← The Wake-Up Call
The Wake-Up Call
Jesus and Our Tech-Filled Lives with Andy Crouch | Wake-Up Call Conversations
00:49:47
The episode explores the paradox of modern technology: the tools promised to make life easier are often leaving people more isolated, anxious, and spiritually drained. Through a conversation about AI, social media, and the pursuit of “easy everywhere,” the speakers examine how convenience can quietly reshape identity, community, and even what it means to be human. They contrast the cultural dream of technological progress with a faith-centered vision rooted in incarnation, relationship, and wisdom, arguing that the story of Jesus offers a better way forward than either utopia or dystopia. Join Andy at New Room Conference! Register here: https://seedbed.com/newroom/ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Get the Wake-Up Call in your email each day ► https://seedbed.com/wakeupcall ⛪️ Are you a pastor? We'd love to connect ► https://seedbed.typeform.com/to/dymjFhUB Join the Field Team and help us sow the Wake-Up Call into new hearts ► https://seedbed.typeform.com/fieldteam Join the con...
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Wake up sleeper. Rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you. Hey, everybody. J.D. walt here for another wake up call conversation. And today I'm so excited that we have Andy Crouch is, is going to be with us. It's going to be a total mess, not because of Andy, but because of me. I'm kind of like, this is like Christmas morning and I'm coming down the stairs and there's just all the things and I'm like, which one am I going to go to first? And so I just have a mess of, of scratches on my page. And this is a friend from, from
- [00:51]
B
years and yes, wonderful years.
- [00:55]
A
And he's going to be at the new room conference this fall, which of course, we want you to come to. And we thought it would be great to sit down and I mean, we're not going to talk about the new room conference. We're going to talk about Jesus and all the, all the ways that he wants us to talk about him today and with him and with you and with us together. So Lord have mercy and help us and lead us and witness to us and through us as we're together. So, Andy, thank you for the time and why don't you just kind of just give your, you know, Life Story Readers Digest here so that people will know you who we're talking to today.
- [01:46]
B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
Last time we were together, we were on my back deck in the 2000s.
- [01:53]
B
Yes, it's true. All right, so the question is, should I give you Matthew's genealogy, which I believe starts with Abraham, or should I give you Luke's, which starts with Adam? Which do you prefer? How far back should I go exactly?
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A
The Arch. Joyce.
- [02:10]
B
Well, son of Wayne and Joyce. I mean, we never talk about this in our world. We introduce ourselves by the most recent thing we've done for pay. But I was born the son, first oldest son of Wayne and Joyce. They raised me well. I was born in Connecticut. My father moved. Our family moved with my dad for several different jobs. They raised me, taking me to church, though my father, his whole life, quite openly, was not a believer in the things the church taught, but he loved the community found in churches. And When I was 13, we moved for the last time that our family moved altogether. And they dropped me off at the local Methodist church in Needham, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, where the Charismatic Renewal was really shaping the experience of a certain number of adults and a certain number of kids in that youth group. And I had never, I had been in churches, but I don't think I'D ever encountered, like living love and the power of the Spirit in quite the way that some of those kids and some of the counselors in that youth group had access to. And that began my journey of faith at 13 in this new town, new community. And I just happened to be part of the plunged into one of the purest expressions of seeking God in community that I have ever experienced in my whole life in this high school in a place that you might know is not considered the Bible Belt. The suburbs of Boston were not ground zero for revival per se, except that this group of kids was seeking God and they became my friends. And so amazing kind of initiation into Christian community and the faith through some great friends, a couple of whom I'm still friends with to this day. But to give you the much abbreviated version, then spent really, I've done three things in my life. Primarily I spent 10 years in campus ministry. So coming alongside undergraduates, kind of thinking about and discovering their life in and with God at a place you might have heard of called Harvard College. So kind of an unusual place, another unusual place to find kind of the Holy Spirit at work. But boy, was the Holy Spirit at work in the 10 years that I was there. Just got to see amazing things. And then spent over 10 years in journalism trying to tell the truth about the church and the world. The good news, but also the real news, which is the work of journalism. And then since 2018, I've been working with an organization called Praxis that is really living out something I found myself writing about back in the early 2000s, which is culture making the creation of culture of new forms of culture that are better for the world than what we currently have. And we do that practice by coming alongside entrepreneurs, people who are starting new ventures both for profit and not for profit all over the world. Now we have fellows in Asia and Africa as well as our US based programs. And I'm the partner for theology and culture there. And I get to just connect what we can say about God, which is theology, with what we're making of the world, which is culture, and do that with amazingly creative people who are seeking God's will for what they're building, even though most of what they're building are not Christian companies per se, or Christian nonprofits. But they're trying to step into every sector of culture with something really animated by the good news. So that's maybe along the way, raised two kids. Now I have a grandchild, my wife
- [05:48]
A
and I. I didn't know you were that old.
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B
I didn't either. Everyone says you're too young to be a grandfather. I'm like, that's because you remember your grandparents when you were like, 17. By the time my granddaughter's 17, I will look old enough to be a grandparent. But right now, I'm a delighted grandfather, Miriam. And the generations continue, which is pretty, pretty amazing.
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A
Wow. You know, Andy, my first really awareness of you came back in the. Maybe it was. Maybe it was the late 1900s.
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B
That's such a great way to put it.
- [06:29]
A
Maybe it was. Maybe it was the turn of the century. But I read this essay that you had written in a book called the Church in Emerging Culture.
- [06:40]
B
Oh, interesting. I remember.
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A
I remember it because it was. It just. You opened the essay. I think it opened the book. Talking about the vehicle assembly building and the Mall of America.
- [06:53]
B
Yes. Two of the largest structures on the planet. Yes.
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A
And like, which is the church going to be?
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B
Or is there a third option? Well, I do. I'm not sure I remember. I do remember starting with the vehicle assembly building, which is where the space shuttle is built and so forth, and like, these massive modern structures. And is this really what we want the church to look like? I think was how that essay started. Yeah.
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A
Yeah.
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B
That's so interesting.
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A
But that's my first. I'm like, hang on, this guy's different. I like this guy. I want to meet him. And then I got to meet you over the years. Wow. And you know, you've written a lot about, done a lot of thinking about technology and humanity and, and certainly now I know you have not the backdrop, but the foreground of a grandchild.
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B
That's right.
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A
Really?
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B
Indeed.
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A
Just raises the. The stakes.
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B
Yes, yes.
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A
On all of this. And so I don't even know, like I say, I mean, so. So first off, how about this talk about the meaning of the two words easy and everywhere.
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B
Easy everywhere. Oh, that's so good. Yes. You know, I am always looking for the simplest possible words for complex things. So easy everywhere is. Is the phrase I kind of stumbled on to describe what technology promises us and in fact, what we are trying to build in the world with technology. So I sometimes call technology science plus a dream. So we have science. Science is the discipline study of the world as God has given it to us using methods that are repeatable and that lead to reliable discoveries. Right. So that's the world of science. And there's some other things that you could include in science, like just beholding the world in its richness and complexity in a rigorous way, or having awe and wonder at the world. Oh, those are part of science. But what technology is, is applying science to a particular end that we have in mind. Because what we do with the things we know about the world are not foreordained in the structure of the world. We've got to put that to some use. So I call it science plus a dream. Because since the dawn of science, once we started figuring some of this stuff out in a new way, you might say in history, in the 18th and 19th centuries in particular, we started to ask, what should we build now that we know more about how the world works, now that we don't just see lightning off in the distance, but we can actually run electricity through wires and make use of it, et cetera, et cetera. And I think the dream is a pretty good summary of it is easy everywhere. I want my life to be easy, and I want every part of my life to be easy. And if you ask people why they have acquired a given piece of technology, why did I buy a robot vacuum? Why do I have a washing machine in my house? Why do I use a telephone? Why do I have an automobile? There's so many different things. And it often comes down to, I want my life to be easier than it has been or than my parents or grandparents lives were. And the logic of this extends to everything. So the other thing is the dream doesn't stay put with, like physical labor. So our, I mean, since we're talking about grandparents, you know, my great grandmother probably spent a couple days a week on laundry, right? And so there was like the human labor or toil of just keeping the world clean or providing for food. And technology has made many of those things much easier and in real ways freed us up to do other things as well. And that's a good thing in my view. But the dream doesn't stay put with just kind of reducing toil. It starts to apply to things like how hard relationships are. So Sherry Turkle is a psychologist, a social psychologist at MIT, and she's been, she spent 20 plus years now studying why and how people use the digital in their relationships. And there was one series of studies she did with undergraduates about 10 years ago, and they all preferred to text their friends rather than talk with their friends. And Sheri is like, why do you do this? So she does these structured interviews to kind of tease out why do we text rather than talk. And the answer is, it's easier to text your friends, not just as in, I can get a message to you quickly without having to find you on campus or something. It's easier in that I'm more in control of what I communicate. So when I talk with you, even right now, J.D. which we're doing over some technology here, of course, there's so much vulnerability. Like, I am literally thinking as we're talking, I'm thinking, am I going on too long? Is JD Smiling because he likes what I'm saying, or is he like, please rap? Well, see, but it's vulnerable, right? And also I'm aware as I'm talking, though I've talked about these topics before. I'm definitely making it up to some extent. I'm like, how am I doing? Is this coming across the right way? I'm just thinking about all the vulnerabilities of a live conversation, which is what we're having. Well, I might well prefer to get rid of some of those vulnerabilities and just send you a text, which I can read before I send it. I know every kind of ounce of meaning in it because it's very compressed. And then when I send it to you, I'll be in control of what I send.
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A
And then it may say edited underneath it.
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B
Yes, I know, I know. Which is vulnerability again, right? Exactly. I can refine it even after I send it now. So that, in a way, is this quest to technologize, like, the most basic thing that we do, which is engage in relationship with other people and with God, of course. And the dream is it's supposed to get easier. Like our lives are supposed to get easier. And in some ways, they are much easier. Our grandparents, great grandparents in particular, would look at our lives now and just say, oh, my goodness, you live in paradise. Like, just so many things are so easy for us, but we would say back to them. I mean, if you try to explain to your great grandparents how hard your life is, I think they would be very perplexed. They would be like, you've got to be kidding. Like, your life is so much easier than ours. But we'd say, you don't understand. Weirdly, this dream of easy everywhere has made so many things harder, and so many things feel worse, and it feels harder to be a person and lonelier to be a person. We made it easy to connect. We made it almost impossible to love. Like, connection is easy. Love is hard. Love can't be made easy. So this dream of easy everywhere, though it's good in its proper place, is a kind of a disaster for the human race when we let it be the only thing we're chasing. So that's the kind of story that's good.
- [14:05]
A
And I think about, like, my mom. I mean, well. So first off, I often think how. What if I had to explain this? And if you're. If you're watching this, you see I'm holding my phone up on the screen, the glowing rectangle.
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B
Yes.
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A
How would I explain this to my grandfather, who was born in 1906?
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B
Yeah.
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A
How would I explain? I'm like, I have no idea. I wouldn't know where to start. I mean. Well, I think I might probably start with the Jetsons.
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B
Oh, yeah.
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A
I mean, that was a thing where
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B
kind of vision of the future getting better and easier in some ways. Yeah.
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A
It was the first prophesying of zoom.
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B
Ah, yes, yes, that's right. That's right.
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A
Which was utterly, absurdly impossible and futuristic anyhow. And, I mean, it's. It's almost like. Well, so I was going to say. So there's my grandfather, and now here's my mother, who texts me or writes or calls me. She texts me every day with some screenshot of some, like, mortgage notice, and she's like, our house is paid for, and I hate technology and I hate my phone, and will you please come delete my iPad? And I'm like, this is not working.
- [15:35]
B
Wow. Wow. So she expresses a lot of distress about how it's complicating her life. I mean, this is a great irony is we've been chasing Easy for generations now, and we don't seem to feel actually that our lives are getting easier, even though in some objective ways, clearly they are, but in other ways, getting way more unpleasant. Distressing. Yeah, absolutely.
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A
She loves her washing machine, but she hates her iPhone.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And I think.
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B
I think that's because the washing machine. So every human experience is a mixture of fruitful labor and kind of tedious toil. So that's true of parenting. It's true of writing a book. It's true of doing the accounts of a company, but they're not all the same mixture. Like, parenting has some tedious toil, but it's got a lot of, like, the most fruitful labor one ever gets to do. Washing clothes is a lot of tedious toil, and we're able to use machines to relieve that, even though it's also good work to make things clean again. It's not bad, bad work, but it's just that there's a lot of toil in it. But what the phone does is colonize all these parts of your life that actually are meant to be, like, 90% fruitful. Labor and introduce a layer of toil and trouble that didn't exist before. And. Yeah, it backfires. The quest. You know, to be clear, I am not endorsing the quest for easy everywhere. I'm diagnosing, I'm diagnosing.
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A
Right. And a world that sees this will
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B
not be a healthy world.
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A
The thing we're identifying is that the outcome is actually hard all the time.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hard everywhere.
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A
Hard everywhere, all the time. Everything hard. And so I think about. So there's my mom. I've talked about my grandfather. I'm talking about my mom. Now let's talk about my kids. And they say the thing, whatever the thing is that you grow up with, it was already there.
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B
Yeah.
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A
That's not. You don't consider that technology.
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B
Right, right.
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A
That's just the air, the way the world is.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And I look at my kids, who were probably the last kids to grow up. I mean, my son was born in 2000, the oldest of four. And the iPhone comes along in 07. Around. In there. And so he had six good years. He had a good run.
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B
Those are important years. Yeah.
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A
But they also have a different relationship to all of this digital culture. And so completing the thought going back to the Jetsons, the Jetsons were projecting a utopian future. And the irony is we are getting a dystopian reality. We're getting a dystopian. And the mark of this. And this is where I'd like us to talk about one of the marks of this is two words that you never saw coming. Artificial, I. E. Fake intelligence.
- [19:14]
B
The latest wave. The latest wave of the thing.
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A
Yeah. Artificial intelligence. What is that, Andy?
- [19:25]
B
Well, so it's another dream. First it was a dream, before it was a thing. Before it was a real thing. And in some ways, it's a dream. It's ancient. It's an ancient dream. There are versions of this in myths and legends. There's a version of an Aristotle Aristot. Aristotle speculates at one point, I think in the politics. I'm pretty sure it's in the politics. You know, what if we could create slaves that weren't human, that would play music for us at our dinners, which is one thing slaves did back then. He's like, oh, wow, that would be great. We wouldn't have to force people to do it. We could just have the automatons do it. So people have been dreaming for a long time about.
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A
That's called a jukebox.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Yeah.
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B
But. So, yeah, this is the thing. It's like the quest to go beyond machines. Machines conform us to their mechanical way of doing things. And the quest has always been to have another creature in the world beside us that does things the way we do things. So if you think about computers, even the evolution of computers, for those of us who are old enough to remember, like the early days, you had to learn a lot technically to use them at all, because you had to start inform yourself, basic.
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A
You had to learn basic.
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B
Have to learn exactly. Fortran was my first language. Then basic. What we did is we added layers on top of them to make them easier to use. So that's the easy everywhere thing going, but the real quest. And then a group of computer scientists in the late 50s, early 60s, I don't remember the date, gathered at Dartmouth College and for the first time in the modern era to say, could we really pursue the dream, could we, of a computational system that adapts to the human way of doing things in the world, rather than we having adapt to it? And could we have it think and engage with the world the way human beings do? And this then became a quest chased by several generations of computer scientists, mostly fruitlessly. So there were a bunch of different efforts toward this. It kept having these sort of spring times where people are like, ooh, ooh, it's coming. But then winters where people are like, oh, that did not work. And there was this thing called expert Systems in the 90s, 1980s, totally didn't work. So many attempts about a little over maybe 10 years ago now, at the very beginning of this, computer scientists stumbled on a model that is, like, way simpler than anything they'd tried before, which is just feed a simple mathematical system, everything human beings have ever written down. You could also do this with images and let it learn the kind of deep structure of everything human beings have done by this thing we call training. And we now have, as we all know, systems that to an amazing extent, in a limited domain like language or like image processing, creating images or video. Now, maybe sometime not too far off, robotics can take everything they can vacuum up about how we work as human beings, put them into the simplest possible model that nonetheless is so large that inside it is the sum total of how human beings do stuff. And it's like there's a pastor named Scott Crosby who uses this good phrase for it. It's like a map or an interactive map of everything human beings have done. And then we can ask the system to follow the map. And that's what you do when you prompt an AI, you give it a question or a statement. Or a phrase and it follows the map. It's like, oh, I've seen this pattern before. And the extent to which they really get it, I don't mean they themselves have any experience of it, but to the extent to which these systems, you kind of point it in a direction and it goes to the place on the map that a well informed person, an intelligent person would go, they do it. So that's what we now have and it's very powerful. And this is in some ways just science, I want to say, like this is just a discovery about how mathematics interacts with data. The question is, what dream are we going to try to pursue with this ability that our big computing systems have? And that's very wide open in a way right now. But I will tell you, there's trillions of dollars on basically replacing all human economic activity with a cheaper form that computers do. And so the dream that's going to be pursued kind of by the logic of profit is going to be do not just the toil, but the fruit, the fruitful labor. That's the dream. Now how that's going to play out I will have to see.
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A
I know, I mean, I wish we had three hours today. I've always wanted to do one of the sort of Joe Rogan long form, hey, listen. And not waste time like I think he does.
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B
But, but if people want to deep dive on this, can I cross promote something? J. Kim and I, he's a pastor in Silicon Valley, we did an hour and 20 minute conversation on spiritual formation and AI which might be of interest. So just, just absolutely. I want more. It's on YouTube. It was produced by practicing the way, which we're friends of and they asked us to just sit there in a studio and talk for 80 straight minutes. And it was a good conversation, it was worth, it was worth the time and it's worth. So it's, if you want more on that, it's up there.
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A
I mean, I'm sitting today in a town, I live in a town of 500 people. I pastor a church of, you know, 70 or 80, just block away. I'm sitting in a 100 year old abandoned hardware store that we have turned into, we call it the Rural Renaissance. Okay. It's an art gallery, my son and I, David. And it's, it's everything and nothing at the same time. And so this is a town that is essentially, it's filled with wonderful souls, but it's a ghost town. And this is a town that essentially I would say was destroyed and its number one, industry, agriculture. But it was destroyed by combines and tractors. That's right, the Industrial Revolution. And so the question is, what kind of towns is AI going to decimate?
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B
Yes.
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A
In the future? Because it's promising a utopian outcome and it's producing a dystopian reality. And to the point. I mean, who knows where this is going, even this conversation. But I think about Elon Musk. Okay. Elon Musk. I read the biography by Walter Isaacson. Unbelievable story. And this. I read it before I. I read it before I'd heard of him. I didn't know about him. I bought it in an airport. It's a book that thick, which I would never buy, and if I bought it, I'd never read it. But I was already living here and I'm like, I got time. And so I just started reading that book. And this is way before he got in all the politics and all that stuff.
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B
Right, right.
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A
But what I. My summary of Elon Musk is that his entire life has been geared. This is my take. Has been geared around. It's like he saw the future of AI he saw that AI is going to destroy the human race and therefore we must preserve human consciousness on another planet.
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B
Right, right. He's been going to Mars his whole life.
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A
Amazingly, Mars. Mars is not a hobby. It's a survival. It's a prepper strategy.
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B
Right. Yes, indeed.
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A
For the end of the human race. And I think so. So again, he sees dystopian future and he's trying to create utopian. I don't know if you call it utopian, but yeah, yeah, it's some kind of future. Some kind of future. And so I was talking. I was in a conversation the other day. Well, I mean, I'd love to say more about AI And I wrote a memo to our team on our staff the other day about. About AI let's come back around to that. But I was talking to someone and I said, so we've got. If we have dystopian. And that's the interesting thing about movies today. When you and I were growing up, the movies all worked out by the end. I mean, we won. The thing got resolved and in our lifetime, that narratival structure has collapsed.
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B
Becomes less plausible. Yeah, that's so interesting.
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A
And the movies don't work out and they're dark.
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B
Especially about the future. The artists who are like the canaries in the coal mine of human beings because they have, like, more finely tuned sensitivity than any other person. That's something that is true about Most artists, when they imagine the future, they cannot. They cannot figure out how to give you a hopeful account. I mean, maybe there's one or two exceptions, but it's. It's very dystopian. What? You kind of let an artist loose on the direction we're going and they're like, oh, it doesn't look good. And it resonates. Right? Yeah.
- [29:11]
A
No, and. And so there's. I guess I was, in my conversation, I'm like, so what if there's dystopian and there's utopian? What else is there? Is there something in the middle of that? Because I hate middle. Middle compromise ways. I don't buy that. But what is the alternative? Is there another Ian word? Utopian? Dystopian? Is there another Ian? And I thought, what if it's Christian? Really? Really. Right. What if it's Jesus? What would it mean for that to be the word?
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B
Well, you sound like you read my last book, which I don't presume anyone has the time to read any given book, but this is my argument in my last book, which is called the Life We're Looking For.
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A
Yes.
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B
And it's. It's weirdly two books. And I think it's so weird that a lot of people haven't known what to make of it. And it has not sold very well. But the people who've read it, I've been very grateful for it.
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A
You had me from the vehicle assembly building. Come on.
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B
Ah, yeah. Yeah. Well, so on the one level, it's a book about technology and what it's doing to us as persons, but it's also a book about a movement that arose in the midst of the most impressive technological empire of its time. So our modern technology is built on three things, at least, but three big. There's three big foundation stones stacked on top of each other for modern technology. First is money, the second is machines, and the third is computation. So money is. Yeah, well, I don't need to expand on these, but the financial revolution, the industrial revolution, the computational or information revolution, are the stack on which we built our modern world. Rome, the Roman Empire, had all three in its own way, at its own time, and Caesar controlled them all. It was the first empire to use money in a really systematic way, because they had these huge armies that they had to pay. We get salary from the salt in which they paid them, but they quickly started minting coins to do that. So the Roman Empire is money. It's industrially very advanced, most advanced engineering in its part of the world, China Has a separate story. But the Romans were in the Mediterranean world, by far the most industrially advanced. And they had this information explosion because they conquered the Greek and Arab worlds, and all the libraries and all the knowledge of the Greek and Arab worlds became part of the Roman inheritance. So Rome was the technological. The first technological empire, I would argue, in the West. And it's presided over by someone who spoke in utopian terms and was spoken of in utopian terms. The son of God who is bringing peace to all the world through the good news that came into the world by virtue of his birth. That is an inscription in Priene in western Turkey that celebrates the birthday of the son of God, Augustus. It technically says Divius Filius, the divine son who has brought good news to the whole world. This is erected. I forget the exact date. It's around the time of the birth of Jesus or a little later. People are like, oh, a son of God has come into the world. He's given peace, he's given prosperity. And it was all built on technological power. At the same time, another human being is born, not in Rome, not to power, Never uses the technology even that's available to him. He doesn't use money in any meaningful way. He doesn't even write anything down, even write a book. Yes, he doesn't exactly. He doesn't even write a single thing down. One time he writes in the sand or in the dirt, we don't know what he wrote. And is put to death by the agents of the other son of God. And then, against all expectation, this little movement of people starts to arise in the colonial cities of the Roman Empire who treat each other like people in what was, by the way, a very dehumanizing world. So it was utopia. If you were like Cicero or later people, perhaps if you were an elite and you sat at the top of this economic, industrial, military power, it was a pretty good place to be. A man, specifically of a certain kind. Everyone else, all women, most ordinary men, young people, lived under conditions of incredible violation of violence that were tolerated by the Roman world, had no hope of something different. And in the midst of that arises this community who treat everyone as a brother or a sister, who relate to each other under conditions of peace, who honor each other, who care for the poor, who care for the vulnerable, who rescue the children abandoned on the trash heaps because they don't fit the technological society's vision of a useful person. And this community, over 300 years, slowly, but not that slowly, 30% per decade, I think, is Rodney Stark's estimate for 300 years, just gradually grows until half the Empire believes that their story is better than Augustus's story. And I just see that as our moment in every place that especially in the places where the Empire has swept through, as it has in the town that you're living in and with its imperative of economic efficiency has leveled, destroyed the conditions for community. And that's about to happen with AI in a fresh way, not just in our rural communities, but in our suburbs and our cities. We need a group of people who just are like, you know, the Son of God, so called, is doing his thing, but we're worshiping a different kind of Son of God and we have a different quality of relationships and relationship to place. And we are here to love God where we are, with the people we're given. And I think it can happen again that over several hundred years a renewal movement appears that absolutely changes the direction this all goes. So that's my very genuine hope in a moment that I think when you look toward the future without the hope of Jesus, there is nothing but dystopia, in my view. But man, Jesus changes everything. When you imagine when you look at what happened to Rome, which the empire fell, but the story of humanity did not end. And the story of beneficial humanity, of a better way of being human, was just getting started when Rome falls in the 4th century or so. So that's my framing for it.
- [36:10]
A
Yeah, that's helpful. As history really is cyclical, right? It's.
- [36:19]
B
Well, there's risings and fallings of the historical actors, with the exception. I mean, there's cyclical things in the history of the Church too. The Church is a historical actor and it fails and falls in certain ways. In another way, though, like, the redemptive story just keeps broadening and expanding. And like there's this one thing in history that is actually heading towards redemption and it's the called out people of God living in the midst of the world. Everything else is cycles, rising, incarnation.
- [36:54]
A
That's not in between dystopian and utopian. It's on another planet.
- [36:58]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But you know, the whole technological world is telling you you need to be discarnate. It's like, oh, bodies so inconvenient, you know, so much toil and trouble. And the most radical thing in this technological world will be to believe bodies are good. The human condition, with all its limitations, is actually a path to the best that we can possibly know as we are filled by and renewed by the spirit of that raised Jesus from the dead. Like, this is the best time to be like, on. We're like in. On the ground floor of the same kind of revolution and reform that the first Christians were able without even planning it or intending it to unleash in the Roman Empire.
- [37:43]
A
Well, and that's the thing, you know, for me with AI and I'm trying to learn to understand. And I don't want to be afraid. We don't want to be led by fear. We want to move by faith, which is toward love. And fear is just moving us toward protection.
- [38:04]
B
Yes, exactly, exactly.
- [38:06]
A
Self protection. And so I was writing to some of our team the other day about AI because it's now on the ground. And I said, you know, I'm seeing a sequence. I'm going to test this by you. A progression. So you start off with AI as like an advanced super research tool. It's Google on steroids. It will. It will just. It's just like a super calculator, which we will all affirm. Like, calculators are good. But then where it will go next, number two is it becomes wisdom. Like, you're asking it questions like you would pray, help me to understand what is wise here among you. Dump all your data into it. You say, what. What would you do? I mean, people have counselors that are essentially robots. And then the third thing it moves toward is it's like a cheat code for creativity, for creation. That's a godlike thing.
- [39:25]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [39:25]
A
It will create art for you. It will create music for you. We'll write a song about your grandmother with melody. It will write a book for you. It will write your term paper. That this is. This is a cheat code. Right. And really what you're trying to gain in that is power, an advantage. And people are afraid. They're like, well, if we don't use AI, we're going to be left behind.
- [39:56]
B
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
- [39:59]
A
And the fourth thing, and this is what my concern is, is all of this is inexorably moving toward AI as God, little G God. And we are essentially inquiring of the God at every step of the way. What do you think about that?
- [40:23]
B
I think it's well put. I don't know. The only thing I might add is at some point, it's somewhere in the middle of that before it gets to God, which is ultimately being beyond us, that we end up serving rather than it serving us. But somewhere in the middle of that is agent. I think that's serving the creation stage. This is the great intoxication. People Feel they can get this. This thing to do things on their behalf. And it is your angel work while they're asleep and so forth. Yeah, well, this is the natural. Like, we've seen this story many, many times when human beings turn to some aspect of the work of their hands, always shrouded in mystery. So when you went to visit the Temple of Athena, it wasn't like you walked in. It was like, all white marble and brightly floodlit. Like, you sort of walked in. There was incense, there was smoke, it was shadowy. There's music. There may be hallucinogenic substances in the air. And you're like, whoa, I'm in the presence of real power now. Like, I've gotten in touch with the thing that can move the world in my favor. And that's what idols do. So they always rely on a bit of deception. So AI is deceiving because, in fact, it doesn't care about you. It springs into existence when you prompt it. It disappears as soon as it issues its continuation. It's not there for you, except in the sense that you can summon it anytime. But the illusion, it relies on illusion. And the just consistent biblical judgment on this is, well, it may work at first, but eventually it's going to ask you to sacrifice things you shouldn't be asked to sacrifice. And by the way, it's not going to deliver what it promised.
- [42:03]
A
Well, your agency, number one among them.
- [42:05]
B
Yeah, you are well, but all the way back, right to your own apprehension of the world, which is the knowledge we seek. And there's a place for increasing our knowledge, your own wisdom. There's a place for going to others for wisdom, your own creativity, your own agency, but ultimately your relationship to your creator, like, who made me? Who am I most responsible to? And AI at every step will seem like an easier solution everywhere. An easier everywhere solution that in the short run will be more effective at the cost of undermining your capacity to ever be a person of wisdom, a person of creativity or agency, let alone a person in relationship to God.
- [42:49]
A
For instance, gps, okay, you're never lost, but you don't know how to get
- [42:55]
B
anywhere or you're always lost. It's hard to tell the difference. Like, in some ways, you're never lost. But another way, you never know where you are.
- [43:01]
A
Yeah, you don't know where you are. You don't know how to get anywhere. Here's a term I learned from you, and I know we got to start wrapping up. A term I learned from you that I feel like is it. Just put it Just clicked for me. You use the term parasocial relationships.
- [43:19]
B
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [43:20]
A
And what I'm wondering, is that another name for idolatry?
- [43:25]
B
Ah, yeah, yeah.
- [43:28]
A
Parasocial relationship.
- [43:30]
B
Parasocial. There's not, of course, I didn't coin it, but I do use it a lot because I think it's so right on. It's relationships that do not have. That really are not real embodied, reciprocal connections between people born on sacrificial love, but instead are a feeling of being connected through media, with celebrities, with your friends on Facebook who you never talk to, but you watch their updates. But ultimately, of course, with AI which will present itself as a very social being ready to talk to you anytime about anything you want. Yeah, We've been training for this for 10 plus years with social media. And it's just that now we're going to have. You're going to have a friend who's way better at being a friend than any of your real friends. You're going to have celebrities to follow who are more interesting than even our human celebrities. And we're going to get caught up in that if we don't choose otherwise. The only thing I'd say, JD is
- [44:31]
A
this is the essence of idolatry, is it not?
- [44:34]
B
Yes, yes, Certainly at the limit where you say, this is the thing that saves me. This is the thing that really knows and loves me. This is the thing that gives me power in the world. All the things that only God can do for you. Yeah. So we've seen this story many, many times. It's hard for us to remember how powerful the ancient gods seemed to people because we don't see them that way now because we live on the other side of demythologizing. But what we need is a massive demythologizing of AI that says this is never going to serve well as a God or as a friend or as a pastor. It has its uses because it's a map of everything human beings have ever done. And some of the things we've done and learned are amazing to be able to access. And it's a beautiful way to kind of access it. But we've got to go through a profound demythologization just in the way that the Roman Empire's gods and goddesses had to be stripped of their power to compel human attention and worship and become like nice art. You're like, that's actually quite an impressive statue of Zeus, but not something you should worship. And we need to somehow get to a point as a society where we say AI is impressive because it reflects the best as well as worst of humanity and we can use it in interesting ways. But boy, don't entrust yourself to it.
- [45:52]
A
Coming back around to the generational thing, I mean, you've noticed probably this year at all these different commencements of all these schools and the.
- [46:00]
B
Everyone's booing AI this year, they're boo.
- [46:03]
A
The students are seeing any reference.
- [46:07]
B
So this is, this is interesting, J.D. this is the. Certainly in you're in my lifetimes, the first major technological advance that most people explicitly do not want, that is they would rather it not happen. And the younger you are, the more suspicious you are of it. Well, I actually should not say that it's complex, but there is some optimism in certain ways. But what we're seeing is that we've had a narrative, by the way, that, and you kind of alluded to this earlier, that every new technology, like the old people are like, oh, this is terrible. And young people are like, well, this is just the way the world is. That is not, it's not happening with social media. So what I'm not sure about attitudes on AI, I don't want to claim anything that I'm not sure about. What I do know is, is the fastest declining users of social media are so called Gen Z and Gen Alpha. They are withdrawing from social media. They're giving up on it, they don't like it, they wish it were not invented. And so much resistance to AI is coming from the youngest, earliest stage adults in our world. So this story is not finished. It does not have to progress in the way you kind of linearly extrapolate it. So much depends on what we kind of ask it to do and don't ask it to do and whether we ask it to be an idol or just an instrument. And I really think it's still up in the air. But I'll tell you, the communities of faith, that is people who have an ultimate allegiance to something bigger than this world, which unfortunately most people building this technology cannot conceive of something beyond this world. They are the linchpin. Yeah, Mars, I suppose they're the linchpin in a movement of redefinition that would be better for the whole human race. I mean, the stakes are amazingly high and I'm actually strangely hopeful at this point.
- [47:59]
A
Well, here's. I'll close with this. This is my son David and I, who's, you know, 25 now, millennial baby. We're riding down the road a lot of times and we're somewhere between despair and joy. And one of us will say this phrase, it's, it's kind of like right off the lips of Gandalf Twin Towers Tolkien. One will say the battle for Helm's Deep is over. And the other will say, and the battle for Middle Earth just begun. Like that's a better story.
- [48:43]
B
Yes, yes.
- [48:44]
A
Take that, Elon. Well, thank you.
- [48:49]
B
We've got a better story.
- [48:50]
A
It's good. We got a better story. Well, thank you, Andy. We're so looking forward to new room and I'm already seeing the mind blown emojis just popping up everywhere. And thanks for being my friend and for, for the time today and everybody who's been a part of this. We're going to put references to the things that were lifted up in the, in the notes and yeah, thanks for joining us for this wake up call conversation. It's been a, a little bit different one. I have loved it. And we'll see you on the field for The Awakening. I'm J.D.
- [49:37]
B
wall with Andy Crouch.