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Category: Public Theology

Public theology explores how Christianity can work for the common good. It is concerned with translating religious virtues, ideals, and values into a secular framework for the public square.

4 Ways to Show up to the Generative AI Discussion in 2023

January often puts us in a posture of reflection. New beginnings invite us to adjust, ponder and experiment. For example, per my wife’s wise encouragement, I started drinking 2 liters (64 ounces) of water a day. I also joined the local gym and started to work out 3 times a week. These two actions, and assuming I stick with them, will pay dividends for my health for years to come. I could have done it anytime before but for some reason, it took the coming of a season of reflection to jumpstart in the right direction.

Yet, this is not a post about making new year’s resolutions. It is instead an invitation to reflect on how we can show up to the conversation around Generative AI as its imminent disruption becomes more apparent. Stable diffusion, Chat-GPT, Lensa, and LaMDA filled the news with possibilities, fear, and confusion last year. While these technologies were fermenting for years, 2022 was a “coming out” of sorts when the world realized the potential behind generative AI.

Text, image, and sound generators are now available to the masses, opening avenues for multiform novelties. It has not been without controversy, resistance, and caution. A wave of backlash is mounting which is part of the process when a disruptive innovation emerges. Even so, the only certainty is that things won’t be the same.

These developments only make this work all the more important which leads us to the following question: what will it take to be AI theologians in a time of deep disruption? For those struggling to relate with an increasingly out-of-touch term like theology, let me phrase this dilemma in a different manner: how do we engage with these new AI technologies to ensure they build (not destroy) a flourishing future? If the underlying fear is that AI will redefine our humanity, what would it take to steer them toward a future we all want to live in?

For those new to the area, it is important you immerse yourself with accurate and helpful information about AI technologies. Reading two articles that sound an alarm based on an ill-thought-out worst-case scenario is not a replacement for understanding. Social Media and the Internet in general are chock-full of these. They often lead to misinformation, confusion, and in some cases despair.

A better approach is to expose yourself to a broad array of sources. The implications of any new technology are very hard to predict. They hinge on many factors such as economic cycles, evolving social norms, legislation, and speed of adoption. Furthermore, applications like generative AI will have the greatest impact through innovators that can capitalize on it for commercial ventures. Many of these will fail and few will rise to the top. Remember the dotcom revolution promised in the early ’00s? Only a few companies from that time are still in business.

The best you can do is to browse multiple sources on the matter and ponder their diverse informational signals. While this is a daunting task, you don’t have to do this alone. At our AI theology FB group we are constantly curating and discussing new developments on the AI front. This is a good place to start. There are also emails and publications you can sign up for. One that I would recommend which is free is TLDR which offers a daily sampling of top developments in the world of technology. In short, don’t form an opinion based on one alarmist article. Keep an open mind while patiently looking for diverse sources to see what emerges. The future is open.

2) Stay in dialogue with ancient sources of wisdom

In a time of fast change, one of the temptations is to disregard wisdom from the past. We get so immersed in our time that and over-estimate the uniqueness of our predicament. This kind of chronological pride will make us deaf to ancient voices of wisdom. While our challenges may feel immense, humanity has been around for a while the commonalities that bind us are more substantial than it is apparent.

For Christians reading this, that will mean returning to the Bible. Yet, that should not be the only source. I would encourage all of us to engage with the rich theological heritages. Among these, I recommend paying special attention to the contemplative tradition which is also known as Christian mysticism. Rigid dogma will not serve us well and unfortunately, Western Christianity is full of it.

I would also encourage expanding our horizons beyond Christian roots. It is time to draw from Eastern sources which include the great Asian faiths like Hinduism and Buddhism and also our Abrahamic brothers and sisters in the Muslim and Jewish faith. Ponder on Rumi’s poems, attend to the stories from the Vedas, and learn to meditate with Buddhist monks. Our global challenge calls for an extensive search for wisdom wherever we can find it.

3) Stand in the paradox of hope and despair (with self-care)

Another temptation is to follow a knee-jerk reactive way of engagement – to wish that we could turn back the block of time to a period when this technology did not exist. Wedded to nostalgia, this can be fuel for powerful political movements such as the resurgence of right-wing nationalism. They can slow the tide of history, for a while. But ultimately, they are bound to fail.

A better strategy is to stand in the paradox of hope and despair. What does that mean? It is actually a spiritual practice in which you hold together all the potentialities and the risks of these new technologies in tension. You consider them equally, not trying to solve one or another but contemplating reality for what it is.

Can we hold in tension that this innovation will leave many without a job while also opening space for unprecedented art? Can we ponder that it will both democratize creative skills to the masses while also concentrating power and wealth on the few who control the platforms that offer it? Finally, would we consider the tension that while this new technology could empower many to leave poverty and help us address climate change, it will most likely be used for commercial uses that are non-essential?

Weigh different futures being offered with an open mind while also paying attention to the issues that arise as you learn about Generative AI. It goes without saying, that this process can be emotionally draining. That is why I also urge you to attend to self-care in the process. Look for life-giving spiritual practices that will ground you in what is good and beautiful. Stop, listen and rest. While these are timeless practices they are becoming all the more essential to anyone hoping to keep their sanity in a world of dizzying contradictions.

4) Engage in activist imagination

The ultimate question is: what will we do about it? Some are called to engage in the legislative process in order to protect those who will be harmed by these new technologies. Others will engage in the hard work of building new ecosystems that harness the power of these technologies for the flourishing of life. Others will solve intractable business problems leveraging the power of Generative AI.

I want to call out to a task that may be less obvious but is becoming all the more important: activist imagination. That is, we use imagination as a way to encourage others to act. It is meant to be transformative and paradigm-shifting not simply an experience to be consumed but an activity to enliven citizens.

In a situation where the possibilities are legion, anticipation starts with imagination. It is futile to try to predict how these technologies will transform the world. Yet, imagining multiple possibilities can better prepare us to face what will come next. Can we prepare this generation for what’s coming? A place to start is painting vivid pictures of what could be.

Predicting is a form of control but imagining is an invitation to ponder. The prophetic task of our time is to imagine possibilities (both good and bad) and invite our listeners to consider the impact of their actions in the present. Like the Hebrew prophets, we call out for people to repent, change their minds and go a different way. This is not limited to “scorched earth disaster” scenarios but also to pictures of hope that can inspire positive change

Like present-day prophets, we sit in the paradox of hope and despair and invite our audiences to choose life today so we can all have a future tomorrow.

6th AIT Podcast: A Talk about the Future – Part 1

Video tapes, landlines and big computers.

20 years ago the life was very different from today. Can we predict the future by thinking about the past? Join Elias and Maggie in a conversation about how the past can help us envision the future. Listen now to the 6th episode of the AI Theology Podcast. 

Listen to us on: 

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

Google Podcasts

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

Future Scenario: A Divided World With Delayed Climate Change

In the last few months, we have been busy working on a book project to describe plausible futures in the intersection of AI and faith. After some extensive brainstorming, the scenarios are finally starting to come alive (need a refresher on the project click here). After selecting our macro drivers, we have settled on the foundations for our 4 scenarios that form the backdrop for the stories to be written. Here is what they look like:

Each quadrant represents the combination of drivers that undergirds that scenario. For example, in the Q1 scenario, we have National (divided geopolitical system) Green (lower climate change impact). In short, this represents a future where the effects of climate change are delayed or lower than expected but where cooperation among nations is worse than it is today. How can such a combination even be possible?

Now that the parameters are set, the fun part of describing the scenarios can start. In this exercise, we try to imagine a future that fits within these parameters. For Q1, we imagine the global order deteriorating as nations turn inward. On the climate change side, we see a better or delayed outcome even if that seems counter-intuitive. How can a divided world somehow escape the worse of climate change? These difficult questions create the tensions from which creativity can flow.

What does that look like? Before a full description of the National Green scenario, let’s kick it off with a poem that evokes the feeling of this world.

Repent Before it’s Too Late

A world that hesitates
like a wave in the acidifying sea
Tossed by unharnessed winds
Shifting from action to inaction

Division cuts deep
Why can’t we come together?
The arguing continues
Polar caps whiter

Build up, tear down
Hot summers linger
“Each to its own” rules the day
Parochial thinking 
Global shrinking

AI advances by competition
Slowed by economic stagnation
Focusing on security and independence
It scarcely brings real transformation

National colors of allegiance
Taint Green Xianity 
into a shade of brown
of scattered complacency

Wedded to their turfs
the church keeps Christ divided
Petty speculations
Keep clergy from coordination

Humanity stands at the valley of decision
Will it choose life
Or deadly, slow oblivion?

Photo by Victor on Unsplash

Gradual change can come too little too late. This scenario is based mostly on a continuation of the present. The 20s decade witnessed gradual climate decay with growing local and regional challenges. The geopolitical order drags along as US and China become major poles of influence, followed by the EU. Polarization within countries increases as political regimes oscillate between democracy and authoritarianism. This vacillation in direction stifles international coordination on climate leading to increased regionalization. In 2028, the Paris agreement collapses yearly climate conferences stop as the US, China, India, and Russia pull out from conversations. 

By 2030, climate change is undeniable, but the lack of international cooperation on how to address it leads to scattered and uncoordinated efforts. Powerful nations think in terms of “energy independence” which ensures that fossil fuels remain an option for many even if they do not play the same role as in the past century. Mother nature seems patient with humanity, giving gentle reminders for them to mend their ways in the way of increased floods, droughts, and the melting of the ice caps. Yet, the gradual impact is scarcely enough to jolt humanity out of its enchanted oblivion. Affected areas in the developing world lack the clout and the resources to catch the world’s attention. The overall sense is that if we could just figure out how to work together, maybe we could avoid the worse. 

As the 2040’s begin, a growing portion of the population no longer believes in stopping climate change. The hope now is simply to stem and adapt to the gradual but decisively transforming effect of a warming planet. In 2045, as the temperature rises by 2-degree celsius, well beyond UN goals, humanity hits a decision point. It must repent before it is too late. Yet, can it come together as a unified front? Can humanity heed nature’s call to repentance or will they be betrayed by half-measures that can no longer prevent the worse? Will it turn a corner or slowly descend into a Malthusian trap?

Nationalism leads to competition rather than cooperation. Tech development accelerates due to a tech “arms race” as nations strive for energy independence and the superiority of AI, supercomputers, weapons, and communications. While generalized war is absent in this period, there is a growing build-up of arms. This overall climate of mistrust guides and hamstrings national investments in tech. Tech dev + adoption is characterized more by competition and parallel acceleration than by shared research or resources. Cybersecurity becomes more of an emphasis here than in other scenarios. 

AI adoption and development are uneven as international cooperation wanes. For example, AI justice slows downs as interests in this area are overshadowed by security concerns. Digital assistants take hold but increasingly become an artifact for developed nations with little use to the global south. Deepfakes and text generation develop more towards political propaganda within regions. The Metaverse mirrors the trend toward nationalism becoming more regionalized rather than the global commons it promised to be. AI/VR advances here take hold in the western versions of the metaverse and make some progress in China. The rest of the world is mostly cut off from it. Green AI advances within the confines of research institutions and government-funded labs in western nations. The benefits don’t trickle down to the global south.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Christianity mirrors many realities of this divided world. The Catholic church becomes more traditionalist and more distributed, therefore less tied to Rome. Even so, the Vatican emerges as a haven for cooperation in a regionalizing world. A string of progressive popes speaks up for the environment following Pope Francis’s lead. Yet, strong conservative factions, more in line with Pope Benedict, hold increasing power both in the West and in the global south. Green consciousness is present but not a forefront preoccupation for traditionalists that remain caught up in theological and liturgical debates. 

Mainline Protestants doubled down on green aspects of Christianity but without the evangelistic component. The focus is more on education than pushing Christian people to action. Their influence wane as their decline in the West continues. They are also unable to gain a foothold in the global south being no match for evangelicals who by now are well-established even as their growth slows down. 

Evangelical Christianity in the US takes up the green consciousness, wedded to a national push for energy independence. Good eco-theology comes in through the back door, so to speak, marshaled to support US national interests. Overall green consciousness in culture is embraced and evangelicals attempt to use this as an evangelism tool–“look how Christianity does such a good job of advocating for a green, sustainable world”. Emphasis on positive comparison between Christianity and other religions in this regard: “Christians are more green than Muslims, Hindus, etc.” captures a bit of the mindset. While greener, they remain militant and disinterested in interfaith dialogue. Missionary networks endure even in a more divided world but the focus continues on personal salvation, with a bit of green consciousness on the side. 

Christian roots of green consciousness find independent expression, less tied to mainline church or institutional Christianity. Organizations like CTA, Biologos, EACH, and others grow, but become more secularly focused and theologically diffuse as a result. They fail to coalesce around common causes and weakened global cooperation ensuring its impact is also limited and only a shadow of its potential. While emerging as a viable alternative to organized Xianity, its lack of cohesion translates into multifold affinity groups that coalesce around narrow missions rather than a movement with a broad vision for transformation.  

Theology Must Move Beyond Creation Care

I often write on the intersection between technology and theology. Yet, sometimes, I veer off this framework when I believe there is some important that needs to be said. I do this sparingly because I want to honor the focus of this portal. It also saves me from being all over the place with my writing (which I have a tendency to do as my reading and interests are pretty broad).

Without further ado, let me jump right to it. In this piece, I argue the following:

Creation care is woefully inadequate for addressing the current global existential crisis we face with climate. What we need is a complete overhaul of our relationship with nature, one that can only come if we are willing to listen to other religious traditions.

There are a number of reasons why that is the case but the main one is that creation care fails to re-connect us with nature. It also fails to challenge the glaring millennial-old blind spot of anthropocentrism, embedded in Christian theology from the very beginning. In short, if we are serious about meeting this climate challenge, we must put humanity back in its place: right in the middle of nature.

Photo by Alesia Kazantceva on Unsplash

The Climate Challenge

What else could be said about this topic? Yet, allow me to frame this one more time. Firstly, if you are not convinced humans are affecting climate, well, I have no time to prove that to you. Go look up the science and then draw your own conclusions. Secondly, for those of you anxious about this topic, take solace: every crisis is an opportunity. Yes, the crisis is real and yes, we caused it. This is, however, no reason to despair and give up. Instead, it is an opportunity to embrace as an invitation (albeit with serious consequences if we reject it) to change our relationship with this planet.

The problem is not in the Bible per se but in the Christian anthropology that developed afterward. The Genesis creation story may lend itself to ideas of appropriation and abuse, however, the central problem lies elsewhere. I am talking about Imago Dei, the Latin term for the idea that we are God’s mirror image. Why is that a problem? By trying to elevate humans to the pinnacle of Creation, just slightly below God and angels, theologians set us on that (sorry for the cliche) dreaded slippery slope of human worship. More specifically, we fell prey to the sin of anthropocentrism. Our current age, calls for a re-definition if not a full abandonment of this concept.

We have been so obsessed with putting God in God’s place that we became blind to our unacceptable disdain for other living beings. If there is such a thing as white and Christian supremacy, then well, there is also human supremacy that goes unnoticed. This climate change is a real opportunity for us to step down from our human-centric altar so we may worship God on the dusty ground, right along with all nature.

Creation Care

The concept of Creation care is not very old. Most likely started being circulated in the late 80s as some Christians finally started catching up to what environmentalists were already saying. It was a way to tie theology with environmental concern. While well-intentioned and much needed, the move towards creation care falls short in many accounts.

First, it leaves the ghost of Image Dei undisturbed and unchallenged. If at first, Creation care indicts us as the villain, it also elevates us as the heroes – the caretakers that will reverse the climate crisis. The onus stays on the human and creation is still nothing more than a piece of property that must be cared for.

Second, it does little to reconnect us with nature. This is probably the biggest problem of our current crisis. In a technological age, we have grown irreversibly disconnected from nature, and in turn from our humanness. People out of nature are, well, less human. This disconnection is also what makes behavioral change so difficult. We simply are not feeling directly the impact we are making in the biosphere. That is, in big part, because when you live your life in climatized indoor places nature becomes as alien as it can be.

Visiting Shamans

If Creation Care is not the path, where do we go from here? Well, a good starting point is Genesis 2:7, reminding us that we came from dust. That is, we are part of the Earth, not an alien being that descended on it. We are not caretakers, but earth itself and connected to all beings on this planet. We are an extension of it. Before appointing ourselves responsibilities, we must first recognize our earthiness.

Photo by Tia Vidal on Unsplash

That’s a start but not enough to repair the damage of centuries of misguided theology. Unfortunately, the path of repentance must lead us out and beyond Christian tradition. It starts by humbly recognizing that while our tradition bears witness to our connectedness to the earth, it has made it mostly an afterthought. We must look for those that have better emphasized this reality in their belief and practice. Traditions that preceded and survived the contamination of Modernity and its nature-severing effects. Traditions that Christendom has also violently tried to suppress.

Once we open up to learn from other traditions, the possibilities are multifold. One of them is to sit at the sweat lodge and learn from the First Nations of the Americas. The very people displaced by our arrival on this continent may very well offer the wisdom needed to guide us back to the God of nature. Not through romanticization or appropriation, we should humbly sit in their circles silently with an attentive ear. Only then may we have a chance to hear the whisper of God calling us back to nature over the deafening sounds of modern technology.

Conclusion

Learning from First Nations’ religion is only one of the many paths to move beyond creation care. The good news is that there are many options here. Yet all of them require a significant shift in theology where special revelation is no longer the exclusive property of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It requires a recognition that the Bible or the traditions emanating from it alone may not be enough to save us from ourselves. It calls for an openness to respectfully incorporate concepts from other religions.

Are we up to the challenge? I certainly hope so and our planet prays it so.

Egalitarian Human Futures in the Wake of AI, Part II

In this article, I’m going to use the idea of image-bearing and social synecdoche to help us discuss the relationship between AI, theology and egalitarian governance. The first article here provides background for this discussion.

Image-bearing, priesthood, and social synecdoche

In the Ancient Near East, to say that someone was the image of a god was to say that they had a governance function, as priest or king. At the core of the priestly function is mediation between divine and human realms, as a part who represents the whole group. The priest manifests social synecdoche before the divine. In a Christian context, we also understand a priest as a mediator between the group and the divine Word or Logos, the ordering principle that brings rational coherence to Creation.

In this network of ideas, we can hold together the experiences of scientific learning and true communication, along with the experience of human agency in governance. After all, scientists stand-in for all of us as mediators of the Word spoken in Creation, within their area of specialization. They bring back to the group what they have been shown: realities that they don’t invent, but which their reconciling work helps us all access. Similarly, political representatives stand-in for the group as their representative agent, embodying its decision-making capacity. Both scientific and governing roles properly involve experiences of meditation through social synecdoche. Both roles involve a priestly element.

Now let’s focus our attention on the experience of mediation. What does it feel like when you represent a group, bridging the gap between us and a powerful reality beyond us? Along with inevitable frustrations, we might also experience the joy of discovery, the delight of shared understanding, and the satisfaction of reaching an agreement that is good for us all. The instrumental goods that come from this kind of mediation are substantial. But beyond this, the shared experience itself is of profound value. Priestly image-bearing isn’t just about what is achieved externally through representative mediation. It necessarily involves the human experience of that process.

Expanding human priesthood

To say that humans bear the image of God is to say that we all have a special vocation to foster experiences of mediation, within various domains at various scales. If humans really are image-bears of God, that means the experience of bringing a greater wholeness into being is an irreducible aspect of what we are for. Whether it is in our garden, our home, our workplace, or in some larger domain of responsibility, this is the miracle that we all are.

Imagine science or politics proceeding without authentic experiences of mediation. Maybe we can build a zombie world where research and agreement seem to be happening, but where the AI agents conducting this work have no experience, and so no appreciation of the syntheses achieved. Or we might have an authoritarian politics in which people are threatened (or blindly herded by algorithms) into group conformity, but they are out of conformity with any kind of larger reality. Both scenarios, I hope, sound profoundly and transparently dystopian. Against these possibilities, I would encourage us to envision a society (even an AI-human society) that focuses on fostering the universal priestly function of humanity. It would be a spiritually egalitarian and deeply discursive society.

Franciscan spirituality and egalitarianism

In appealing to spiritual egalitarianism, we can advocate for the kind of elevating egalitarianism I have described above. However, egalitarianism can easily collapse into a universal denigration, rather than elevation, of image-bearers. Although laudably egalitarian, this other approach can reproduce patterns of domination and abuse, when a liberatory elevation is more important than ever. At the core of this issue are different ways of appropriating Franciscan spirituality.

By Christian Buehner taken from unsplash.com

Consider: Pope Francis styled himself after Brother Francis of Assisi. Far more than a whim, this is a powerful and enduring signal of his egalitarian vision for the church. But there is a radical tension here. The Pope has long been styled as the Pontifex Maximus, an office inherited from Roman high priests and then Emperor-priests. During the life of Jesus, this office was held by Emperor Tiberius. A common meaning associated with “pontifex” (both then and now) is “bridge builder.” The term reflects the mediating role of the priest.

The irony of a Pope taking the name Francis is extremely sharp: Saint Francis of Assisi rather pointedly never became an official priest. He remained Brother Francis, never Father Francis. What does it really mean for the Pontifex Maximus, the Father of Fathers and the Head of the College of Cardinals, to style himself after Brother Francis? It might be a gesture toward general elevation. But it also might indicate a denigrating abdication of responsibility. What, exactly, is happening in this moment of clerical anti-clericalism?

Anti-Clericalism and Lay Authoritarianism

Pope Francis genuinely reflects a Franciscan vocation in many ways. For example, he has recently made some important post-clerical accommodations in the church, allowing non-priests to lead Catholic orders. Fittingly, Franciscans like Daniel Horan, OFM, have celebrated this decision as an anti-clerical victory.

However, this particular form of egalitarianism can easily foster unaccountability and authoritarian populism. Consider: the primary opponent of Pope Francis for the hearts and minds of Catholics in the US today is the EWTN media network. Slate’s history of the network describes the development of this lay-led media empire as it has become the Catholic Fox News.

The Pope does not approve of EWTN. He has even referred to it as “the work of the devil,” as Slate documents. But can he exorcise EWTN? No. The network, founded by a Franciscan nun, is led by the laity. That makes it relatively unaccountable to anyone but its funders. Institutionally, the Catholic Church doesn’t have a comparable media network, so it can’t interact discursively at relevant social scale. The Pope is left to inveigh ineffectively against its aggressive authoritarian populism, because it mediates the Pope to US Catholics.

So lay leadership is already being tried. EWTN’s broadcasters are the lay media priests that Pope Francis is not. It hasn’t yielded the discursively democratic fruit we might hope it would.

We can easily imagine AI leadership that simply amplifies these problems. What if EWTN next pursues the attention-harvesting of the Youtube algorithm, but on steroids? It could govern us by creating even more intense propaganda rabbit holes. Humans would be even further divorced from their shared vocation as true mediators, because of the absence of truth criteria that connect the project to a broader Creational and social whole. Instead, they would become objects in an increasingly sophisticated epistemic capture system.

Universal image-bearing as a powerful alternative vision

What can we do? To start, we should clarify what is of first importance in this brave new world. A primary goal of society at all scales must be to honor the universal priestly vocation of humans, as image-bearers. We need to embrace our callings to represent bodies at different times and in different contexts. That includes our own physical bodies, as well as layered networks of group agents at all social scales. Representation matters. This is true in media, but it pertains even more to the many groups we belong to.

By Michal Mation taken from Unsplash.com

The egalitarianism of Pope Francis is to be commended, but it is flawed. We don’t need to remove priests from governance. Instead, we need to help all people discern and accountably live out their priestly roles, as mediators and representatives. It isn’t that we should let brothers govern Fathers, but that we must see all the ways that we already govern each other as sibling priests, as experiencing mediators.

Fortunately, we have a precedent for this in Christian tradition. Catholic and otherwise, we all view Jesus as our high priest. But even He didn’t call Himself Father. Rather, he fulfills his priestly function as our equal, as our sibling, and as the Son. Matthew 23:9 specifically articulates this egalitarian vision of priesthood when Jesus warns, in an especially dire passage of Scripture:

“And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father, the one in heaven.”

Here at the dawn of AI governance, we urgently need to hear and heed our brother and high priest.

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

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.

What is Social Synecdoche?

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

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

AIT podcast - 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.

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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? 

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.

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:

Listen on Spotify - spotify logo
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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?

Living Faithfully in a Technological Age: Heeding Ellul’s Warnings

We are living in a technological age. The acceleration and pervasiveness of technology (both as knowledge and objects) is a dominant force shaping the direction of history. No other time in history has techno-optimism, the idea that we can “techno” our way out of any problem, been such a driving force in society. As Big tech, maybe the biggest symbol of this trend, accumulate staggering profit, the narrative marches on.

Consider this, if the global technology sector were a country, its GDP would be the third-largest in the world. Even so, the pervasiveness of tech extends far beyond the economy. It has come to touch every aspect of human societies, revolutionizing how we shop, study, work, and relate to each other. The cyber-world, as it was once known, is no longer a virtual representation of reality. It is, instead, a reality of its own that now exists in parallel to our offline reality.

If technology is the defining force of our age, how can we live the good life in it? For centuries humans have asked this question as a way to engage faithfully with their environment. How do we do that in a technological age? In this case, a clarification is in order. In a time where the word technology gets thrown around a lot, what actually does it mean? To help us with this task we now turn to a 20th-century scholar.

The Danger of Technique

In 1954, French theologian and sociologist Jacques Ellul put forth one of the most complete critique of technology’s impact on humanity. His seminal work, La technique ou l’enjeu du siècle, is one of the first to recognize that we were indeed living in a technological age. In his view, that was a concerning development. He saw the rise of technology as a vortex that started in the industrial revolution but accelerated in the last two centuries. He used the French word technique that meant not just the objects themselves but a mentality, an approach to the world. Underneath it was the culmination belief that the world was a machine, and that by combining the right parts, one could solve any problem.

Technology was not a neutral force. Instead, it was marked by rationality. It obeyed prescribed rules and follow dictated patterns. It is obsessed with efficiency in every field of human activity. Not only that, but it often supplants and destroys the old, replacing them with the new. In doing so, it often leaves a trail of loss, confusion, and disorientation.

Furthermore, he believed that technology was self-perpetuating. It starts with a narrow purpose in mind but eventually, by creating new problems, it begets new objects to address it. In this way, it can raise whole new industries in a short amount of time. Thus, it can both be a fantastic driver of economic growth and job creation, even as it destroys and disrupts existing structures.

Techno-determinism and the Human-Machine Telos

Photo by ThisIsEngineering from Pexels

Jacques Ellul observed that technology tends to be deterministic. This is even more true today in a digital age where algorithms and decision engines are shaping our future by predicting, nudging, and optimizing human behavior toward pre-determined aims. In its pursuit of perfectionist dreams, it stubbornly seeks the most efficient method in a process which often supplants human creativity. It imposes its preferred method as a universal law, forcing all its users to follow its pre-determined principles.

At its essence, it drives the future toward a human-machine telos. Because it believes the universe is mechanistic, it further transforms us into machines. Technology, therefore, seeks to conform us to its image of mechanical perfection. It treats living beings as predictable objects built to accomplish narrow objectives.

If it wasn’t enough, Ellul believed that as it became ubiquitous, it has also become the new sacred. Supplanting religious hegemonies of the past, technology is the new god before which everyone must bow. One cannot question it, one must only accept its sovereign plan for a future of efficiency, perfection, and effectiveness. In that, he could not be more right.

A Faithful Response

It does not take much probing to realize Ellul’s proposed response to this predicament. In a technological age, where our world has turned to tech worship, Ellul is an iconoclast. Breaking down the idols through resistance and subversion is the only way. As a Christian, he believed that to be the most appropriate response in view of a mounting techno-tyranny. The faithful must throw a wrench into the whole process and work for its collapse.

By that, I don’t think he meant a complete return to nature. Yet, it starts with a recognition of the pervasive pernicious impact of technology in society. Resistance to technique, as both objects and mentality, is a return to human creativity and partnership. It most certainly entails a new way to build and operate machinery. A way in which it recognizes its limitations while upholding the sacredness of live beings.

mystic Christianity
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It means dismantling the centralizing power of techno elites and spreading their knowledge with the masses. Placing technology in its rightful place as one tool among many in the work for the flourishing of life. A subversion that returns to the human and hopefully leads us back to the ultimate. This is the type of response, I believe, Jacques Ellul could get behind and see it as a faithful rendering of his legacy.

Conclusion

Ellul’s critique of technology only gets more relevant with time. The prophetic insights that he originally saw in the half of the 20th century continue to reverberate in a world where technique has only become more predominant. Coupled with an appropriate mindset that replaces despair with action, it can lead to the type of subversion we need to see in our time.

Even so, one must ask whether subversion is enough in a technological age. Is technique only a phenomenon to be resisted, an evil to be controlled? Even if it is properly pursued as a tool, is that sufficient to capture its meaning. Are there other fascets we must see if we are to fully comprehend this technological age? That is when we turn next to another French prophet, paleontologist, and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.