September 8, 2025
I was invited to attend a Summit last week in Minneapolis entitled “Faithful Futures: Guiding AI with Wisdom and Witness.” The Summit was an ecumenical collaboration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church USA brought together to consider the church’s role in the burgeoning arena of Artificial Intelligence. If you use a smart phone, GPS, a search engine (google, for example), a daily prayer app, etc., you interact with artificial intelligence probably every day. The technology of this phenomenon was first developed over 50 years ago but in the last two to three years the development of large language models (AI) has burst on the scene in increasingly pervasive and consequential ways.
I’ve never been much of a fan of Sci-Fi so robots run-amuck, the Matrix exploiting expendable human beings, or Terminators hunting humans has never captured my attention, regardless of whether or not Hal opened the pod door for Dave. Still, what has been science fiction is now fact – artificial intelligence with an accelerating impact having already out-stripped humanity’s capacity to gather, evaluate, calculate and perform thought tasks. One of the creators of AI, Sam Altman, in an interview I heard maybe five or so years ago, expressed his own concern about a future with what he called “super intelligence” – an intelligence not even its creators can comprehend let alone control.
There are many hopeful and helpful ways generative AI can aid humanity and the planet: medical advances, climate solutions (though the water and power needed to run these huge data centers is already part of the climate problem and will become more so), educational access through democratizing who can access education, productivity (which is valued highly by corporations for good or ill) , and scientific discovery to name a few.
As you can imagine, there are significant concerns about AI, too: misinformation and deepfakes making it harder to trust what we see and hear and undermining institutions, job disruption (already being felt keenly by the many gen Z-ers at the conference where entry level white collar jobs are already replaced with Ai,) bias and fairness (remember, large language models strip the internet of all that humans have contributed to it with all its attendant biases and racism), weaponization (CBS’ 60 minutes a few weeks ago, aired a segment with a weapons developer, Palmer Luckey, a 32 year old tech billionaire who has created fully autonomous weapons systems he is selling to arms dealers around the world), and the complete erosion and manipulation of human privacy/agency (think just how fast companies are pushing an ad at you for just the very thing you seconds ago expressed an interest in), not to even mention the enormous energy requirements of the AI centers themselves. And in the absence of a coherent national or global strategy for developing and deploying AI, the industry is largely in the hands of tech billionaires, Elon Musk being only one of them. They are the ones making decisions about how these large language models are “taught” and how it is put to use in the world.
Why am I writing this edition of Ponderings about this topic? Because I believe the church needs to pay attention to this development and lend its moral voice to the changes that are swift upon us, in what one noted Futurist described as a BANI world (brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible). The church needs to do what we can so that the values of integrity, justice, and compassion can be part of the development and use. We need to be aware of it in the church’s own ethical decisions around the use of AI. There is a prayer in the book of Common Worship for travelers which is going through my mind – “may we be cautious but not afraid,” God is the ruler yet and the One who created the whole Universe is not caught off guard by AI! So let us be cautious, but not afraid as we move into the effects of this never-before-seen era of human history.
As ever in prayer,
Sue