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Tony Payne: Like just about every other educational institution these days, here at Moore College, we've been thinking about the rise and spread of generative AI and what it means for education—what it means for our students and for us as lecturers, for that matter. And one thing we've been determined to do as we think about AI is not to do it just pragmatically, as in how could we make best use of this new technology while avoiding its pitfalls—that kind of thinking—but to think about what generative AI means theologically and morally: how it relates to what we believe human personhood is, and intelligence and mind is, on the basis of God's revelation to us of what all these things mean in Christ. The theological and moral meaning of AI and its rise—that's our topic on this week's episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast.

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Well, hello again. I'm Tony Payne. Welcome to another edition of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast. It's great to have you with us again.

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And today, I'm talking to Alastair Roberts. And Alastair is a name that you may not know. Alastair, tell us a little bit about who you are. Alastair Roberts: Thank you for having me on.

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My name is Alastair Roberts. I divide my time between Stoke-on-Trent in the UK and Manhattan in New York. Tony Payne: Those are two very different places. Alastair Roberts: They really are!

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Yes, but. It is a strange alternation, but it works well for us. My wife is a fourth-generation New Yorker, and it's beginning to feel more of a home for me at the moment. So my work is for Davenant Hall.

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I teach for them. I teach for the Theopolis Institute. And then I also do my own work—most significantly over the last few years doing a chapter by chapter commentary on the Bible. Tony Payne: And for those Australian and other listeners who might not be familiar with Davenant and Theopolis, just a very quick summary.

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What sort of places are they? Alastair Roberts: Yes, the Davenant Institute mostly teaches online. I work for Davenant Hall, which is very much designed to provide courses for students who are doing it for credit, but also a lot of our students would be auditors. I generally teach in the Bible track.

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I teach things like biblical law. My current course that's about to start. Um, the Gospel of Luke is the one I've just finished. And then I've got various other courses coming up.

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I've taught on Psalms recently. Death and resurrection in the Old Testament. Various other subjects that have, in part, various common themes. But one of the common themes is typological or figural reading of Scripture.

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And for the Theopolis Institute, I teach; I am a participant in the podcast; and in various other ways, write for and am involved with their ministry. And so, Theopolis is very concerned to give people a grounding in Scripture and then show how that is related to Christian liturgy, and then how that flows out into the wider culture. That involves a lot of typological reading of Scripture and just exploration of we might call an interpretive maximalist approach to optical text. Tony Payne: Yeah, yeah.

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Fascinating. In some ways, I wish our conversation today might be about that, because talking about Scripture and how to read Scripture, and perhaps it will come out in the thing we're talking about today, and the way the web of meaning of Scripture kind of all interconnects with each other and generates meanings and interconnections it—be lovely to talk more about that. But our topic today is going to be artificial intelligence or generative AI.

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I know that you're here partly to give a talk on this with Rory Schreiner over in Western Australia. And so, while you're here in Sydney with us at Moore College, I thought it was an ideal opportunity to talk to you about that subject, because it's one that we're all thinking about. Here at Moore College at the moment, we're certainly thinking about, like all educational institutions, what does it mean for artificial intelligence to be part of the reality of students' lives? It will be, to some extent.

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How do we manage it? How does it affect education? Should we utilise it? In what manner should we utilise it?

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Is it dangerous? How is it dangerous? And I know you've been thinking quite a lot about this, and about technology more generally and its effect on us and how we interact with it. And I suppose I want to begin by asking what do you think AI actually is?

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'Cause it's something that I've thought about quite a bit as well, and it's not the most straightforward question to answer. What are we dealing with when we're dealing with AI, do you think? Alastair Roberts: It's definitely not the most straightforward question to answer—in part, because many of the things that we're most interested in talking about when we're talking about AI are just part of a much bigger cluster of things that could be named as AI. So you mentioned GenAI earlier on, which is not AI in the broader sense of the term, but specific case: we Might think about the way that something like Alphafold—considering the ways that proteins are formed—that's AI.

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We don't tend to get exercised about that in the same way as we might about some form of AI that is counselling people or writing their essays for them. There are forms of AI that will be used in a host of different applications that we wouldn't bat an eyelid at. So I think at the very outset, we need to recognise just the sheer range of things that we're referring to. There are forms of activities, forms of texts, cultural objects that have an AI-like quality to them.

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Tony Payne: Yeah. Alastair Roberts: I think, for instance, of the work of some artists that feels almost like the creations of generative AI in having such a derivative or procedural character that this specific object is lost beneath this hyper-palatable replication that seems to constantly follow the same script. And there are a myriad different replications of the same sort of thing. So an example would be the cottages of Thomas Kinkade, where there's a hyper-palatable image, the shining light of the cottage that seems like it might be on fire within, but it's just very bright.

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And it's a presentation of this bucolic scene— Tony Payne: Yes. Alastair Roberts: —that is really nowhere in particular, but yet— Tony Payne: It's no particular object or place.

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Alastair Roberts: Exactly. Tony Payne: It's a kind of artificial place. Alastair Roberts: And it really, as those are multiplied, a myriad different presentations of cottages within his art, and then those who have formed similar kinds of art. And that's before the invention of AI.

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When AI comes along, it has something of a similar character. And there's maybe a great uncannying of society that we experience. But it's not without predecessors. And I think also of some of the ways in which a certain, almost boilerplate kind of speech has already colonised various parts of the academy, where people speak in ways that seem almost procedurally generated—where there's a

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certain type of ideology that people are speaking and thinking in terms of—and everything feels like a regurgitation of something that's never been fully metabolised, nor is that text really arising from deep reflection of their heart. It's a regurgitation of something that has not been internalised. And it's not coming up from the deep wellsprings of a human spirit that has incorporated the word. So I think it's helpful maybe to think about AI as bringing to light forms of the word that we've already encountered, but maybe not reflected upon what feels off about them?

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Tony Payne: Yes. Alastair Roberts: What's distinct about this form of speech, and it can occur at the highest levels of society, it can involve great artistic skill. Kinkade was not without artistic skill. But there's something about the way that these things are generated and the procedural character or the lack of an individual—a very defined voice, perhaps.

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Tony Payne: Would you say the lack of an individual mind? Alastair Roberts: We could say that. Tony Payne: We could say that. Alastair Roberts: Yeah.

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Tony Payne: It's interesting: I haven't thought of it this way before, but in some ways, if we talk about generative AI, the kind of AI that surveys and algorithmically consumes vast quantities of text, and on the basis of that vast consumption and collation and calibration, is able to generate text that approximates or simulates what someone would say if they were answering the question that you're putting to that engine—in other words, a whole series of phrases and texts and sentences of words that this particular engine has kind of averaged or consumed, and then generates text that's not actually in connection with anything real or any generative mind. It's just the reproduction of phrases, as it were.

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I'm kind of summarising. We meet that all the time in bureaucracy. Alastair Roberts: Yes. Tony Payne: You're quite right.

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It's exactly what bureaucracy is. Or in higher education or various—but we know that in the business world, and in politics, of course. Alastair Roberts: Yep. Tony Payne: We're not getting an actual interaction between a human mind and reality that is generating some kind of thought that comes out of a person and says something about what's real.

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We're getting an assemblage of phrases where a politician says, "Look, I just want to emphasise that I'm committed to moving Australia forward and acting on behalf of all its citizens and making sure that Queenslanders are safe." Out come the phrases, and you think you've said absolutely nothing. Alastair Roberts: Indeed. And those words are, in some ways—they've developed the skill of being a procedural generator of text— Tony Payne: Of text.

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Alastair Roberts: —that says nothing, and there's no need for them to reflect deeply upon the meaning of the words that they're saying. Tony Payne: And in a way, just as we would say, that doesn't really, in our mind, constitute intelligence. It's just the generating of text that we think someone wants to hear. Would you say therefore that giving the name "intelligence"—artificial intelligence—so, say, generative AI is a helpful usage or potentially a masking kind of usage?

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I mean, what would you say? Is it intelligent? Alastair Roberts: I think that's an unhelpful way to think about it. There's maybe something behaviouristic about it.

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Tony Payne: Hmm. Alastair Roberts: That's the way that some people have modelled intelligence, I think, quite wrongly. And yet, behaviouralism can tell us a lot about how human beings actually act, because a lot of the things that we do could be explained within some behaviouralistic framework where we see ourselves acting almost stimulus and response— Tony Payne: Yes.

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Alastair Roberts: —some stimulus, and then we generate something that responds to that in a way that seems fitting to the circumstance. But there's no sense of deep reflection. A lot of our speech is actually more behaviouralistic. When someone greets you, you respond almost instinctively with your own greeting.

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There's not a process of deep reflection upon words. Tony Payne: Mm-hmm. Alastair Roberts: And a lot of our speech is phatic speech that's designed more for bonding or it's designed not to convey actual inf—when someone discusses the weather with you, they're not really searching for information or understanding or wisdom. They're just wanting to bond.

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And a lot of our phatic speech has the character of something that might be procedurally generated or behaviouristic in character. Whereas when we're talking about human intelligence, I think maybe we can reflect upon the way that Scripture talks about the wise man as opposed to the fool. The fool babbles. The fool acts or speaks in a manner that is without reflection.

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Things don't arise from the wellspring of the heart, which has meditated upon things. The fool speaks very glibly and easily, and words just babble forth out of his mouth without actually being weighed or being considered. You might think also about the way that the speech of the fool is described as something that is almost behaviouralistic, where the liar breathes forth lies. The liar doesn't lie because he's really thinking about lying.

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He lies because he's a liar, and he will lie even when he's not thinking about lying, because that's the sort of person that he is. Whereas the wise man within Scripture, there's a lot of emphasis upon the connection of the heart and speech— Tony Payne: Yes. Alastair Roberts: —that the word has taken up resident within the wise man's heart as he's reflected upon God's truth.

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He's internalised the word of the Lord, starting with the fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom, and then as that word has taken up residence within his heart and he reflects upon it, then when he speaks, he speaks with wisdom the words that are appropriate to that season. And those words have a very different character to the words of the fool—in certain contexts, pass for the words of the wise man. They may be the same words, but there's a different character. Maybe we might think about it as the difference between, say, artificial crab meat and actual crab meat: you may taste the artificial crab meat and it may taste exactly the same as the actual crab meat, but the ingredients are very different.

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Tony Payne: Mm. Alastair Roberts: And the quality of the food that you're eating and how good it might be for you, likewise. And so, when we think about artificial intelligence, it maybe gives a simulation of those things which we'd typically associate with human beings as distinctive productions of human reflection—words and texts, and maybe images that have been created. And yet, that semblance is formed with very different ingredients.

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It's formed in this procedural way. It's formed in a way—maybe a model of human minds that is aggregating, as you say, this vast quantity of material that has been produced by human minds. And then within that vast quantity of material, recognising patterns that enable the model to generate behaviouralistically in a very complicated way—far more complex than most human beings. Some likely response with some novel prompt.

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And it's maybe challenging to us that the human mind can be modelled in such a way. But it is a model. It's maybe like the way that the mirror can present your image, and your image can move in a way that seems lifelike, but it's not— Tony Payne: It's not you.

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Alastair Roberts: —your image. It's not you. You can maybe misrecognise the image as yourself in certain circumstances. But really, it is a different sort of thing entirely.

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Tony Payne: Yes. AI is looking into an interactive mirror. That's an interesting image, isn't it? It strikes me too, from what you're saying about the wise man and wisdom, that the reason the wise man is wise—certainly in Proverbs and more broadly—is that he's understood reality in a profound way.

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There's a foundation to his reflection in his heart, which is of course the fear of Yahweh—the fear of the Lord—as the sovereign creator and guider of all things. And so, the wise man relates to something real. He relates to Yahweh as real and to the creation as real, and has come to understand something about how that creation functions and fits—what's good within that creation. How those things are related together.

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What the industrious person does and why that works. And there's something about the nature of the world in his or her interaction with and sense relation to that world in hearing, touching, working, tasting, seeing that world as a real, good reality created by God—that seems to be essential to his wisdom. Alastair Roberts: Yes. Tony Payne: And that's obviously something that an artificial intelligence has now access to, apart from what texts it reads or consumes—that actual people have sensed and written.

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Alastair Roberts: You can maybe think about artificial intelligence in terms of wisdom as something that testifies in part to the external form of wisdom—that wisdom is part of the structure of reality. And as we learn wisdom, we're learning something about the nature of reality. The idea of the logos, for instance, is a principle of rationality within the creation in Greek thought and the way that Christ is, in many ways, a fulfilment of that. Tony Payne: Yes.

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Alastair Roberts: But ultimately, I think, better understood in terms of the principle of wisdom that we find in places like Proverbs 8. That principle is one that is in the world. It's not just in the human mind that's imposed upon a world that's without a rationality. The world is fitted for the human mind to think rationally about, because there is a rational order to the creation.

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And so, maybe the fact that our minds are so suited for this externalisation in this more objective simulated form is related, in part, to the character of wisdom. But beyond that, there is in Scripture, I think, a great emphasis upon the relationship of the human being with the word is unique. Tony Payne: Mm-hmm. Alastair Roberts: We start off with the law of God as an external thing that's addressed to the people of God, to which they give their assent—the "amen" in the curses of the covenant, for instance, or elsewhere.

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And then the charge is to meditate upon the law of God: somehow to internalise this in memory and in meditation, and then to fulfil the law in love—to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. When you move further in Scripture, what does that look like? And it seems to me the answer is given to us in texts like the Psalms: it's the man who meditates upon the law of God day and light. He's like a tree planted by the streams of water in Psalm 1, the introductory Psalm.

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Or elsewhere, Psalm 19: the description of the law as the object of delight, and that which gives light corresponds with the heavens, for instance, that declare the glory of God. Or Psalm 119 as this deep, extended acrostic meditation upon the law of God and how it is his various judgements and precepts, and how they give light and understanding of the world. So within the Psalms, there's this movement of the text from this external word that's primarily encountered in the second person form in the imperative, to a word that's been internalised, and desire and delight and understanding and meditation and in just metabolisation—that the word is now part of you, or "Your law is in my heart" in Psalm 40.

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Go into the wisdom literature and it—here's something that develops even further. The Book of Proverbs and elsewhere describes the teaching of God as something that the wise man has in his understanding. He understands the principles of jurisprudence that he's learned from a book like Deuteronomy, reflecting on the interplay between the core principles of the law and the expanded case law that we see in chapters 6-26, for instance. Then that principle is internalised as in the duty of the king to meditate upon the law day and night.

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You see it as something that enlightens the eyes of the wise man. So he can look into the world and make judgements concerning things. Tony Payne: Hmm. Alastair Roberts: Go into the prophetic literature and the word of God is related to in a different way still.

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The word of God is that which enables Jeremiah to speak in a way that tears down kingdoms and plants them and builds them up. Or the words that are placed in the mouth of the prophet Ezekiel as he eats the scroll. Or the way that the lips of the prophet Isaiah are touched with the burning coal from the altar. In each of these cases, God gives his word to us not merely as an authoritative word over against us, to which we submit—not merely as a word that we metabolise and understand in meditation and delight and desire and the various other forms of metabolisation that we see in the Psalms.

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But also in the way that we have been given authority to speak with God's word. God has lit our tongues so that we might speak with fiery tongues, as in the day of Pentecost. Now that is a biblical account of the relationship between the human being and the Word that presents the human being as the primary vehicle of the Word. Ultimately, of course, Christ is the Word made flesh, and there's something fitting that Christ can take human flesh as the vehicle of the Word that does not apply to mere technology.

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Human beings are more than the bearer of the Word is the physical text of the book might be. The human being can not merely bear the text of a Psalm written down, but can actually pray that. The human being can embody and have the Word written within their heart, as the promise of the new covenant declares. And so, the way that we think about the text can often be defined by the sense that human beings are generators of texts and that the primary home of the text is the objective textual object—the book, the digital text, for instance, that you have in your phone or some other textual object.

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And of course, when we started to think about the text in that way, AI, which can generate text often in ways that are confused for human generated text, and can maybe do it with a facility that human beings lack— Tony Payne: Mm mm. Alastair Roberts: —human beings can feel less than this new technology. Tony Payne: Yeah.

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Alastair Roberts: But AI can't bear the text in the way that the human being can. And so, the human being, when we understand it scripturally, is the primary bearer of text. And that, it seems to me, is just a biblical insight about the text—what Scripture is—that it's supposed to take up residence within the life of the church—that the purpose of Scripture all the time is moving towards this metabolisation in the people of God that's made possible, ultimately, by the incarnation of the Word.

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Tony Payne: Yeah. Alastair Roberts: And then the Word taking flesh, not merely in the womb of Mary, but in the body of the church, and as our flesh is conscripted by the word of God capital W, we become bearers of Scripture in a new way. And that, it seems to me, gives us a sense of something that cannot be replicated or simulated or replaced by artificial intelligence. And that understanding of the relationship between the human being and the Word, and the primary location of the Word, is maybe an issue that goes all the way back.

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If you read Plato's discussion of writing, for instance, it's there already: he sees this tension between the text, which can remind— Tony Payne: Yes. Alastair Roberts: —but cannot perform the task of memory. Tony Payne: Yes.

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He's worried, in that dialogue. He's worried—or the king—he's worried that the invention of writing will sap the ability of humans to remember. And so, we read that, we see that—well, we read it, interestingly. We read that and we go, "Oh, don't be silly. It never did." But in fact, it did.

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Alastair Roberts: Yeah. Tony Payne: And writing and text does change the way we assimilate the word within ourselves and hold it within our minds. And this is something that a lot of people point out with respect to AI, just at an exponentially larger and greater level, that in a sense, the outsourcing of thinking—the outsourcing of the process of reading and trawling and understanding and inhabiting some text in order to understand—that forms things in our minds as we do that, well, those connections start growing.

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The outsourcing of that process to some device that can simulate it, and do it far more quickly and easily than we can, means we lose our ability to remember what to think. Alastair Roberts: I think this is also something that goes back to a number of earlier developments as we're just talking about with writing. This is implicit in some of these earlier technologies that present us with something that's really helpful. Writing: we would not really function without writing.

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Writing is the means by which we form our thinking in a great many respects. We'd never be without it. God gave us a written text. Tony Payne: A Scripture.

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Yeah. Alastair Roberts: And that matters. And yet, there is always a danger that a certain era of understanding about where the text primarily is supposed to reside, waiting for the development of something like AI, have an effect upon our understanding that can be catastrophic. Whereas in these earlier forms, much less so.

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Tony Payne: Mm. Alastair Roberts: If we think about the purpose, for instance—I give this example quite often: where is the primary home of the Shakespearean play? Is it a book that is on the shelf that you pull down—maybe you can study in a high school English class, or is it the script that is memorised and then performed upon the stage? Now you always need the script over against that to correct and to challenge those who are performing it to make sure, first of all, that they've got the actual script.

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Tony Payne: It's still authoritative as a script. Alastair Roberts: It is, and it stands over against the practice in a way that can correct it. And yet, the purpose of that script is performance. Tony Payne: Is performance.

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Yes. Alastair Roberts: Is that it might be performed. Tony Payne: Known and performed, as you say. Alastair Roberts: And that's the purpose, it seems to me, of Scripture—that we can so often forget when we think that the home of Scripture is just your Bible.

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Tony Payne: It's in that book over there. Yep. Alastair Roberts: Yep. Whereas within the worship and life of the church, the purpose, again and again, I think, is given this more incarnational form.

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First of all, of course, in the Word taking flesh in Jesus Christ. But beyond that, in the Word conscripting the people of God as bearers of the Word. Tony Payne: Mm. Alastair Roberts: So for instance, in Ephesians 5, "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs."

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Tony Payne: Colossians 3. But that's all right. I know what you mean. Alastair Roberts: Colossians 3.

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Ephesians 5 is the "Be filled with the Holy Spirit"— Tony Payne: "—and then speak." Alastair Roberts: They're the same. Tony Payne: Yes, very similar.

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Alastair Roberts: They're parallel texts. Tony Payne: Yes, Alastair Roberts: yes. So yeah, Colossians 3:17.

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These texts, I think, present us with the psalms, in that case, but I think it's a principle that applies more broadly— Tony Payne: Yeah. Alastair Roberts: —That the Word within the life of the church is not merely something that we're studying as this text that resides outside of us, but something to be metabolised and to be experienced, not merely as something that we're reflecting upon in this very objective way. but words that give us authority, for instance.

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When you experience something like the absolution within worship, it's not just a theological reflection upon the doctrine of forgiveness; it's the actual expression of that within a speech act. And that's really what we're called to do. We're called not merely to read the psalms, but to sing and to pray them as worship and petition and all these sorts of things. And so for me, many of the things that we're dealing with in AI can be thought of as connecting with earlier developments and maybe alerting us to missteps that preceded it that have made it very hard for us to respond to

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this novel technology in a way that's wise and recognising its true nature and, more importantly, what it is not. Tony Payne: We know that the gospel of Jesus is transformative. It transforms our minds and our hearts and our lives. But can it transform our daily work?

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This has been a disturbing question for many Christians in recent times. We often struggle to connect the realities of the workplace with all their complications with Christ—with the reality of Christ in our lives as his people. Now Simon Flinders and Paul Grimmond have recently published a book on precisely this question, and on Wednesday 29th July, they'll be recording a live episode of the Centre for Christian Living podcast with me, Tony Payne. We'd love it if you'd join us at this live podcast recording at Moore College for a lively evening of input and conversation about this important topic.

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That's "Transforming work" with Simon Flinders and Paul Grimmond in conversation with Tony Payne, a live podcast recording on Wednesday 29th July here at Moore College. You can find out more and register on the Centre for Christian Living website: that's ccl.moore.edu.au. And now, let's get back to our program. It's really interesting: as you're talking, the thought that it's sparking off in my mind is you're talking about how our tendency to disconnect the home of the word from within ourselves and to locate it outside ourselves makes this development

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a natural development as it were, but a surprising and startling one, because of its scale and its impressive kind of power. It's also, in a sense, exactly the kind of thing that a Post-Enlightenment society would come up with, if I can put it that way—a society that's become quite used to the idea that words aren't intrinsically connected with things. They're words: they're a set of conventions, and we impose them, as it were, on the world. It's almost as if the world is full of real things that we come to discover and to interact with via language and words so that the word has a home within us.

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But as we speak and think our words, it actually relates to some real reality that we sense and experience and love or hate—that we are in touch with. In a Post-Enlightenment/Modernist/Postmodern/Late Modernist—whatever stage we find ourselves in, that idea of an objective reality beyond ourselves that invites our understanding, as opposed to a landscape in which we live and which we can name and talk about, really, with any words we want to name and talk about—that the words create the reality, as opposed to responding to the reality—that's a society within which the idea that an algorithm could simply create the words and simulate the words—generate the words—why not think about those words as just exactly the same or that kind of generation of text as

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being any different or any other than the arbitrary generation of text we come up with to describe this blank reality that we live in? It seems to me to come out of a subjectivist view of reality or the turn-to-the-subject view of reality. It's the kind of society which would come up with a machine to generate words that have no connection with reality, if I can put it that way. Alastair Roberts: Yeah.

00:30:53.480 - 00:31:04.880

So you may think about this also in terms of a society that's built so much around efficiency— Tony Payne: Yes. Alastair Roberts: —and a sort of need to abstract and depersonalise. Tony Payne: Mm.

00:31:04.940 - 00:31:26.200

Alastair Roberts: And to create a sort of script according to which society operates. And the degree to which you can automate that script and subject human beings to that script. Tony Payne: Yeah. Alastair Roberts: It's—already a significant degree of our lives is a highly autonomous scripted reality.

00:31:26.440 - 00:32:00.880

The economy and other things are designed to make us interchangeable in various ways to operate according to principles that are not those principles that are more distinctively human—those things that are customary, those things that are traditional, those things that are particular to a specific context of life and other things. It's those things that can be optimised, rendered ultimately efficient, rationalised, truly scripted. That provides incredible power, and we've realised the power of scripted and rationalised reality.

00:32:01.210 - 00:32:14.240

And we've subjected ourselves to that in a great many respects. Law is a great example of this. Law is a sort of scripting of society. And there is always a danger that law takes on something of an autonomous character—

00:32:14.250 - 00:32:39.810

Tony Payne: Yeah, yeah. Alastair Roberts: —relative to us. You might think about the decree of Darius that ends up being a means that's used by the high-up officials as a sort of internal coup to remove Daniel from his office and to accuse him of undermining the king's decree when he can be removed from office with the use of this law that's crafted. The king puts out this word thinking that he's in charge of it.

00:32:40.050 - 00:32:59.220

But that law comes back to bite him. Tony Payne: Yeah. Alastair Roberts: The law that is unbreakable is the law of the Medes and the Persians—actually ends up having a sort of autonomous character. And in the same way, I think what we see in that sort of case—what we see in the scripts that run our society—we increasingly become subject to these scripts.

00:32:59.280 - 00:33:33.340

Tony Payne: Hmm. Alastair Roberts: Whether that's the script of system of production, the way in which we develop and form people within institutions that are designed to make them very much interchangeable within different structures and systems and other things within our society and its economy, or whether we think about the scripting of relations according to economic transactions, in all of these ways, we've scripted a lot of human life. And AI is a sort of optimisation and increasing of that scripting logic.

00:33:33.430 - 00:33:56.500

Tony Payne: Yeah. Alastair Roberts: And we are increasingly subjected to an autonomous word that we no longer exercise power over, but it can exercise power over us. And so, I think that sort of challenge is one—again, we struggle to articulate what's going on. It can help maybe to relate it to things like law, which is a scripting that has been very familiar.

00:33:56.500 - 00:34:18.040

Tony Payne: Yeah. Alastair Roberts: We've had that from the very beginning. Tony Payne: We're all familiar with that sense of society and of different structures and activities within society changing us, forming us, moulding us into a certain kind of way of thinking and acting that we don't have much choice except just to submit to, or we find ourselves submitting to it. And I guess that's one of the next questions I was interested to ask you as you've thought about AI.

00:34:18.760 - 00:34:32.530

We think of it, of course, as a technology, like we tend to do with much technology. We tend to think of it just as a tool that we can use well or not use well. It's sort of in our power and we can decide how we're going to use it. But of course, technology's not quite like that.

00:34:32.530 - 00:34:49.080

A technology uses us as much as we use it. It changes us and moulds us. In what sort of ways do you think—especially generative AI, that the AI that many people are now grappling with is Chat GPT and Claude and so on. In what way does it use us or change us or form us, do you think?

00:34:49.380 - 00:35:03.590

Alastair Roberts: Yes. I think it's helpful when we're talking about technology, to pay attention. Technology is a more general theme is the subject of some analysis. You might think about Heidegger's question concerning technology: texts like that is reflecting upon technology.

00:35:03.590 - 00:35:08.000

Tony Payne: Yes. Alastair Roberts: A broader sense. Tony Payne: There's a long discussion of which this is one part. Yes.

00:35:08.030 - 00:35:25.310

Alastair Roberts: Yes. So—or someone like Ellul in his discussion of technique and that broader principle of which, what we call technology is one expression. But different technologies differ. There are technologies that are profoundly powerful that aren't necessarily very complex.

00:35:25.900 - 00:35:38.320

One of the most powerful technologies of all is, we discussed earlier: the mirror. And yet the mirror is not a particularly complex technology. But it is a technology through which we form our concept of self. Tony Payne: Hmm.

00:35:38.710 - 00:36:09.940

Alastair Roberts: As we see ourselves in the mirror, once we've got over the initial shock first thing in the morning, we have a sense of who we are—how we appear to others. And we comport ourselves relative to that image that we see in the mirror. Social media can function in a similar way where we are forming representations of ourselves with which we identify ourselves, and as a result, that image becomes constitutive of our sense of who we are. AI is maybe an extension of that sort of intimate technology—

00:36:10.060 - 00:36:46.840

Tony Payne: Mm-hmm. Alastair Roberts: —Where increasingly, it's taking the place of one of the most intimate things of all: our speech and our capacity to express ourselves. As we outsource that to an algorithm or some other sort of technology, we can leave ourselves, well, at least, lacking in a lot of the speech that we would formally have enjoyed, even if not completely mute. We've outsourced things that have historically been seen as constitutive of the person: the character of speech, the ability to occupy a specific unique position within a conversation.

00:36:47.410 - 00:37:28.600

And the more that we offload those sorts of cognitive tasks or the roles, more broadly, onto machines, we can end up attenuating the human. And so, I think the struggle increasingly is thinking about what it means to be distinctively human in relationship to these technologies that purport to do many of the things that we've hitherto thought were distinctive to us. And there, I think, the concept that we just use it, rather than developing a dependence upon it, increasingly as you're using these technologies, we're going to be atrophying some of our abilities to act without them. Tony Payne: Yes.

00:37:28.870 - 00:38:04.070

Alastair Roberts: And we'll be damaging the pipeline, as it were, to—maybe not the most fortuitous way to put it, but the way that we form ourselves to be the sorts of people who could do the things that we're now offloading to various forms of generative AI. The child, for instance, that learns how to draw for themselves: once they've got this image in their head that they want to express, when that child can just get AI to generate that image for them, what's lost in the process? Tony Payne: Mm-hmm. Alastair Roberts: Well, maybe the first few rungs of the ladder that would lead them to become a gifted artist.

00:38:04.820 - 00:38:30.210

And so, I think a tool is not just something that we can stand over against. Or certainly the relationship that we have with AI is not the same as the relationship we might have with a spade. Tony Payne: Mm. Alastair Roberts: The spade, for instance, is a technology that conscripts your body to a relationship with the earth, where your body is intimately related to that thing that's being performed upon the earth.

00:38:30.670 - 00:38:41.920

Hannah Arendt discusses a lot of this stuff in the human condition. Whereas modern technology intermediates itself— Tony Payne: Yes. Alastair Roberts: —Between us and the world, and AI increasingly so.

00:38:41.940 - 00:39:09.890

Now we've already experienced this in a pronounced way as we've mediated our relationship with the world through the spectacle and the screen. But AI can create simulations that increasingly don't just mediate the relationship with a reality, but replace that reality and even efface that reality. Tony Payne: Yeah. Alastair Roberts: And so I think the idea that it's just a tool that's neutral and just depends upon use, it has an inbuilt tendency to it.

00:39:10.320 - 00:39:38.550

It has an inbuilt set—or certainly as it becomes typical within society and widely used, there are certain use cases that are very hard to resist. You may even resist these at the individual level. But the cultural and societal tendencies are virtually irresistible on scale. Likewise, a technology that is initially adopted may have a certain malleability to different sorts of society.

00:39:38.550 - 00:40:07.990

So if you gave the same technology to an Amish community—you gave that same technology to a community of people in Silicon Valley—they could shape the technology very differently, because they have different norms for— Tony Payne: And it would shape them differently, no doubt. Alastair Roberts: Exactly. But then there's a period of time after which they've developed these practices around it, that, as it were, what was formally a bit more fluid is like concrete that has hardened, and now it's very difficult to resist the forms of use and application—

00:40:07.990 - 00:40:34.750

Tony Payne: Yes. Alastair Roberts: —that have become customary. Tony Payne: We've seen this, and we've experienced it already in a very recent case study, in a sense, in our history, which is the way the smartphone has become this normalised part of our structure—how it conscripts and scripts our life in certain ways that initially were, "Hey, try this. It will enable you to do this fantastic thing and it will save you having to do this other thing you don't want to do. And it offers you capacities and it offers to save you time or save you labour."

00:40:34.980 - 00:40:52.960

But over time, as you say, it so solidifies into a cultural practice that there are now certain things that I can no longer do. So I no longer have a sense of direction—an innate sense of direction. I have to follow the GPS instructions. I can't just have a sense of the city in my head as I once did.

00:40:53.270 - 00:41:05.870

And I actually can't get that anymore: I can't buy a street directory anymore. So there's certain things you won't be able to have or do. And then there'll be certain things that you'll necessarily have to do. I'll have to use the GPS.

00:41:06.320 - 00:41:19.710

I'll have to have a phone so I can sign into wherever I'm signing in. There's no other way of signing in except scanning this QR code. And so, as you say, even if you might be personally resistant at various levels, there's a social weight— Alastair Roberts: Yep.

00:41:19.770 - 00:41:33.630

Tony Payne: —that, in the end, conforms us to a certain way of being that the technology has shaped the whole society to be. Alastair Roberts: We might think about different forms of regulation that society's wrestling with—the affordances of these new technologies. Tony Payne: Yes. Alastair Roberts: And the dangers that come with those.

00:41:34.060 - 00:42:12.530

And also with the tendencies that are just taken for granted in the technology. So for instance, I think it was in Germany, recent legislation about AI that spreads false information—that the company is liable for it—not just the person who has generated it and has published it, but the company itself behind the AI. Now, under different circumstances, that might seem commonsensical to us. But because we've got the AI and we've assumed, okay, it has these limitations: it's a novel, strange form of speech, and we can't hold it accountable in the ways that we formally held things accountable.

00:42:12.890 - 00:42:34.890

We just take for granted that that seems like a strange way to regulate it. Tony Payne: Mm-hmm. Alastair Roberts: Because we've just granted that, of course, you should hold a company accountable for something false that is generated by their AI. You might think also about the recent British questions about regulating access to social media to under 16s.

00:42:34.940 - 00:42:39.140

Tony Payne: Well, we've had that, of course. we've done that here, of course. Alastair Roberts: Which requires regulation at the device level. Tony Payne: Yeah.

00:42:39.380 - 00:42:56.190

Alastair Roberts: So you have to regulate this relative to—every single person needs to have their access regulated, connected to their passport or some other— Tony Payne: Right. Alastair Roberts: —Proof of their identity and their age. The surveillance that that can open up is quite radical.

00:42:56.490 - 00:43:19.400

And yet, wrestling with the new technology and the fact that it exposes young children to obscene material, on the other hand, people can treat that as commonsensical. Why would you not leave the internet, this sort of wild west situation? Because we can have free speech, then. And so, the technology presents these sorts of dilemmas.

00:43:19.610 - 00:43:55.180

Either side seems pretty horrific in various ways. And AI increasingly, I think, accelerates this sense of, on the one hand, this technology gives us immense freedom in certain respects, and in other respects, it presents us with increasing and accelerating crises that other people might use that supposed freedom in ways that hurt or harm society. And so, we need to develop more and more regulation. It's very difficult to navigate those sorts of things, and yet it's built into the technology itself that it will present us with these sorts of dilemmas.

00:43:55.600 - 00:44:28.590

Tony Payne: If I can bounce onto how we might respond to this theologically as Christians—Christian individuals and Christian organisations—I was saying earlier on, it's something, of course, that Moore College, like all educational institutions, is grappling with as to what sort of response. And part of what we've been saying is that at one level, individual response is important. And yet, there will be a social and cultural pressure in which we'll be, in a sense, boxed into certain options just by the prevailing power of the spreading technology. Theologically, how do we think about it, if I can put it this way, as a kind of godly resistance?

00:44:28.590 - 00:44:54.460

If we see that AI has the potential to be quite harmful and, in many ways, to disrupt the flourishing of human beings and human mind and human love and human relationships, how do we live in a world that's inevitably gonna have AI and yet be faithful, sane, human, relational, intelligent people of mind within that context? Have you thoughts on that? Alastair Roberts: Yes.

00:44:54.460 - 00:45:05.470

It's perhaps the big question. Maybe starting with an understanding of the Word and human beings unique relationship with the Word. Tony Payne: Mm-hmm. Alastair Roberts: That would be one of the places to start.

00:45:05.740 - 00:45:22.850

Having at the heart of our life together and our Christian lives, contexts which are freed from the intermediation of technology. Tony Payne: Yes. Alastair Roberts: The gathering together, eating the supper together, the hearing of a human word. Tony Payne: Are you talking about church or home or both?

00:45:22.960 - 00:45:47.650

Alastair Roberts: Well, church, primarily, I think, but out from that also, the home. We might think about our engagement with Scripture as—there is always some degree of technological mediation in the fact that we're using a book. A book is a technology. And it's not just new technologies that are technologies: we can often use the term "technology" in a way that's restricted to those things that are novel, and we shouldn't.

00:45:47.770 - 00:46:22.810

But when we think about our relationship with each other, our relationship with the world, our relationship with the Word within the gathering of the people of God, there is a sort of downplaying and marginalising of those things that have become the intermediation of our entire experience in many—we're not primarily experiencing the world through screens, or ideally, we shouldn't be, in the context of the gathered worship of the people of God. Tony Payne: Oh, we should get you back for another podcast on the use of screens in the gathered congregation! Alastair Roberts: You should talk to my friend Brad East on the subject.

00:46:22.900 - 00:46:34.450

He has a book coming out in the next few months: The Screen-Free Church, which is superb. I highly recommend it. Tony Payne: Well, I will, because it's been a thought I've had for some time here—that our life is full of screens. Why do we need them in church?

00:46:34.480 - 00:46:40.450

Anyway, this is another question. Come back to where we are. Alastair Roberts: So the context of the church, I think, will be an important thing. Tony Payne: Yes.

00:46:40.520 - 00:47:15.670

Alastair Roberts: The raising of children in ways that protect them from the normalcy of mediation of the screen, mediation of artificial intelligence and just the colonisation of education with the artificial word—I think that will be crucial. That is a frontline issue. And so, being prepared to create and maintain contexts that are 100 per cent human for the raising of children, I think, will be important. And I think it will also be an area of Christian mission in the future.

00:47:16.120 - 00:47:57.160

People will feel, in the wider society, that we're being deluged with forms of technology that intrude upon and compromise the formation of children. And people will feel that primarily when they see their children, because they're very mindful of how their children are being formed. Maybe not thinking enough about, okay, we're forming ourselves in the same way. But that concern, I think, will give churches possibility to present an articulate understanding of our relationship with the Word; the human mediation of the body, which is often displaced; the mediation of the wise word that has been incorporated

00:47:57.160 - 00:48:43.630

and that's expressed within the specific context, not just the context-less world of social media or something like that—it will give, I think, the opportunity for a deeply Christian understanding of the Word, the world, technology, the body, et cetera, the place to function as a sort of ark where people who fear this deluge—who feel its effects upon their children, upon their homes, upon themselves—will encounter an alternative, or at least see the possibility of an alternative. There was a recent article in The Atlantic that discussed the fact that Christians have resources and vocabulary to speak about artificial intelligence that is lacking within the wider society. Tony Payne: Yeah, I've noticed this.

00:48:43.630 - 00:48:55.870

Yeah. Alastair Roberts: The author was observing the work, for instance, of some older writers like Ivan Illich or— Tony Payne: Mm-hmm. Alastair Roberts: —some more recent work by people like Michael Sacasas or Antón Barba-Kay.

00:48:56.320 - 00:49:27.330

Some of the great thinkers about technology are coming with a Christian vision. The recent papal encyclical is, I think, a flawed and limited example. But it's another way in which, I think, Christian voices are being heard in these debates as something of a breath of fresh air in the society where people lack the conceptual abilities to articulate and defend that which is distinctively human. Tony Payne: That's wonderful, Alastair, because, in many ways, that's what we offer in the Christian gospel, isn't it?

00:49:27.330 - 00:49:56.090

We offer an inbreaking Word from outside that restores us to be who we truly are as humans. And as we live that out as church, as Christians in our families and in our neighbourhood, as we live as Christ said in the world and abiding in him, but not of the world, we represent Christ in the world and we bring Christ to the world. And what a surprise that it might be Christ that would be the answer to our questions. Alastair Roberts: And the whole story of Scripture is about the fact that the Word has come to us.

00:49:56.540 - 00:50:38.150

The Word has come to us in a way that the Word can never come to some technology. The Word can never come to just a creature of man's hands in the way that it has come to us in Jesus Christ and in God's revelation more broadly, which, of course, culminates in Christ. And so as we celebrate and understand the centrality of Christ as the Word, I think we have certainly those ways in which the various technologies that are named by AI—we have, at least, a principle by which we can assess those. Do they in any way diminish the uniqueness of Christ and the meaning of the incarnation as the Word coming to us?

00:50:38.840 - 00:50:58.400

And as we begin to recognise the way that the word of God has taken up home in human flesh—that we are called to be a home for the Word— Tony Payne: —in flesh. Alastair Roberts: Exactly. As we have that at the heart, I think we have the resources to, on the one hand, accept certain uses of AI and appreciate them.

00:50:58.700 - 00:51:37.360

For instance, in development of new medicines or understanding how certain scientific realities function. And yet also being those who jealously guard those things that are specifically human—those things that render humanity made in the image of God fitting as bearers of the one who is the image of God. Tony Payne: Alastair, thanks so much for this conversation. It's been fascinating, wide-ranging, and dear listener, I hope you found it also stimulating to think about these new technologies that are challenging our lives in a way that's distinctively Christ-centered and biblical and starts from the Word and the Word made flesh.

00:51:37.360 - 00:52:03.860

Alastair Roberts, thanks so much for joining us. Alastair Roberts: Thank you. Tony Payne: Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of the Centre for Christian Living podcast from Moore College. For a whole lot more from the Centre for Christian Living, just head over to the CCL website—that's

00:52:07.840 - 00:52:43.480

ccl.moore.edu.au—where you will find a stack of resources, including every past podcast episode all the way back to 2017, videos from our live events and articles that we've published through the Centre. And while you're there on the website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax-deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre here at Moore College. We'd also love you to subscribe to the podcast and to leave a review so that people can discover our podcast and our other resources. And we always love and benefit from receiving your feedback and questions: please get in touch.

00:52:43.840 - 00:53:04.800

You can email us at ccl@moore.edu.au. Many thanks to Karen Beilharz from the Communications Team here at Moore College for all her work in transcribing and editing and producing this podcast, to James West for music, and to you, dear listeners, for joining us each week. Thank you for listening. I'm Tony Payne.

00:53:05.210 - 00:53:05.830

'Bye for now.