Sunday Sermon - 20 September

There has been a lot in the news this week about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the potential threat it poses to humanity.

One of the people who works in AI safety at Anthropic, one of the major artificial intelligence companies, Evan Hubinger, said last week that he personally believes there is a greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all human beings within the next decade. Another researcher who recently resigned from Anthropic, Jacob Coxon, said that people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Now, before we all go home and destroy our computers, IPads and other technology, I think it is important to put that statement into perspective. It is a hypothesis. It is a warning. It is a possibility being taken seriously by some people who work in this field. It is not a fact that AI is going to destroy humanity.

Then again, what if this hypothesis is proven? What if the theory becomes fact? That is where things get a little uncomfortable if not down right scary. I pray that we don’t panic - throw our computers away and hide in our basements - because human beings have always had existential fears.

I grew up in the 1980s, during the Cold War, and I honestly didn't think I would live to 50 let alone 60 years old. We lived with the possibility of nuclear war hanging over us. I remember watching The Day After—that television movie from the 80’s about nuclear war. I think it was actually assigned as homework when I was in Grade 11. It was an English assignment and we were forced to watch it!

We were taught about nuclear fallout and nuclear winter. We talked about what we would do in the last moments of our lives. Who we would want to be with and what we would want to say in our final moments. I was around 16 years old. In my mind there was always this possibility that human beings had created something powerful enough to destroy ourselves. I expect that, for those who have lived through world wars, Viet Nam, and other human crises, this existential threat has always been something we’ve learned to live with.  

Think about it:  There was the year 2000. Remember Y2K? We were told that when the clocks turned over to January 1, 2000, computers and main frames might stop working. Planes might fall out of the sky. Banks might collapse. The power grid might fail. I remember that year, instead of saying Happy New Year, the gathering I was with were all silent, listening, waiting to hear the crash of society as we know it. It didn't happen. And yet the fear was real.

I think that is important to remember when we talk about AI, because we don't actually know. Maybe the warnings are overstated. Maybe they aren't. Maybe AI will become one of the most beneficial technologies humanity has ever created. Maybe it will help us address some of the enormous problems we have created for ourselves. Maybe we have created something that could become incredibly dangerous.

Perhaps there is an even deeper question underneath all of this. Not simply, “What is going to happen to us?” but “How do we live when we don't know what is going to happen to us?”

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (my favourite anti-nihilist), in his 1889 book Twilight of the Idols, wrote:  “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”  I think there is something profound in that because so much of our anxiety comes from wanting to know the how.

How will this turn out? What will happen to our jobs? What will happen to our children? What will happen to our planet? What will happen if AI becomes more capable than we are? What will happen if we lose control?

We want to know the how but, my friends, we are people of faith and faith begins somewhere else. Faith asks us to know our why, even when we don't know the how.

Let’s look at what our scripture tells us this morning. In Exodus: The Israelites have escaped slavery in Egypt. They have been liberated but now they are in the wilderness and they are hungry. Suddenly freedom doesn't look quite as attractive as it did before. They say, “If only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread.”

In other words: At least we knew what we were dealing with in Egypt. At least we knew where our next meal was coming from. At least we knew what tomorrow looked like. And isn't that one of the things that happens when we become afraid?

We start looking backward because the future is frightening. We would rather have the certainty of something bad than the uncertainty of something unknown. I think that is one of the great spiritual challenges of living in this particular moment.

We are living through enormous technological change. We don't know what AI will mean for work, for education, for creativity, for relationships, for human purpose—or, ultimately, for human survival. Our natural response is to want certainty. We want someone to tell us exactly what is going to happen. We want to have knowledge and predictability, but that’s not real life is it?

God doesn't give the Israelites certainty. God gives them manna. Enough for today. Daily bread. They are still in the wilderness. They still don't know what tomorrow will bring but they are given what they need to live today.

Then we come to Jesus' parable of the workers in the vineyard. Here again, there is anxiety about the future. The workers who have worked all day discover that those who worked only one hour are receiving the same wage and they are angry. In their minds, life should be fair – If I work more, I should get more.  If I contribute more, I should be worth more. If I am more productive, I should have greater value.

I wonder if that isn't another place where our anxiety about AI touches something much deeper in us. One of the questions AI is forcing us to ask is: What makes a human being valuable?

For most of our lives, or perhaps human existence since the Industrial Revolution, we have answered that question, at least partly, through productivity.  What do you do? How much can you produce? How useful are you?

What happens when we create machines that can write faster than we can, calculate faster than we can, process more information than we can, and perhaps eventually perform many of the tasks that we currently use to define our usefulness. What happens then? How do we value ourselves, our existence?

As Christians, we know that our value does not come from what we can do or produce – that’s a profane term of reference. As Christians our value comes from the fact that we are God's creation. We don't have to outperform a machine to be worthy of God's love. We don't have to be the smartest one (or maybe thing) in the room. We don't have to control the future. We don't even have to know what the future holds.

Rather, we simply accept the fact that we are human beings created in the image of God. Loved by God – called to love one another. That is what I hear in these two readings.  The Israelites want certainty. God gives them daily bread. The workers want to measure worth according to productivity. Jesus reminds them that God's generosity doesn't work that way.

I think that is a word we need to hear right now because whether or not AI ultimately becomes the existential threat some people fear, we have a more important question before us in the midst of this concern: What kind of human beings are we going to be?

Will fear make us hoard? Will fear make us turn inward? Will fear cause us to place our survival over the lives of others? Will our desire for security cause us to surrender the very things that make us human—our freedom, our relationships, our compassion, our capacity to wonder, our responsibility for one another?

Or will we remember that we are creatures before we are consumers, neighbours before we are competitors, and children of God above all else?

This is where our Christian response to AI must necessarily begin. Not with panic. Not with pretending that the risks aren't real and not with blind optimism that everything will somehow work itself out, but with responsibility. Yes, we should ask hard questions. We should insist that powerful technologies be developed responsibly and that those ‘guardrails’ and safety measures be mandated. We should care about the people whose lives and livelihoods are affected by water abuse for data centres. We should refuse to become lazily reliant on technology and worship it like a false god simply because it is powerful. And we should always remember that having the ability to create something does not necessarily mean that we have the wisdom to use it well.

The Christian story has always been about learning how to use the gifts we have been given in ways that serve life rather than destroy it. That brings us back to the Season of Creation. We have been thinking about what it means to care for the world God has entrusted to us. Perhaps Artificial Intelligence gives us another way of thinking about creation. Human beings are creators. We make things. We imagine. We invent. We build.  Innovation and creativity are gifts from God, but every gift comes with responsibility.

Perhaps our calling isn't to become less human because we have created something that may be more powerful than anything we have created before. I argue that our calling is to become more fully human. In the midst of our existential concerns we are called to become more compassionate, more thoughtful, more responsible, more willing to ask not simply, Can we do this?  but Should we? and most importantly, more willing to love.

In the end, Christianity doesn't promise us a future in which nothing frightening will ever happen. Let’s face it, we are faced with the reality of our own individual mortality every day. If we get lost in what is called “death anxiety” or thanatophobia, we will be paralyzed with fear. God doesn’t promise that frightening things will never happen.

Exodus certainly doesn't promise that. Matthew doesn't promise that. God’s word in Scripture gives us something different. It tells us that when we are afraid of tomorrow, God gives us enough for today. We are given grace – God’s unconditional love - and we are called to share that love in these uncertain times.  Love breeds hope.

I don't know whether AI will change the world for the better. I don't know whether it will create dangers we haven't yet imagined and I certainly don't know what the next decade will bring, but I do know this:  Whatever the future holds, we do not face it as people who have to save ourselves. We face it as people who belong to God. If the world is going to be saved, it will not be saved by becoming more powerful – it will be saved by becoming more loving.

That is the thing no machine can ever truly be. No machine has our capacity to love, to care, to forgive, to look at another human being and say: You matter. I love you.

Perhaps that is our calling in this Season of Creation and in this strange, uncertain technological age: To use every gift we have been given — not to make ourselves gods, but to become more fully human. To accept, graciously and gratefully, our daily bread. To trust God's grace and to love one another.

Whatever technological power we may create, and whatever fears we may have about the future, the power of love is greater.  It is love that reminds us who we are. It is love that binds us together. It is love that allows us to face the unknown without being consumed by fear.

This is how we overcome our existential dread—not by becoming powerful enough to control the future, but by becoming loving enough to face it, as people of God, together.

Amen.