promise that we can dodge life's Stressors might seem like the course of a compassionate parent, but it actually robs individuals of the stressors that are central to developing resilience. I would go further and say that in trying to become world building gods, we reduce ourselves from deaformed souls to digitized simulations. In so doing, we become the dangerously dissatisfied and irresponsible gods atheist Yuval Harari warned we'd become. Lest Christians think that digital escapism is confined to the unchurched, consider the findings from a recent study by the Barna group and Christ in Youth. Their survey of 1500American teenagers revealed that the teens most engaged in their faith, who Barna calls faith activated, were nearly twice as likely as their peers to trust AI's answers to important questions over a person's these aren't isolated kids substituting a chatbot for friends they don't have, nor are they afraid to talk to their youth leaders. Many said they feel free to bring doubts to their youth groups and that they're encouraged to think critically about faith, yet they trust machines more. Though explanations are still being explored, there are clues to why this retreat to silicon entices even the faithful. We all struggle with automation bias the belief that since machines lack emotion, they provide objective answers. And young people think AI systems curate collected human wisdom on a topic. So they think they're relying on the wisdom of many, not just one pastor. But shielding our feelings also may be at play in even the safest environments. A pastor might subtly sigh, a friend might tell you something you don't want to hear when you confess a sin. But a chatbot will never think less of you because it never had a high opinion of you. Confessing to a chatbot, like posting to a community of bots, removes risk entirely. We've wrung our hands over whether AI will get so good that we can't distinguish it from a human. What we're learning now is that fewer young people care about the distinction so long as something answers when they call. Even though we respond to hard to believe videos or images with that's probably AI, we actually don't distrust AI. We distrust the people using AI, and so we rely on machines to avoid risks. But real community entails risks. Christian community isn't meant to be optimized for emotional ease or predictability. Jesus interactions with his disciples and others were marked by affirmation and correction, even rebuke. That's what prepared his disciples to speak truth to power and endure hardship when preaching the gospel. Real community, marked by reliable answers and compassionate though unpredictable connection, fosters resilience, the relationships and the faith worth having surprise us, correct us, and uplift us amidst life's triumphs and tragedies. No feed of bots or virtual world can do that. God has privileged us with living in the harsh reality that we can really impact, not avoid. But that requires courage. Anything that removes that courage isn't community, it's a mirror with a chat function.
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That was Abdu Murray, author of the book Fake How AI and Identity Ideology are Collapsing Reality, and a speaker at the upcoming Great Lakes symposium, what Does It Mean to Be Human in an AI Age? On August 6th in Bay Harbor, Michigan. The event is free online or in person, but you must register. Find out more@greatlakesymposium.org and for more resources or to share this commentary with others, visit Breakpoint.org if you or your spouse has been thinking about the Colson Fellows Program, don't go through it alone. Take the journey together. Couples who apply save 25% on each tuition and pursue something more valuable clarity for the mind, confidence for the soul and courage for faithful living right where God has called you. The program begins August 1st. Apply now@colsonfellows.org apply. That's colsonfellows.org apply.