Tomorrow's Next Week: February 17-21

Rebellion, Salvation, Liberation, and Building for the Future.

“Building is a sweet impoverishing.” —George Herbert

In his October post, “Machines of Loving Grace,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei imagined “How AI Could Transform the World for the Better.” This kind of optimistic outlook will be very familiar to anyone who has spent time in Silicon Valley.

That said, cracks have started to emerge in some of these utopian visions (Bitcoin being one symptom), especially when we watch billionaire leaders deploy their systems for their own benefit. When they—and we— find themselves faced with tipping the balance—ever so slightly—toward others or toward themselves, they will likely choose their own benefits first. What will it hurt? It’s so small. But a succession of small, selfish choices programmed into the tech—these harden into systems that benefit some first and impoverish others.

In earlier eras, these hard imbalances took the form of institutions, policies, and legislation, and they disempowered various groups along the way. You can certainly think of a few.

Of course, Jesus presented a different picture of power and poverty—he gave up all power, consistently choosing to benefit others over himself. And he did it all the way to the end. Leaving his throne above all creation, he descended and descended and descended, lower and lower, until he gave up his very body to be killed.

“Machines of Loving Grace” sounds like a hopeful note amid fears of tech dystopianism. But any such machine is built by “People of Loving Grace,” who, when faced with those small choices, when faced with tipping the balance toward self or others—ever so slightly—choose to follow Jesus down down down. Only then will they begin to build systems that lift others up up up.

Building such systems that impoverish ourselves can sound scary. “Will I have enough if I build systems that impoverish myself?” And if our hope is in the systems we build, then we are right to be afraid. But as Christians, we know our wealth does not rise and fall on our tech systems.

When Christian technologists trust that it is God from whom every good gift comes, then we can build in ways that impoverish ourselves. We can build machines of loving grace because our blessing and benefits come not from our tech, but from our God.

So when we build, our giving comes from God’s wealth to us, from the abundant lives we’ve received from God. In that light, with those gifts, our building becomes the systems of blessing, a flow from God’s abundant life through our own lives and into the lives of others.