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Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs.
Oscar Diggs for short.
I remember seeing The Wizard of Oz movie when I was a kid for the first time. The buildup to Dorothy and her companions walking down that long, dark, echoey hallway into the throne room of the great and powerful Wizard of Oz was scary. And Oz was so frightening. So detached from anything real. His translucent floating head like a ghost above two pillars of fire. The gigantic booming voice. It blew me away.
And then, at the climax of the movie, we discover that he is all smoke and mirrors, being controlled by a frumpy, humbug of a man behind a curtain, tugging away on levers and pressing buttons. His name was Oscar Diggs. That revelation was both disappointing and yet comforting all at the same time. Underneath it all, Diggs was a human being.
Today, we have a growing presence in our world that was not obviously there even ten years ago. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an everyday reality for most people doing anything on the Internet, and whether they realize it, even people who live their lives unplugged would be surprised to learn how much influence AI has over their daily activities, such as ordering food at a restaurant, filling up their gas tank at Costco, or even making a simple phone call to a friend across the globe.
And as a pastor of a church, I hear a growing level of mistrust about its influence over us as Jesus followers. Fake news. AI-generated video and imagery. Automated sermon and worship song writing. Endless spying on us and our daily online activities. What’s next? AI going to rewrite our Bibles??
Well, before you start brandishing your electronic torches and pitchforks, let’s step back a moment and have a brief look at AI and some of the realities behind its massive growth in popularity.
In November 2022, a company called OpenAI developed an app called ChatGPT. The purpose of this app is to provide a tool for people in the digital world that allows them to perform many different types of tasks way faster and more efficiently than if they had set out to do some of those tasks on their own. Common applications would be to search the Internet for answers that they might receive in seconds as opposed to hours of opening other websites. This general approach to everyday research alone has changed the way many of us search for answers to our questions online.
Other tasks this app performs includes complex mathematical calculations, writing content all by itself (short stories, how-to manuals, even poetry), and even basic computer programming sequences that usually requires knowledge of computer coding. The possibilities seem endless.
And as its abilities grow, so does the paranoia. “Is this really where society is headed,” many wonder. Humans become unnecessary in the workplace. Fake information will take over our world so that nobody knows what is even true anymore.
Some have even warned the rest of us that AI one day will grow self-aware and begin to take over our world altogether in a kind of digital apocalypse.
The average Christian is more fearful of AI than optimistic. Barna recently did a study identifying that only 28% of US Christians are hopeful that AI will have a positive impact on our world.
While a few churchgoers believe we need to pull ourselves completely off the digital grid, the vast majority see that as unrealistic, even if their fears are not abated.
So, what do we do? Should we disconnect from the net? Go back to pocket calculators and musty encyclopedias? Keep our cash in a coffee tin, and fish for our food in the river?
I want to remind you of something that you are aware of but maybe have forgotten. It’s a truth we have carried with us since the day the original two were removed from the original garden. But now this truth comes back to us to reveal something much darker and more sinister about AI. The conspiracy is deeper than you imagined. I am going to reveal to you the unseen truth about who is really behind AI and why this topic has so many of you afraid.
What is the secret about who is behind AI?
Humans. People.
AI is the great and powerful Oz and we are Oscar Diggs. Oz does nothing without Diggs pulling the levers.
For those of you not sure what I’m getting at, human beings are the force behind AI. Let me reveal to you a question I asked ChatGPT this morning preparing for this devo:
Q: What is the mathematical and logical likelihood that AI will be able to perform tasks completely unconnected with human commissioning?
A: There is no coherent, mathematical way to assign a non‑zero probability to AI ever doing tasks that are completely unconnected to human commissioning, because every physically existing AI system is causally downstream of human design, training, and deployment.
Every AI-performed task ultimately leads back to a human being asking it to do something. It mathematically cannot ever become “self-aware.” It will never take over our world in the way people fear.
And, as Christians, we know something about the human race that others are not as aware of. We are fallen. We live in a fallen world. Please forgive the pessimism, but if anybody ever had a good idea about anything in the history of our world, we can all agree that it is just a matter of time before human beings find a way to muck it up.
What’s my point? If AI looks like it’s a scary thing, if it looks like it’s taking over our world, consider the truth that it’s really human beings behind the overthrow.
People are scary. AI is just a tool.
Historically, Christians have looked at nearly every modern advancement in the last 1,000 years with derision and fear. The printing press. Modern medicine. Industrialization. Broadcast technology. The Internet. And now, AI. We always show our mistrust of something new.
But, my Bible says that we have not been given a spirit of fear. And if AI is a tool with the ability to do both enormous good and enormous evil, do we shut it down and run away from it? Our issue should not be with technology but with the masterminds behind it. Us.
In the years ahead, will we need to be more aware that AI (controlled by humans) will continue to dump a lot of unreliable, false, and detestable content in the digital arena? Yeah. Afraid so.
But I want you to hear this and take it to heart: AI is not going away. It is here to stay.
And as children of God, you must remember that you are a co-heir with Jesus Christ of this earth in which we live. Our citizenship might be heaven, but our home is here. One day, God will come and make it ever new, but in the interim, we have been given dominion over all the earth and commission to rule (Genesis 1:27).
That means that we should be seizing control of the tools of our day and using them for good, not evil. Imagine where we would be if we kept running away from the printing press. Imagine what it would be like if we continued to attack the entirety of modern medicine. Imagine our existence if we had turned away from and shunned the Internet as a tool of the devil.
It’s time to stop living in the shadow of fear. AI is here, it’s potential is astronomical, and we have the opportunity to embrace it or shun it.
And yes, AI was used in the preparation of this devo. 😊