The great AI panic

A few weeks ago, a single quip on Twitter from a researcher at Anthropic with barely six weeks on the job went hyper-viral, warning that AI technology could kill us all by the end of the decade. It racked up over 150 million views. We are such a fear-dominated people and our fear hair-trigger setting is so sensitive that one quip became the major driver of the news cycle.

Christians, who should be the least fearful about all of this, have an opportunity to be a calming influence in these discussions because we start with the correct presuppositions. Both the AI hypesters and the doomers share the same flawed premise—that man can out-create God. If humanity cannot out-create God, then humanity cannot create anything greater than itself, whether for good or for evil. The Christian faith is clear that the only successor species to humanity is a resurrected humanity.

Much of this binary God-versus-devil language flows from Anthropic in particular. The company appears to hold the most messianic vision of the technology among major AI labs. Its name, drawn from the Greek anthropos for “man,” with the “ic” ending suggesting that their creation has the characteristic of being human, reflects a confused anthropology that treats AI as something fundamentally human. Its founder, Dario Amodei, and others at the company have spoken of AI in near-spiritual terms, even describing their work as tending to the “soul” of these systems.

Christians must reject this distorted anthropology at the root. If we reject Anthropic’s confused vision of AI as a quasi-human entity with a soul, we can also reject their utopian lie that “ye shall be as gods.” It’s also important to see the lie in their dystopian threats of AI as a successor species to humanity. Take the system off that pedestal and it becomes what it is: simply a product. Products raise ordinary questions. When should this one ship? Who should use it? What happens if a release is sloppy? Those questions matter.

That is closer to how many believers already treat it. Recent research from Barna found that practicing Christians use AI more often than Americans as a whole. People with skin in the game appear to be putting the tool to use. The professional Christian conversation has been much more anti-AI than the practice of the people in the churches. Cultural habits among thought leaders likely explain most of that gap: a taste for prophetic warning and a media climate that rewards alarm. Money may be having an effect as well. Organizations that want to slow AI have been making grants to religious groups and commentators who supply much of the criticism.

Once AI is taken off the metaphysical pedestal, we can return to more boring and useful commercial discourse about things like shipping, product liability, and safety features. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang put it bluntly this week: if you are not confident in a product’s function or safety, do not release it. Innovate fast, but stop a particular release if it is not ready. Economist and technology writer George Gilder made the same point in a recent interview with me: “It’s software.”

Even if one takes these extinction predictions seriously, forecasting human extinction decades in advance is laughably impossible. The future is hard enough to predict tomorrow, let alone ten or 20 years from now. But let’s run the extinction scenario anyway. There is no button labeled “Stop the world from building AI.” We can only stop the free world from building it. So our real-world choice is whether it will be developed primarily by a Maoist superpower with the deaths of some 30 million people on its ledger, or by the United States, which, for all its flaws, still maintains a significant vestige of belief in human dignity and the rule of law.

If Christians reject the flawed anthropology behind the fears, we are freed to receive new technological developments with gratitude and prudence. We should reject both the messianic hype and the apocalyptic fear mongering, recognizing that our hope rests not in technology, but in the God who is alone the divine Creator—and who has by nature put man at the pinnacle of creation, where he has nothing to fear from the lower order. As the Psalmist declares in Psalm 8: “You have made him a little lower than God and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet.”

The promise of Psalm 8 comes from God and was locked in by Jesus. Its truths cannot be broken. So keep calm and carry on to the glory of God.