The promise and peril of the digital age

Eighty years ago this month, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania unveiled what is considered the world’s first electronic computer, known as the ENIAC. Not only was the ENIAC 1,000 times faster than previous machines; it was the first machine to abandon cranks and shafts and rely on vacuum tubes and the flow of electrons. In other words, it was truly electronic. What’s more, it could solve multiple problems rather than a single task. Crucial to this innovation was the contribution of six female programmers.

Running the machine was still a chore, according to the University of Pennsylvania:

Because ENIAC lacked internal program storage, the programmers had to configure each computation manually. They stood between the machine’s 30-ton panels, rewiring plugboards and setting switches to route electric signals (pulses). They then “patched” the accumulators together with heavy cables, manually routing the flow of pulses—for example, from a multiplier to an accumulator and finally to a card puncher—to solve an equation.

ENIAC, like many of its successors, took up quite a bit of space, including 18,000 vacuum tubes that weighed 30 tons and took up 1,800 square feet. It was the precursor to the big computer centers built at places like University of Michigan and other campuses, where young computer engineers began working on ever more complex applications.

Today, something like the ENIAC seems like a relic from an ancient past. Your children’s throwaway wind-up toys likely have more processing power. Yet we should also be reminded of how young the digital age actually is and how fast innovation has happened in less than a century. We now live in a world where, with a small pocket device, one can communicate with the world, have food delivered, choose from a variety of entertainment options, and book travel anywhere in the world. What was once written about as science fiction a few generations ago is now reality.

I am in my late 40s and yet I can remember a time before the age of personal computers, before the internet, and before the smartphone. The day my dad bought a personal computer—complete with a dot matrix printer and a free trial of AOL—I thought we were as advanced as NASA. To my kids, that might as well have been the medieval era.

Christians should both celebrate the digital age and yet be sober about its impact. We rightly rejoice at the raw materials of God’s creation being fashioned into something new and wonderful by His image-bearers. This is a fulfillment of the mandate given in Genesis 1 to “subdue” the earth. We create and innovate in the image of a creating and innovating God.

At the same time, our creative work is often marred by the corruption of the Fall. Technology, often used to advance human flourishing, is also used as a weapon of dehumanization and death by those who oppose God. And we are increasingly aware of ways in which new technologies form and shape us in perverse ways. The same technology that allows people to access Christian education around the world and breaks through closed countries with gospel witness also allows terrorists to organize and entraps men in destructive pornography addiction. Today we are wrestling with both the promise and peril of artificial intelligence.

An age of innovation requires believers to be sober-minded and scriptural, yielding neither to a doomerism that finds false virtue in a previous, more primitive era, or succumbing to the false promises of the tech futurists. Discerning what is good, and true, and beautiful is essential for our moment.

Eight decades ago, those engineers and programmers at the University of Pennsylvania could not have imagined what their work would unleash. Nor can we envision what wonders and worries await our grandchildren at the end of this century.

What does remain constant is the unchanging character of God, who is not surprised by what emerges from our inventions. And He is guiding this rapidly changing and uncertain world toward a certain future, where “moths neither break through and steal” (Matthew 6:19) and where the mandate to create is no longer marked by corruption and decay.