technology

Several prominent people, including SpaceX founder Elon Musk, have called for a pause on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies due to the potential danger it could have on society.

AI, in particular, and our broken society, in general, desperately need the moral compass of the Christian worldview. To guide culture most effectively, however, we must do so from inside. We need Christians who are charismatic political leaders, brilliant screenwriters, exemplary businesspeople, and superlative athletes. The rest of us need to pray for Christians in such positions of strategic influence.

The threat to our future posed by artificial intelligence is made exponentially worse by another threat to our future posed by cultural intelligence, or actually the lack thereof. In a pivotal Wall Street Journal article, Aaron Zitner reports that the values which helped define America’s national character for generations are receding in importance to Americans.

Parents today are caught between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, allowing kids online means exposure to content that threatens their mental health and their innocence. On the other hand, removing online access threatens to socially isolate kids from their friends and peer groups. What are parents to do?

We must remember that AI is not inherently evil. After all, if you go looking for funny animal videos, cooking tips, or sports highlights, it can fill your feed with content that brings happiness and laughter. But if you go with a darker purpose in mind, it can easily exacerbate those intentions as well. And those darker intentions have been around since humanity first left Eden. Ultimately, the problem with AI is the degree to which it makes feeding our sinful impulses so much simpler.

ChatGPT is, to borrow a phrase, “breaking the internet.” So far, what it has produced ranges from the impressive to the hilarious.  It is also forcing a series of existential crises. For example, teachers are scrambling to discern the work of their students from the work of compelling AI counterfeits. The tech industry now faces what The New York Times calls “an AI arms race,” as competitors like Google apply their own AI to search engines and ad generators. Technology has made searching for errors in code, sifting through mountains of data, and summarizing complex issues in a few paragraphs exponentially easier and more user-friendly.

The Institute for Family Studies has published a list of legal and policy recommendations to protect teens from the dangers of social media. Among the recommendations are age-verification laws, parental consent requirements, and shutting down social media platforms at night for teens.

Is a truly “sentient” AI even possible? How could code develop the capacity for feelings, experiences, or intentionality? Even if our best algorithms can one day perfectly mirror the behavior of people, would they be conscious? How one answers such questions depends on one’s anthropology. What are people? Are we merely “computers made of flesh?” Or is there something more to us than the sum of our parts, a true ghost in the machine? A true ghost in the shell?

A new study found that religious millennials who engage with digital religion say their faith has been enriched with technology.

A Google engineer has been placed on paid administrative leave for violating policy after he claimed the company's artificial intelligence (AI) appears to have a consciousness and perhaps even a soul.