... where the, that's gonna really blend us into the AI of screen versus community, and community is such an important part of Christianity all the way back to day one.

Right.

Well, I mean, one of the great promises of the internet is to be able to make it possible for us to connect with people at a distance, which is an amazing thing.

I mean, when I was 15 years old, we had AOL and, you know, the AOL Instant Messenger.

It was like the nonstop thing of talking to one another, and it was an amazing thing to me as a 15-year-old that I could talk to people all around the world instantly through typing to them, and it's only gotten better and better over time.

But at this point, I don't think there's a single person who attends by church for the first time that doesn't watch us on YouTube before they come.

It's kind of been said by a lot of people, and I think it's probably true at this point, that the front door of the church is YouTube at this point.

Now, getting to the ethics of AI, what is maybe your framework for what an ethical AI is? Especially since it's really, I would almost even say in the last year, where I think it's become a real concern for really everybody.

I'm sure there's so much more that could be said, and I'm wondering, assuming all that's true, nobody thinks AI should write your sermon for you, but what are the ways that you can help us to think maybe one layer deeper about this? Here are probably a few layers beneath, but help us to go from surface level to one or two

levels down.

Well, I do think having listened to you talk about this in the past, you are way ahead of the vast majority of people who are in pastoral ministry thinking about these things.

And so I would have to say I commend you for that.

I think that it's wise to consider what these tools are because they are radically reshaping everything in society, especially in the weird world that we live in, the Western industrial educated, you know, rich and democratic world that we live in in the West.

politics medicine economy industry you just go down the list and it's going to affect ministry significantly it already is whether people realize it or not so what i find fascinating about the discussion of you know don't let ai write your message which obviously i agree with But having sat on the board of both Enduring Word and Blue Letter Bible for a long time, I do know the usage patterns of these tools, and they increase substantially on Wednesday afternoons and on Saturday nights.

And I do know that there are plenty of people who just crib off of the tools there and are already lazily working on their messages.

So Psalm 8 asks the question, what is man? Where in scripture is the answer given?

Right

... came about by random chance and mutation over billions of years.

So if that's the case, then you have a, you have to have a naturalistic argument for what consciousness is.

For a lot of these people, they're what are called emergentists, which means they believe that consciousness emerges at a certain level of neurological complexity.

You know, at a certain level of neurons in the brain, then consciousness just kinda pops in there.

So for them, these technologies may become conscious or already are conscious.

And so the problem with the AI consciousness question, it, it really, it, it's raising the, the machine level up to human consciousness to say, "This machine is just like you because you're just a computation machine." And what it's doing is it's dragging human consciousness down to the level of the machine, and in so doing, it's diminishing the beauty of what consciousness actually is.

Yep.