I’m getting daily offers of some AI program to speed up my writing and achieve success. In every area of human endeavour, we’re promised some ill-defined nirvana.

In 2023 venture capitalist Marc Andreesen published the ‘techno-optimist manifesto.’ He wrote, “I am here to bring good news that there is no material problem whether created by nature or by technology that cannot be solved with more technology. . . . [we’ll make] everyone rich, everything cheap, and everything abundant.” What about moral, compassionate, loving, faithful, honest?

By contrast Catholic novelist Walker Percy declared; “You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.” That is the real problem. Fallen sinful human beings think they call solve all human ills and even perfect mankind their own efforts. The cry is, “Technology is our Saviour!” Most recently—and temporarily—the cry has become, “Tariffs are our Saviours!”

In spite of the disaster that was the twentieth century, we haven’t learned where the problem lies. The problem goes back to the Garden when the Devil tempted Eve; “You shall be as gods.” He has been tempting us ever since. He even tempted Christ. “If you are the Son of God”…show us a miracle. Today he tempts mankind to think that if we only adopt AI, we can transform “the cosmos into a perfectly functioning machine.”

Christ reminded the Devil then, as he would today, man’s highest good is to live sustained by “every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4). May the Lord help us to be good students of the Word, giving it time to remake us within—not to make us gods, but to make us humble, devoted disciples of the Master through faith in his saving work on the cross.

Jeffrey Bilbro reminds us that “our vocation as Christ-followers , then, is to follow the path that Jesus trod, to walk, slowly with others, to suffer, and—ultimately to become capable of embodying God’s presence to others…Christ did good things slowly, and so must we.…Jesus didn’t jet around the world; he walked around Judea.…We must refuse technologies that promise to automate our relationships with the world and with one another.”

Speed up writing? Speed up poetry. Speed up art? I don’t think so.

(Ideas and quotations from; Christianity Today, January/February issue: AI and all its splendor by Jeffrey Bilbro, p. 59.)

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