With Will Penman, Lecturer, Princeton Writing Program

Wednesday, Feb 16 at 7:00pm

Frist Campus Center, room 302

Humans aren’t the fastest creatures. We can’t fly, or make food from sunlight, or live at the bottom of the ocean. But when it comes to language, creativity, rationality – those let us overcome our other limitations, and we’re just the best… right? In a few cases, today’s AI is actually beating us already, and it may get better at other cases soon. Examples include text-production AI that can write coherent paragraphs, robots that can backflip, and game-playing AI that beats the world’s best chess players. What do we make of these developments as Christians? How can we tie in our faith when emerging AI sometimes threatens the way we’ve typically seen ourselves? First, we’ll offer some wider historical context where scientific discoveries have displaced how central humans are in the universe. Then, we’ll examine a Christian life of humility as a key to responding well to AI displacement. Humility gives us a flexibility of self that allows us to hear God’s countercultural call. In the case where we’re losing to AI at games we care about, being humble means internalizing that humans are not necessarily the height of intelligence/rationality/etc. We apply this tough message by considering situations in daily life where identifying too closely with our own intelligence might be holding us back, and where God is calling us into deeper humility.