What Should Christians Think About AI

And it seems as if there are just a constant barrage of headlines that address this topic.

And many of these headlines, to be honest, sound like something out of a science fiction novel or film.

In fact, it was September 29th that the New York Times ran an article saying, about one of the leading AI models.

Many of you are familiar with Claude, which is Anthropic's AI model.

And the headline of the New York Times article was, Is Claude Conscious? And the New York Times was investigating the fact that Anthropic, one of the leading frontier labs in AI development back in March, had invited a number of religious and philosophical leaders to their headquarters in San Francisco to consider the possibility of machine sentience and consciousness development.

and also the implications of that for morality.

In fact, in that article in the New York Times, they revealed the fact that part of the training for Claude includes a more than 80-page document known as the Soul Document, in which those programmers at Anthropic are trying to help the model, Claude, have an innate sense of morality there.

which of course raises all sorts of interesting questions.

It was on that same day, September 29th, that President Trump signed an executive order in which he officially renamed artificial intelligence superintelligence, and the executive order formally inaugurated the age of superintelligence, which of course, is an interesting marker on the historical timeline.

I will, though, for the rest of the evening, still be using the normal moniker AI for what is now deemed in government documents as S-I.

It was a little bit later in September than early October that a company called Artcraft released released an open source version of all of the Adobe products from Photoshop all the way to the other Adobe products that are in their creative suite.

A new entire set of free products called Artcraft are now available free of charge.

And it was an AI model that... essentially recreated all of the Adobe products from scratch and now offers those alternatives free of charge to anyone who wants them.

Adobe stock, as you might imagine, has plummeted.

And on October 6th, we had... 722, if I remember the number correctly, academic papers published by OpenAI using its newest version of ChatGPT.

in which ChatGPT solved some of the most difficult mathematical and scientific proofs.

And in doing so, computed in just a few hours, what they estimated would have required hundreds of years of human effort to solve.

All of this within less than a month.

And here we are talking about AI.

So the headlines are causing us to ask questions, questions about is it possible for AI to produce computers that are actually conscious? Questions about are we truly in an age of superintelligence? Part of the reason that President Trump wanted to rename it from artificial intelligence to superintelligence is is because he said artificial intelligence just sounds like it's simulating human intelligence, and he believes that there's much more happening.

It's a much more powerful tool.

We have significant software companies that are being challenged severely in the marketplace because of this developing new technology, and we have... old, previously thought almost insolvable scientific and mathematic proofs that are suddenly being solved in just a matter of hours.

Well, these kinds of headlines cause us to obviously take notice.

And initially, I had hoped to include a session on AI, a message on AI as part of the eschatology series.

But the reality is that AI is a bigger topic and doesn't quite entirely fit into that series.