AI, God, and Kingdom Come

“Will we be more good than evil? Will we still be free, or will that word no longer have a distinct meaning?”

Hang around long enough, and you’ll soon recognize that in every generation, there is no shortage of folks who think theirs is the worst and will probably be the last. The end of everything is near.

This is why there is an insatiable market for doomsday books and movies about the end of days or post-apocalyptic survival dramas.

Every generation looks at the chaos of the world around them and some people’s unrelenting inhumanity and evil toward other people. They become convinced the world can’t continue, or at least not as it is currently arranged.

This has been going on for thousands of years. Even Martin Luther, the great theologian who kick-started the Reformation, was convinced he lived in the darkest of days and often mused about the world’s end.

In 1528, he wrote darkly, “Things are going toward their end.”

Perhaps some ancient incantation in our DNA calls up in us the rawest fear for our survival that sits on the edge of our minds.

When I was a young boy, my family lived next door to a very old couple, the Yeagers. When the heat of the Texas day broke in the summer evening after I had cut their grass, I’d sit on the porch with Mr. Yeager and he would enchant me with his stories.

He and Mrs. Yeager had married in the Oklahoma Territory before it even achieved statehood. (Yes, you read that correctly.) They came to the high-mountain desert of West Texas for a new start in life in a covered wagon, on dirt trails and roads that connected other dirt trails and roads.

Mr. Yeager saw his first automobile — and then his first airplane — when he was already a father of two. When the First World War came, he was too old for service. He’d seen the great Wall Street crash of 1929 and the next Great War after the “war to end all wars.” He’d twice seen America’s tremendous industrial and fighting might save the world.

But, in spite of that, Mr. Yeager assured me that the end of the world was close. It was all “moving too fast,” he allowed. Somehow, humans would lose control of it, “and that would be that.”

Unsettled by that gloomy prediction, I asked my father what he thought. He agreed with Mr. Yeager.

My father was a child of the Great Depression. He lived a difficult adolescence but learned to fly in an all-canvas open cockpit Curtis-Wright monoplane as a teenager, preparing him for WWII, where he became a decorated B-24 pilot in the Pacific, flying 58 combat missions. Later, he would be a senior officer controlling nuclear weapons being flown from bases in the U.K. over northern Russia for the newly formed Strategic Air Command. Although he died way too young flying into Vietnam, he perhaps had just seen too much. He always surmised that keeping it all together would prove too daunting for humanity. The end would come soon.

The only thing we know for sure is that there is nothing illogical about believing there will be an end of times. There will be, of course.

The world will die instantly or slowly as the sun goes dark or cools too much, or the earth will collide with some great natural body hurtling toward it from outer space — or something will invade mankind from microscopic inner space. Perhaps man himself will finally destroy the world as he figuratively climbs toward the sun, a modern Icarus.

What brings all of this to my mind is the incessant hype and promotion of the AI (artificial intelligence) revolution with robotics and the attendant promise of transhumanism — cross-fitting human beings with various computer interactions and access to unlimited knowledge, memory, and utility overcoming our inherent biological limitations — making us literally part human, part machine.

The AI revolution (egged on by the world’s precarious political status) and its associated advances have spawned a cottage industry of new doomsday prognosticators, including many famous scientists and thinkers who suggest that the end may be near. The thinking generally is that at some tipping point, AI will become a self-proliferating intelligence in and of itself, superseding any need for human input and thus determining for itself that humans are unnecessary hosts. Others speculate that the robotic Rubicon will be crossed and that some cabal of humans themselves will decide that most of humanity (not them) is dispensable.

In a complementary theory, the cyborg will rise. Humans will be compelled to save our utility, integrate, and breed (if you will) with machines. A USB port in your skull to interface with your brain and the internet to calculate some specific mathematical problem, or to perform some medical procedure in the field? Special eyewear to allow an automatic screenshot to be piped into your head with useful information, data, and such?

Of course, to some limited degree, this is already happening in the medical field, where startling new advances for recovering sight and hearing and the loss of various motor skills with computer processors are telling nerve endings what to do and when. Also, dramatic advances in mapping, identifying, and manipulating DNA promise to alter specific DNA sequences to correct or enhance physical and mental attributes.

I’ve been following this science as best a layman can for some time, and there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that this is the “brave new world” — and it’s not only at our doorstep, it’s already in the foyer, headed for the living room.

Left to its own devices, this is where the world is headed.

The question now is only the degree to which we will be changed by this revolution – not if we’ll be changed. How will it look? What of our humanity, and our conscience, and our passions? Will they be silenced or emboldened? Will we be more good than evil? Will we still be free, or will that word no longer have a distinct meaning?

Or will we simply conform to the state of the passionless binary code that drives the machines we build?

Except … except … no sooner are these questions asked then I’m dragged back to reality.

As a practicing (and very flawed) Christian, I don’t believe anything is ever left to its own devices. Not really. The more I ponder all of this and its impending impact on mankind, the more convinced I become of the existence of God, and more specifically, the atoning sacrifice, the salvation of the human race, by Jesus Christ.

The end will come when He comes.

I can’t believe in a world left to its own and on its own. Logic doesn’t support it. Increasingly, science doesn’t support its randomness. The human heart rejects its hopelessness.

I find myself quite by accident in the very good company of many men and women who, only later in their lives, came to the conclusion that God is not only real, but specifically revealed to us by His Son and in sovereign control of His creation. And He will not lose control. After decades of arm-wrestling the subject to a nub, it’s based on evidence, not wishful thinking.

One of the intellectual giants of the last century, C.S. Lewis — like many of his contemporaries —started out as an atheist, perhaps hardened by his combat experiences in the First World War followed by yet another World War. In the middle of his life, after an intensive investigation of the Christianity pressed on him by his friends J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton, he writes of simply coming to a conclusion that “of course, it’s all true.” In his own words, he became the most “dejected and reluctant convert” in all of England.

Many of us know precisely what he meant.

The fingerprints of God are all over creation, and His greatest creation is … us. I see His blueprint and His truth repeatedly, and the more we look at it, the bolder that pattern becomes. It is revealed and explained in great detail, with excruciating honesty, in His Word. It alone contains all that is needed to understand the human heart and the world. While its human converts are flawed, failed, and often irritating, they don’t alter the truth of God and His creation, even a molecule’s worth.

I gave up long ago trying to “convince” people about God or trying to argue about the truth, as I found He doesn’t need any help. I find His followers among the great and the average, the brilliant and the simple, the rich and the poor, and the warriors and the peacemakers.

I find that very few can withstand the introspection of heart that He performs when allowed. An honestly examined life leads to no other conclusion, in my experience.

In 1707, the great English writer, theologian, minister, and logician Isaac Watts wrote what many, including myself, consider the finest Christian hymn: “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” These simple lyrics sit in the truth of the centrality of God in human affairs, not outside them. (Here’s a version sung by Keith and Kristyn Getty.)

That doesn’t mean we understand how and when this works out in the end. It only means that we can rest assured that the God of the Universe will not be sidetracked. Every knee will bow to Him; even AI will bow to Him, as will the cyborgs. So shall we all.