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Egalitarian Human Futures in the wake of AI: Social Synecdoche

In this series of two posts, I’ll equip you with a simple but distinctive set of concepts that can help us think and talk about spiritual egalitarianism. This kind of conceptualization is urgently important in a time when the development of AI systems can increasingly take on leadership and management functions in society. This post will articulate a concept of social synecdoche and why it is especially relevant now, in thinking about human-AI societies. The next post will apply it to a question of church governance today, in an illustrative way.

Our thoughts here will center on a socially and sociologically important concept called synecdoche. Here are two examples of it at work:

When a Pope acts, in some meaningful sense, the Church acts.

When a President acts, in some meaningful sense, the nation acts.

Both sentences illustrate social synecdoche at work: it is the representation of a social whole by a single person who is a part of it. The indefinitely expansive use of this mode of group identity is what will define the term ‘axial consciousness’ in my usage. I use the terms “axial age” and “axial consciousness” to define a substantial shift in human history, that is marked by the emergence of the slave machines that we call civilization. By focusing attention on a figure who could, at least in principle, unify a human group of any size in themselves, ancient civilizations created increasingly expansive governments, eventually including a variety of warring empires.

My usage of the term “axial” provides an alternative way of framing these big history discussions about AI and ancient human history. It invites comparison (and contrast) with Ilia Delio’s more standard usage of axial language in Re-enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion.

Insofar as we are psychologically, socially, and somatically embedded in large social bodies today, it is substantially through the sympathetic “social magic” of synecdoche. Both then and now, we have access to this axial mode of consciousness whenever we identify with a representative of an organized group agent, and thereby identify with it. At the same time, we are also able to slip out of this mode and become increasingly atomized in our experience of the world.

A Visceral Connection with the Whole

For example, when we feel that leaders or a group have betrayed us so deeply that we are no longer a part of it (that it has left us), we experience a kind of atomized consciousness that is the opposite of axial consciousness. This process is often experienced as a painful loss of identity, a confusion about who we are, precisely because we substantially find our identities in this kind of group through representation.

This capacity is rooted in a deep analogy between a personal body and a social body, and this analogy is not only conceptual but also physiological: when our nation is attacked, we feel attacked, and when something happens to our leader, we spontaneously identify with them as a part of the group they represent. Social synecdoche is therefore part of the way we reify social bodies. Reifying a social body is what we do when we make a country or Church into a thing, through group psychology processes that are consciously experienced as synecdoche: the representation of the whole by a part.

Synecdoche and Representative Governments

This notion of social synecdoche can help us notice new things and reframe familiar discussions in interesting ways. For example, how does social synecdoche relate to present debates about representative democracy vs autocracy? Representative government refines and extends this type synecdoche, articulating it at more intermediate scales in terms of space (districts, representing smaller areas), time (limited terms, representing a people for an explicit time) and types of authority (separations of powers, representing us in our different social functions).

This can create a more flexible social body, in certain contexts, because identification is distributed in ways that give the social body more points of articulation and therefore degrees of freedom and potential for accountability. For all of this articulation, representative government remains axial, just more fully articulated. If it weren’t axial in this sense, representative government wouldn’t reach social scale in the first place.

So sociologically and socially, we are still very much in the axial age, even in highly articulated representative governments. In a real sense, representative government is an intensification of and deepening articulation of axial consciousness; it responds to the authoritarianism of a single representative by dramatically multiplying representation.

Synecdoche and the Axial Age

Ever since social synecdoche facilitated the first expanding slave machines, there has been a sometimes intense tug-of-war between atomized consciousness and axial consciousness. This effort to escape axial social bodies through individuation has always been a feature of the axial experience, often because axial group agents are routinely capricious and cruel and unjust. For example, our first known legal code, the Code of Ur-Nammu, bears witness to the ways in which a legal representative of the axial social body incentivized the recuperation of slaves who desperately tried to individuate:

If a slave escapes from the city limits, and someone returns him, the owner shall pay two shekels to the one who returned him.

For all of the privation involved in privateness, some people throughout the axial period have also attempted various forms of internal immigration (into the spirit or mind) as a means of escape. Some, but certainly not all, axial spirituality can be understood in these terms. The Hebrew prophetic tradition, for example, does not engage generally in internal escapism, but instead seeks to hold axial social bodies to account, especially by holding their representatives accountable.

Photo by Frederico Beccari from unsplash.com

Social Synedocque in the Age of AI

Our long history as axial beings suggests that we will probably stay like this, even as we build the technology that will enable us to make AI Presidents and Kings. It seems possible that we will have AI systems that can be better than humans at fulfilling the office of President before we have AI systems that are better than us at plumbing or firefighting. In part this is because the bar for good political leadership is especially low, and in part it reflects the relative ease of automating a wide range of creative, social and analytical work through advanced text generation systems. If this sounds absurd, I’d recommend getting caught up on the developments with GPT-3 and similar systems. You can go to openai.com and try it out if you like.

How hard would it be for an AI system to more faithfully or reliably represent your nation or church or city or ward than the current ones? Suppose it can listen and synthesize information well, identify solutions that can satisfy various stakeholders, and build trust by behaving in a reliable, honest and trustworthy way. And suppose it never runs the risk of sexually molesting someone in your group. By almost any instrumental measure, meaning an external and non-experience-focused measure of its ability to achieve a goal, I think that we may well have systems that do better than a person within a generation. We might also envision a human President who runs on a platform of just approving the decisions of some AI system, or a President who does this secretly.

In such a context, as with any other case where AI systems outperform humans, human agents will come to seem like needless interlopers who only make things worse; it will seem that AI has ascended to its rightful throne.

A Call to Egalitarianism

But this precisely raises the central point I’d like to make:

In that world, humans become interlopers only insofar as our goals are merely instrumental. That is to say, this is the rightful place of AI only insofar as we conceive of leadership merely as a matter of receiving inputs (public feedback, polling data, intelligence briefings) and generating outputs (a political platform, strategy, public communications, and the resultant legitimation structure rooted in social trust and identification).

This scenario highlights the limits of instrumentality itself. Hence, instead of having merely instrumental goals for governance, I believe that we urgently need to treat all humans as image-bearers, as true ends in themselves, as Creation’s priests.

A range of scholarship has highlighted the basic connection between image-bearing and the governance functions of priests and kings in the religions of the Ancient Near East. Image-bearing is, then, very early language for social synecdoche. In an axial age context, which was and is our context, the notion that all of humanity bears God’s image remains a challenging and deeply egalitarian response to the problem of concentrated power that results from social synecdoche. That is what I’ll turn to in the next post.

Daniel Heck is a Pastor at Central Vineyard Church in Columbus, OH. His work focuses on immigrant and refugee support, spiritual direction, and training people of all ages how to follow the teachings of Jesus. He is the author of According to Folly, founder of Tattered Books, and writes regularly on Medium: https://medium.com/@danheck

AIT Podcast Episode 2: AI Warfare

Our second episode from the AI Theology Podcast just came out! Are you having trouble understanding what’s been going on in technology in warfare? Have you ever thought about what the church could do about wars like the one in Ukraine right now? Don’t miss out and listen to a fact based conversation on these topics. Listen to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. Check out here all our references on this episode.

Ukraine government using Clearview for facial recognition – click here

Russia using FindClone for facial recognition – click here

Use of deepfakes to mimic the president of Ukraine (Volodymyr Zelensky), and a deepfake of Putin declaring peace to Ukraine – click here

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a rule that criminalizes reporting that contradicts the Russian government’s version of events – click here

Fact vs Fiction about the war (document from the US government) – click here

Book “Robot Theology: Old questions through new media” from Joshua Smith – click here

Russion drone Lanset – click here

Race for AI supremacy – click here

Just War Theory – click here

Donate here

Make sure to share with family and friends to spread information.

Expanding the Vision for the Life We Are Looking For

In my previous post, I highlighted the important contributions Andy Crouch’s The Life We’re Looking For makes to the dialogue between faith and technology. Using compelling examples, the author argues for returning to the primacy of face-to-face human relationships in a world of disconnection driven by techno-capitalism. This is a powerful and necessary reminder that is worth repeating here.

I would be remiss, however, if I limited my review to this point. In part 2, I dive into the areas where Andy Crouch’s book fell short in expanding this conversation. By starting with a narrow definition of technology, the author missed an opportunity to rethink it and reshape it into a true ally of human flourishing. This may sound like a small tweak, but it makes all the difference. Given how pervasively emerging technologies inhabit our current ecosystem, a narrow definition is bound to lead to unsustainable solutions.

Defining What Technology Is

Andy Crouch does a good job identifying the insidious erosion techno-capitalism is exerting in society. It is unfortunate, however, that he equates technology with techno-capitalism. They are not the same thing. For example, the Internet is a great example of technology. The process of turning it into profit by large Silicon Valley companies is techno-capitalism. The first created a new environment for the free flow of information that connected the world. The second exploited this connection to maximize profit.

Just because our current encounter with technology is mostly mediated by techno-capitalism does not mean the two are the same. This may seem like a small distinction, but it is an important one in the dialogue between faith and technology. If technology is techno-capitalism, then the role of faith will often be one of resistance. While this role is important and necessary, limiting faith to a posture of resistance misses the opportunity to imagine ways in which technology can lead to flourishing.

While Andy provided a few examples of technology enhancing one’s humanity, I finished the book with the impression that his alternative vision was really a turn away from screens and toward more embodied forms of community. This argument, however, undermines and ignores the transformative ways in which technologies (including those mediated through techno-capitalism) have expanded and connected our flourishing. Hence, his narrow view of technology closed the door to how it can contribute to the good.

Image by Bruno /Germany from Pixabay

Lost Connection with Nature

The book’s subtitle, Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World, informs us upfront that the book is about valuing relationships. Implied in that view is an anthropocentric view of relationships, focusing on communion between humans. This can be often assumed and taken for granted, but it becomes problematic in the dialogue of faith and technology.

Humans also have an intricate and visceral relationship to nature, both our environment and other species of life. Technology has often, maybe always, been a means of moving us beyond the limitations of nature. From our early ancestors, we can find traces of tool-making indicating the human drive to impact our environment toward the survival and flourishing of our species. The sheer existence of nearly 8 billion of us is a testament to the success of this strategy. We became our ancestors’ dreams, albeit at a great cost to the earth. Given technology’s central role in this progression, one cannot speak of it and ignore how it has transformed our relationship with nature.

While we may have built our towering civilizations, we still feel like we were kicked out of the garden. While techno-capitalism may have separated us from one another, technology itself has separated us from the dust from which we came. The work of re-imagining technology then must include in its ethos a purposeful return to nature. It does not mean necessarily forsaking devices and going back to a primal lifestyle, but it does mean re-thinking technology in a way that not only optimizes the flourishing of all life.

In a time of climate crisis, this work becomes all the more important. Hence, in my perspective, it must be present in any discussion of faith and technology. Unfortunately, there was nothing in Andy’s book to address this issue.

Image by 0fjd125gk87 from Pixabay

Limited Christian Imagination

Lastly, Andy Crouch’s book missed the mark by appealing little to the rich Christian imagination. Opting for a narrow focus on selected New Testament texts, the author ignored a wealth of Christian tradition on the topic of technology. That includes the biblical books of Genesis and Isaiah, as well as writers like Francis Bacon, Jacques Ellul, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Illia Deo. Crouch’s discussion could have been greatly enriched by interacting with them–not necessarily agreeing or propagating their perspective, but at least using them as conversation partners in building a 21st-century vision for technology.

Starting with a narrow view of technology and engaging with a limited range of Christian tradition inevitably led to a constricted view of what Christian community can look like in a technological age. The result becomes a failure of imagination, one that we can no longer afford to have where growing techno-capitalism accelerates planetary degradation. As much as a return to household and community can restore and improve human relationships, it does not address our disconnection from nature. Furthermore, it ignores our call to be co-creators with God for a flourishing future.

As an alternative, one does not need to look too far within the Bible itself to find a powerful metaphor to catalyze Christian imagination. In the 11th chapter of Isaiah, the prophet imagines a world where the wolf will live with the lamb and the infant will play near the cobra’s den. The prophet’s multiple images speak of a nature restored from strife to peace, from languishing to flourishing. If we want to inspire a Christian vision for technology in our time, that is a good place to start.

Working for a Better Future: Sustainable AI and Gender Equality

At our February AI Theology Advisory Board meeting, Ana Catarina De Alencar joined us to discuss her research on sustainable AI and gender equality, as well as how she integrates her faith and work as a lawyer specializing in data protection. In Part 1 below, she describes her research on the importance of gender equality as we strive for AI sustainability.

Elias: Ana, thank you for joining us today. Why don’t you start by telling us a little about yourself and about your involvement with law and AI.

Ana: Thank you, Elias, for the invitation. It’s very nice to be with you today. I am a lawyer in a big law firm here in Brazil. I work with many startups on topics related to technology. Today I specialize in data protection law. This is a very recent topic for corporations in Brazil. They are learning how to adjust and adapt to these new laws designed to protect people’s data. We consult with them and provide legal opinions about these kinds of topics. I’m also a professor. I have a master’s degree in philosophy of law, and I teach in this field.

Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels.com

In my legal work, I engage many controversial topics involving data protection and AI ethics. For example, I have a client who wants to implement a facial recognition system that can be used for children and teenagers. From the legal point of view, it can be a considerable risk to privacy even when we see a lot of favorable points that this type of technology can provide. It also can be very challenging to balance the ethical perspective with the benefits that our clients see in certain technologies.

Gender Equality and Sustainable AI

Elias: Thank you. There’s so much already in what you shared. We could have a lot to talk about with facial recognition, but we’ll hold off on that for now. I’d like to talk first about the paper you presented at the conference where we met. It was a virtual conference on sustainable AI, and you presented a paper on gender equality. Can you summarize that paper and add anything else you want to say about that connection between gender equality and sustainable AI?

Ana: This paper came out of research I was doing for Women’s Day, which is celebrated internationally. I was thinking about how I could build something uniting this day specifically and the topic of AI, and the research became broader and broader. I realized that it had something to do with the sustainability issue.

Sustainability and A Trans-Generational Point of View

When we think of AI and gender, often we don’t think with a trans-generational point of view. We fail to realize that interests in the past can impact interests in the future. Yet, that is what is happening with AI when we think about gender. The paper I presented asks how current technology impacts future generations of women.

The technology offered in the market is biased in a way that creates a less favorable context for women in generations to come. For example, when a natural language processing system sorts resumes, often it selects resumes in a way that favors men more than women. Another example is when we personalize AI systems as women or as men, which generates or perpetuates certain ideas about women. Watson from IBM is a powerful tool for business, and we personalize it as a man. Alexa is a tool for helping you out with your day-by-day routine, and we personalize it as a woman. It creates the idea that maybe women are servile, just for supporting society in lower tasks, so to speak. I explored other examples in the paper as well.

All of these things together are making AI technology biased and creating ideas about women that can have a negative impact on future generations. It creates a less favorable situation for women in the future.

Reinforcing and Amplifying Bias

Levi: I’m curious if you could give an example of what the intergenerational impact looks like specifically. In the United States, racial disparities persist across generations. Often it is because, for instance, if you’re a Black American, you have a harder time getting high-paying jobs. Then your children won’t be able to go to the best schools, and they will also have a harder time getting high-paying jobs. But it seems to be different with women, because their children may be women or men. So I wonder if you can give an example of what you mean with this intergenerational bias.

Ana: We don’t have concrete examples yet to show that future impact. However, we can imagine how it would shape future generations. Say we use some kind of technology now that reinforces biases–for example, a system for recruiting people that lowers resumes mentioning the word ‘women,’ ‘women’s college,’ or something feminine. Or a system which includes characterization of words related to women–for instance, the word ‘cook’ is related to women, ‘children’ is related to women. If we use these technologies in a broad sense, we are going to reinforce some biases already existing in our society, and we are going to amplify them for future generations. These biases become normal for everybody now and into the future. It becomes more systemic.

Racial Bias

You can use this same thinking for the racial bias, too. When you use these apps and collect data, it reinforces systemic biases about race. That’s why we have to think ethically about AI, not only legally, because we have to build some kind of control in these applications to be sure they do not reinforce and amplify what is already really bad in our society for the future.

Levi: There’s actually a really famous case that illustrates this from Harvard Business students. Black students and Asian students sent their applications out for job interviews, and then they sent out a second application where they had whitewashed it. They removed things on their CV that were coded with with their race–for instance, being the president of the Chinese Student Association or president of the Black Student Union, or even specific sports that are racially coded. They found that when they whitewashed their applications, even though they removed all of these accomplishments, they got significantly higher callbacks.

Elias: I have two daughters, ages 12 and 10. If AI tells them that they’re going to be more like Alexa, not Watson, it influences their possibilities. That is intergenerational, because we are building a society for them. I appreciated the paper you presented, Ana, because AI does have an intergenerational impact.

In Part 2 we will continue the conversation with Ana Catarina De Alencar and explore the way she thinks about faith and her work.

The Life We Are Looking For: Crouch’s Antidote to Techno-Isolation

How is technology reshaping human relationships? This is the central question explored in Andy Crouch’s latest book: The Life We Are All Looking For. His compelling vision and engaging writing style are able to bring a complex subject such as technology into a comprehensive vision of Christian community. This is in itself no small feat. Sitting within a genre that often limits itself to “do’s” and “don’ts” with the screen, Crouch dives deeper and in that is able to spark a dialogue. With that said, the book also fell short in significant areas leaving me wanting more.

As a content creator at the intersection of faith and technology, I am compelled to respond. Andy Crouch’s book called for more than a review. It called for robust engagement. That is what I’ll attempt to do in two blogs. In this first one, I’ll highlight the many ways in which the book elevated and moved forward the dialogue about technology’s impact on the Christian community. In the second, I’ll address the areas in which one can build on what he started. It will not be a critique per se but an attempt to expand the dialogue.

Before you move forward, let me make it clear: the book is worth your time. It kicks off the conversation within the evangelical community and it may even reach other corners of the Christian household. While reading the book is no requirement to understand the blog, it will certainly help evaluate its content. You might even arrive at different conclusions than I did.

With no further ado, let me dive into the three main gifts this book brings to the Christian community

Of Bikes and Planes

By now, we have all (hopefully) sensed how technology can impair human flourishing. Just consider the sense of guilt and dread after spending countless hours staring at a brainless social media stream accompanied by a royal neck ache from looking down for so long. Yet, other times, we are also thankful for how it expands our abilities. Crouch helps us understand this paradox by comparing planes with bicycles.

Riding a bicycle expands our mobility while still requiring physical effort from us. It reminds me of a blog I wrote a while back reflecting on the spirituality of e-bikes. It certainly helps us get to a destination faster while also being an excellent workout. In this way, the author sees it as a technology that augments rather than detracts from our humanity.

This is a sharp contrast to flying on a plane where the constricted space and oppressive air pressure make the experience much less pleasant. Not only there is no effort in the movement but a clear constriction in our health even if it allows us to reach our destinations much faster. While on board a plane, our humanity is diminished even if only for a few hours.

Superpower and Magic

In doing so, Andy is not advocating we forsake plane rides for bikes. He is only highlighting the point of the trade-offs technologies force us to make. The author shows us that technology often gives us what he describes as superpowers – an ability to do things with little to no effort. Andy also uses allusions to magic and alchemy to describe the dominant ethos of for-profit technology endeavors.

Photo by Rhett Wesley on Unsplash

It is like magic because most of us have no clue about how it works. We simply trust that when we press a button, there will be an expected outcome. Oftentimes we expect it to be instantaneous. It is like alchemy because, technology is often portrayed as the silver bullet to all our problems – the recipe for wealth and longevity.

While this affects our physical health in many ways, the author wants to focus on its impact on relationships. This is where, screen technologies more specifically, have done the most damage. As humans, we are wired to be recognized by another face. Often times this crucial exchange of glances is being robbed by a screen or another device that cries for our attention. In short, the dominance of technology in our lives is empoverishing our most cherished relationships. It is even redefining intimacy.

Eloquent Critique of Techno-Capitalism

Chapter 6 dives into the underbelly of techno-capitalism and how it is shaping us into machines. That chapter is worth the book price and then some. Using compelling examples and persuasive arguments, Andy Crouch exposes how a highly transactional society sees no value in those who have little or nothing to transact with. That includes the poor, the aging, the differently-abled, and others who are considered “useless.” Instead, he proposes a society where those with little or nothing to offer should be at the center. That in turn will free us all from our slavery to usefulness.

Throughout the work, Andy delivers strong affirmations of real relationships, forged in the fire of daily living with all its beauty, repetitiveness, and conflict. This vision runs counter to the American dream of financial independence, pointing instead to the messiness of communal interdependence. He advocates for co-housing arrangements with all the inconveniences of personalities rubbing against each other in tight spaces.

In short, he calls us to robust Christian communalism in the midst of a lonely western society. His vision of Christian community, inspired in the New Testament early church, centers on the household. He defines it as small groups that transcend the nuclear family but are still small enough so that everyone is deeply seen and known. Such arrangement goes against the transactional setup of capitalistic societies and alleviates the constant financial struggle to make a living. It is both a spiritual and an economic act of resistance.

Conclusion

Andy Crouch contributes to and expands the dialogue by connecting devices to oppressive economic systems that both diminish human flourishing and propagate a magical view of technology. Through powerful analogies, relatable examples, and fluid writing, he accomplishes all that in a little less than 180 pages.

The review could end here on a positive note but I would be remiss. Unfortunately, Andy Crouch’s assessment of technology had significant gaps that significantly narrowed the scope of the problem. Because of this narrowed scope, his response also fell short by lacking a comprehensive vision to the “how shall we then live?” question. Given the daunting challenges of this technological age, our response and vision of technology must be commensurate with its complexity. This is what I will turn to in the next blog.

Creators, Stewards and the Telos of Technology

This is the fourth and final part of our excellent discussion from the January Advisory Board meeting, where we explored the question of whether we live in a technological age. In Part 1 we addressed the idea of a technological age, and in Part 2 we discussed the telos of technology and the value of work. In Part 3 we explored the value of play. In Part 4, we continue the conversation by asking how our role as creators and stewards shapes the telos of technology.

Wen: My personal theology of technology is grounded in us being creators. We are made in God’s image, and God is a creator. So we are all mini creators. That kind of echoes what Micah said. I also think we’re commanded to steward our resources. So going back to the original question that you raise – what is the telos of technology – I see us as creators and stewards. That’s one way to frame a telos of technology.

Love of God and Love of Neighbor

Another way to frame it is very idealistic. If you look at the Bible, Jesus actually tells us the greatest commandment. Love of God and love of neighbor (Matthew 22:37-40). So is there a way we could run all types of technology, product, visions, and development, through that filter? Does a certain technology help us to love and serve our neighbor? And does this technology honor God?

I know that’s idealistic. I’m not expecting all of US capitalism, all companies, to adopt that framework. But from a biblical perspective, we can ask about the telos of technology and the human telos. Do all of our actions for creating and stewarding serve our neighbor or honor God?

Connecting Creators and Stewards to Smaller Goals

Maggie: As you described earlier, Elias, I also spent a lot of time wondering, “What am I doing?” I worked for a bank. I worked for Wall Street. I’m working for a management and consulting company now. But one of the things that I do in each job is really focusing on bringing a better world, a better life to my end-user.

A lot of times that comes into some pretty granular metrics. For instance, it used to take you two weeks to have this horrible conversation, because you had to pull data from six different places. Now, it will take you an hour to put the data together, and then whatever time it takes you to have the meeting. That is good stewardship! There is a concrete improvement in time saved.

So yes, there is a certain sense in which a broad biblical goal based on love of God and love of neighbor is idealistic. But people can make it more realistic within their context if they connect it to a smaller goal. If I can make one person’s life better, that does express love of neighbor.

Is Ethical Play Possible?

Elias: I want to raise another question, going back to what Micah said about play and what Wen said about our role as creators and stewards. Can we be both playful and good stewards? In other words, is ethical play possible? Can those things happen together? Usually, they do not go together. Often, playing means not worrying about what will happen. And part of being a good steward is almost like being the adult with a child who’s trying to play. “Think about your actions, stop doing that, don’t be so wasteful.” Is there a place there to engage in ethical play? In other words, can play actually help others?

Ben: I think the answer is “yes”. Going back to what Wen said, part of the great commandment is to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. That contains a foundational construct, which is that we love ourselves. If we draw these things together, we can think of it in terms of stewarding ourselves. By stewarding ourselves, we’re increasing our capacity to love ourselves and therefore raising our capacity to love God and neighbor. And I would argue that we increase our capacity by allowing ourselves to play.

Stewardship, Play, and the Church

We can apply this to the life of the church. I rail against cultural co-opting. That is, with every new technology, every new movement, the church asks how we can make it ours. That is really a dishonest conversation because we don’t really care about human flourishing so much as we care about butts in pews and dollars in plates. There’s a lot of focus on the institution of the church. So instead of increasing human flourishing, and increasing the stewardship of ourselves and others, we spend a lot of time trying to make sure that there’s institutional survival.

That’s the capitalist mindset. How do we maximize profit for our investors? In doing that, we iterate for the good of the institution, rather than the good of humanity.

To get away from that mindset, the church must ask: is this about human flourishing or about institutional flourishing? And that’s where I think the value of play is critical because it cuts across institutions. Organizations don’t play. People do. So if we can maintain the vignette of human flourishing through play, then it’s sort of a safeguard. Play helps us focus on human flourishing rather than on institutional survival.

Technology and the Modern Individual

Elias: Isabelle, do you have anything to add? We’d love to hear from you.

Isabelle: Well, from my perspective, as a humanities student, I’m studying a lot about the modern world and how the model modern individual is portrayed inside this world. You could say that the value of play is missing. The individual constantly needs to be efficient, constantly needs to be kind of like a machine. The individual can’t get it wrong. When he feels wrong, he can’t express it. And when he expresses, he’s shut down. And it’s really interesting to see how modernity is embedded in this discussion about technology.

Elias: Thank you, that’s great. I love when you bring something in because your perspective is so unique, and we need that in these conversations. That’s what I love about this group, so many different perspectives coming together.

Unfortunately, our time is up. This does feel like play to me, and I’m going to have to end our ability to play right now, which makes me sad. But thanks, everybody for being here. I look forward to next time.

The Value of Play and the Telos of Technology

We want to create things, and we want to create them with other people. And we want to connect over that. That’s the value of play.
Micah Redding

At our January Advisory Board meeting, we explored the question of whether we live in a technological age. In Part 1 we addressed the idea of a technological age, and in Part 2 we discussed the telos of technology and the value of work. In Part 3 below, we continue the conversation by exploring the telos of technology and the value of play.

Micah: I’ve been thinking about this in terms of our earlier discussion about the nature of technology. I kind of go with Andy Clark and David Chalmers, with the extended mind, extended cognition thesis. Technology, everything in our environment, we make it part of ourselves. An analogy is in the way birds use their environment to make nests. We all wrap our environment around us in some ways. Humans do this in a way that’s incredibly fluid and open-ended and flexible. And what are we doing? What is our telos for that? I think what we ultimately want is that we want to play. We want to create things, and we want to create them with other people. And we want to connect over that. That’s the value of play.

The Impulse to Play

You can look at all the negative impulses and drives in our society as sublimated versions of that impulse to play. We’re all trying to play some kind of game, and maybe we don’t allow ourselves to do that. So we twist it in some way to convince ourselves it’s serious. I think you see this, particularly in edge technological communities like those around web3 and NFTs. These kinds of spaces are heavily reviled right now in the larger culture, and they feel like they are essentially playing with friends. They’re creating something with friends, and they’re trying to connect with people.

We see the value of play across human history. Early humans were trying to survive, trying to overcome starvation, and so forth. But we didn’t just do that. We also made cave paintings. We also told stories and we put ourselves into those stories. And that’s increasingly what we’ve done through history. As soon as we create virtual worlds, we want to put ourselves in those worlds, because this is what it is to play. We keep putting ourselves into stories and pulling in people and our environment into them.

So I think that’s what we’re doing, ultimately. We play. That can be a good, healthy, and productive thing. From a Christian perspective, I would say we’re children of God, and children are made to play. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing. The value of play is central to the human telos. So one step toward a telos of technology is to just be more aware of the way play makes up the human telos.

Rock paintings from the Cave of Beasts (Gilf Kebir, Libyan Desert)
By Clemens Schmillen – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31399425

Free Play versus Structured Play

František: Is there a difference between game and play? Because for me, it appears that a game has some rules. Play itself doesn’t have to have rules. I’m just playing with something. But a game, if you want to take part in the game, you have to follow the rules. Like with traffic. The rules of traffic are basically the rules of a game. And if you want to play the game–be part of the traffic–you have to follow the rules. If you don’t follow them, you aren’t allowed to drive. You must leave the game. And we can extend this example to anything else.

Elias: I think we can talk about this as free play versus structured play. Free play or unstructured play is like a toddler just imagining his or her world. You try to make them play a game and they’re like, no, no, I’m going to change the rules. Gaming is a little more structured. It has rules. I think there’s room for both.

Wen: We can see a spectrum or a continuum of how much rigidity and structure and rules there are. But even when there are certain rules and constraints, they can still enhance the joy and flourishing of play. One example of that is when you let little kids play in a park. You don’t want them to run into the street, so you set boundaries. Putting rules or boundaries in place can enhance safety and creativity and the joy within play. I’ve done a lot of movement and improv games with adults in very rigid corporate organizations, trying to get them to play. You create boundaries, but then you say, within those boundaries, you can do or explore whatever you want, and express yourself however you feel.

The Infinite Game

Photo by freddie marriage on Unsplash

Micah: James Carse describes the concept of finite versus infinite games. In finite games, you play to win. Infinite games, you play to keep playing. And finite games are the kind we think of as rule-based. Infinite games are like what children play where now they’re playing house, now they’re pretending to be dogs, now they’re magicians. The play is constantly mutating and fluid.

The infinite game doesn’t have a rule set in the same way that the finite game does. But it does have a condition, which is that you don’t destroy the ability to keep playing. The value of play forms the basis of it. So when people get kicked out of the game, you find a way to bring them back in. You continually wrap people back in, you continually ensure that the basis of gameplay, the basis of play itself, remains. So there is no strict rule. But there is this premise, that we are all trying to keep playing, we’re going to make sure we don’t destroy the ability to play as we go.

AIT Podcast – Episode 1: Faith, AI and the Climate Crisis

Who doesn’t like to listen to podcasts? Listeners are growing by the day in the major platforms (Spotify, Google, Apple Play). But is there QUALITY content?

AI Theology presents to you a new podcast. Elias Kruger and Maggie Bender discuss the intersection between theology and technology in the budding world of AI and other emerging technologies. They bring the best from academy, industry and church together in a lively conversation. Join us and expand your mind with topics like ai ethics, ai for good, guest interviews and much more.

Here is episode 1: Faith, AI and the Climate Crisis

Elias Kruger and Maggie Bender discuss how AI and faith can help address in the climate crisis. We dive into some controversy here and how religion has not always been an ally in the battle for conservation. Yet, what are the opportunities for AI and faith to join forces in this daunting challenges. The conversation covers creation, worship, algorithms, optimization and recent efforts to save the Amazon.

After listening, don’t forget to hare wih friends and give us your feedback. Also don’t forget to rate the episodes on the podcast platforms.

What do you want to hear about next?

AI Theology’s Podcast

Who doesn’t like to listen to podcasts? Listeners are growing by the day in the major platforms (Spotify, Google, Apple Play). But is there QUALITY content?

We already have a small intro and our first episode on air, here’s how you can listen to us:

Elias Kruger and Maggie Bender will take you into thought-provoking dialogues. Get to know our hosts and what you, our listener, can expect from this podcast. Click on top of your favorite podcast platform:

After listening, don’t forget to hare wih friends and give us your feedback. Also don’t forget to rate the episodes on the podcast platforms.

What do you want to hear about next?

The Telos of Technology and the Value of Work

At our January Advisory Board meeting, we explored the question of whether we live in a technological age. You can find Part 1 of our conversation in this post. In Part 2 below, we discuss a new telos of technology.

Elias: I think we established, for the most part, that this is a technological age. Maybe we always have been in a technological age, but technology is definitely part of our lives now. Some of you started hinting at the idea that technology is pointing towards something. It is teleological, from the Greek word telos, meaning goal. Technology leads toward something. And I think Chardin saw technology leading into the Omega point, while Ellul saw it more as a perversion of a Christian eschaton. In his view, the Christian position was to resist and subvert it.

The question I have now is very broad. How do we forge a new vision, a new telos, for technology? Or maybe even, what would that telos be? We talked earlier about technology for the sake of capitalism or consumption. What would be a new telos for technology, and how would we forge this new vision?

No Overall Goal for Technology

František: I have a great colleague with a technical background and a longtime friend. I studied with him in Amsterdam. He’s now sort of an important person in a company developing AI. He’s a member of the team which programmed the AI to play poker. So he’s quite skillful in programming, and actually working on the development of AI. He’s developing amazing things.

I spoke with him about this telos question, “What is the aim of technology?” He said, “Well, there is no such thing as an overall goal.” The goal is to improve our program to be able to fight more sophisticated threats to our system. That’s what we are developing. So basically, there is no general telos of technology. There is only a narrow focus. There is just the goal to improve technology, that it gets better, and serves better the concrete purpose for which is built. It’s a very particular focus.

A Clash of Mentalities

I was very unhappy with this answer. After all, there must be some goal. And he said, “Well, that’s the business of theologians.” My friend said he doesn’t believe in anything. Not in theism, not even in atheism, he just doesn’t bother discussing it. So for him, there is no God, no goal, nothing. We’re just living our life. And we’re improving it. We are improving it step by step. He’s a well-studied, learned person, and he sees it like that. I’ve experienced the same thing during conversations with many of my friends who are working in technology on the technical or the business side.

So they would say, perhaps, there is no goal. That’s a clash of mentalities. We are trying to build a bridge between this technological type of thinking and the theological, philosophical perspective which intends to see the higher goal.

I don’t have a good argument. You can try to convince him that there is a higher goal, but he doesn’t believe in a higher goal. So I’m afraid that a lot of people developing technology do not see further than the next step of a particular piece of technology. And I’m afraid that here we are, getting close to the vision of the Brave New World, you know, the novel. People are improving technology on a particular stage, but they do not see the full picture. It is all about improving technology to the next step. There is no long-term thinking. Perhaps there are some visionaries, but this is at least my experience, which I’m afraid is quite broad in the field of technology.

The Human Telos of Technology

Maggie: I feel like that happens a lot from the developer side of technology. But at least the import within technology should be that you have some sort of product owner or product manager, that’s supposed to be supplying a vision. That person could start thinking about the goal of technology. I know a lot of times within technology, the product manager draws out the user story. So, “I’m a user. I want to ______, so that ______.” And it’s the so that which becomes the bigger element that’s drawn out. But that’s still at a very microscopic level. So yeah, there might be an intersection with the larger goal of technology, but I don’t think it really is used there very well.

Elias: Some of you who have known me for a long time know how much I have struggled with my job and finding meaning in what I do. And a lot of times it was exactly like you described, František. It was like, What am I doing here? What is this for? And I found, at least recently, this sweet spot where I found a lot of meaning in what I was doing. It wasn’t like I was changing people’s lives. But I found this passion to make things better and more efficient. When you are in a large corporation things can be so bureaucratic. And we were able to come in and say, I don’t care how you do it, we’re gonna accomplish this thing. And then you actually get it done. There is a sense of purpose and satisfaction in that alone.

The Creative Value of Work

I would venture to say that your friend, František, is actually doing creative work, co-creative work with God. He may not call it that. But there is something about bringing order out of chaos. I think even in a situation where the user or the developer is not aware, there might be goals happening there that we could appreciate and describe theologically.

For instance, going back to my experience, it might just be the phase that I’m in at work. But I’m feeling a lot of satisfaction in getting things done nowadays. Just simply getting things done. How can I put that theologically? I don’t know. Is that how God felt after creation? But there is something about accomplishing things. Now, if that’s all you do, obviously, eventually it just becomes meaningless. But there is something meaningful in the act of accomplishing a task.

Maggie: And just the sanctity of work too. Your friend, he’s working, he’s doing something. And in that type of work, even though it’s labor, I think it’s still a part of the human telos.

František: Yeah, I think so, even though he thinks that there is no human telos as such. And we keep having conversations, and he still sees something important in the conversations. So that means he still keeps coming to the conversation with philosophers and theologians, even though he sort of disregards their work because he sees it as not relevant to his work. But I think that’s a sign of hope in his heart.

What is Social Synecdoche?