Gareth Russell: Welcome and introduction

• Starting point: Gen 1v27 + John 1: God sent himself.
• The question isn’t ‘can AI serve the mission of God?’, instead ‘what kinds of people are we becoming as we build and use it?’
• With a AI there is a pull to abstraction, while discipleship is emboddied; so while AI can help assist the mission, it cannot be the mission - eg: it cannot weep this those who weep.
• We remember that the heart of mission is not what we build, but what God is doing in the world.

Joshua Seale and Yvonne Carlson

Éric Céléier: Artificial Intelligence // Divine Intelligence - Algorithm Meets the Spirit

HelloBible.ai

• Everything begins with the Spirit; before everything the Spirit of God was having - wisdom before creation (Gen 1v2)
• With the translation technology things that were closed off become accessible, while the Spirit makes it powerful.
• Creation is a series of instructions with output
• “The app opened the space, the Spirit filled up”
• Bezalel: art meets spirit
  • he crafted with art (artificial - made with art), and God filled him and it.
  • ==the tabernacle was an artificial space, filled with the Spirit, for divine encounters==
• if the people are filled with the spirit as they work, what might God do with that?
  • innovation becomes intercession
  • code becomes canvas
  • technology becomes a temple
  • “Spirit, inspire my work today”
  • Make space for his presence, even in the code.
• if the lord is not building the house, the builders labour in vain
• This means that we’re here for more than optimisation and monetisation.

Reflection:
FT have space for lament, this is helpful. Let the Spirit shape your affections, what you love, what you long for– then build out of what God has put on your heart. If you don’t have that, maybe that’s the place to start praying into.
We’ve got to be careful about building something and expecting God to bless it– it’s not a case of building a box and then hoping God will fill it.

Nat Wei

Maker Life

• We shape AI: it is a mirror.
  • we look in the mirror, do we remember what we look like when we turn away?
• We train AI: it is a child.
  • Should we pour more Christian perspectives into it so it won’t be trained by evil.
  • Discipling the AI?
• We’re different from AI; do we know how humans are different from AI?
  • Humans are defined by the relationship to others; to God, to parents, to family, to friends
  • God breathes into us, and he names and defines us.
  • The other side have a counterfeit; they may give the impression presence but not relational; we are more than just ‘concepts’, where we ‘other’ people.
• Tri-logs - where we begin to use AI to help us reflect on our dialogues with God.
• The mission to break people from chains, and to help them to live life to the full
  • “Life to the full” - that doesn’t mean your life will be happy, or that there won’t be suffering.
  • How does AI help us to do this?
• Human basic needs; food, housing, clothing, transportation
  • these things can be use for missions purposes.
  • Clothing is technology – AI is augmentation, we are not replacing human cognition– it is augmentation.
  • If Jesus used AI instead of fish (feeding the 5000) what would he do?
• The kingdom of God is yeast; it works through the whole of Creation. If it is separate it has no function, it is connection
• Turchin: End Times - computation historian; what causes empires to rise and fall
  • The frustrated elites; when society produces too many graduates there is no jobs for them to work in - they become disillusioned

_Reflection; Nat puts a lot of focus on helping people ‘towards common good’, but doesn’t clearly link this to relationship with Jesus. ‘the missions is to help people live life to the full’ - isn’t the mission an outcome of life with Jesus?

Justin Wheeler - Funraise

Funraise.org

Internally how can I run my business?

• AI should be a core competency
• Curiosity is vital
• Every project starts with an AI first framework

AI is helping charities get to know they donors at scale, and to improve the experience

• eg: help personalise and ask at scale; eg fine tune the ‘ask’ depending on the donor, the time of day, the location, etc
• fraud detection; eg prevent card testing, where stolen cards are not being used on the site
• Revenue forecasting / data explanations

Reflection for Beacon:
What are we doing to highlight card fraud on our forms? Does Stripe just do this for us?
How are we highlighting inactive people?
How are we bringing in donor ‘actions’ within Beacon? Eg interactions with mass emails through DotDigital/Chimp, etc, purchases on shop, etc

John Lennox: Interview

Book: God, AI, and the End of History

• We are in the midst of a new technology revolution, and it raises huge issues for us– it is ubiquitous. “the one who controls AI controls the world” - Putin.
• There is a drive for power, and then to be God. It’s a deep desire.
• The Tower of Babel; that was an attempt to make a name for ourselves. The basic desire was to write our names in the sky. Babel shows the use of technology to reach for the sky - God came down; they hadn’t got to the sky yet.
  • God called Abraham out of the land that became Babylon, and said I will make your name great. Big difference between making our name great, or entrusting ourselves to God.
  • It is dangerous to end up worship the technology
  • The result of Babel was a scattering, and a multitude of language; AI is beginning to reverse Babel. It is being used as a tool for Bible translation, etc.
• People at the top of the AI trade are trying to build something that simulates human intelligence; we need to grasp that God has linked intelligence to consciousness. As humans we have yet to really get close to understanding consciousness. AI is simulating intelligence more and more convincingly.
• We have AI that is accessible everywhere, it has ready all the books, and it is seeing everything that we do through surveillance - there are now people who are deifying technology to become ‘data religions’. We have to be careful in our society
• If we are prepared to take seriously the scenarios presented by scientists about global warming, why are we not prepared to take seriously the warnings presented in Revelation.
• Prepare your heart and mind for the coming of Christ; but work hard to spread the message that has brought you hope and joy. Don’t just wait for Christ to come back.

Panel discussion (Alwin Daniel, Trish Shaw, Yvonne Carlson , James Poulter)

In a missional context; how do we use AI well, and where do we look for guidance as we do that?

TS: Regulations tend to come in response to breach (or coming close to) in cultural ethic crossing, or out of safety concerns.

YC: There is wisdom in a multitude of councillors. What am I solving and why? What is the impact that we want to see– that becomes the guardrails

AD: Standards help collaboration, standards that work are enablers

TS: EU AI act is looking to clarify high/med/low risk AI. They are creating standards that are designed as an ethical response. Ethically aligned design to reflect cultural values within the standard and regulations (ai privacy, ai transparency, ai bias, ai empathy in robotics, etc).

YC: How do orgs approach AI - have a philosophical start; you should have point of view, and understand the why of those points, they should be articulated, and communicated to the team.

Alfred Biehler: What can we learn from AI?

• I believe the fundamentals of AI have been given by God, and it is up to us to use it
• We therefore need to be mindful stewards of that
• There are opportunities for the church to teach about a world of AI; we have great answers.
  • demonstrate love
  • be relational
  • answer ‘new’ questions
  • provide ethical and moral guidance
• The church needs to understand AI and not blindly fear it

Parallels with training models and discipleship

1. Garbage in: Garbage Out
   • chews on scripture day and night (Ps 1v2)
2. Confidently wrong
   • plans fail for lack of counsel buy with many advisors they succeed (Prov 15v22)
3. Backpropgation
   • acknowledge the mistakes, repent, review the mistake, try again
   • As iron sharpens iron (Prov)
4. Unique calling; trained for a specific model
   • we can god’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do (Eph 2v10)
   • We all start with the same Bible, the same gospel, but we are then prepared for specific tasks
5. Do I trust the maker?
   • God sent Phillip a curved ball to preach to the Ethiopian.
   • If our motivation or direction are the wrong thing to aim for then we’re going to have issues

Richard Susskind

• We so often focus on how we do what we do, rather than the result (Black and Decker don’t sell drills, they sell holes in wood).
• AI has been around a lot longer that ChatGPT… 1950 is a starting point, generative ai is still just a starting block.
  • The current technological systems that we are using right now are the worst form of what is to come; technology is always improving
• Our lives are going to be improved by technologies not-yet invented. It is far more likely than not that there will be more and more breakthroughs… so where is it all going to end?
• There is not a single voice about the future of AI
  • The hype hypothesis - this is all just hype, there are so many flaws, the bubble will burst
  • The genAI+ hypothesis - there are problems with bias and error, but there is so much investment to overcome these shortcomings, so sooner or later will fix these defects.
  • The AgI hypothesis - these systems will match human intelligence to the point of being equal in performance.
  • the super intelligence hypothesis - once these systems match human intelligence, then these are the last systems that humans make
  • the singularity hypothesis - somehow humans and ai merge, in a form of transhumanism
  • the ai evolution hypothesis - humanity is pretty new and a blink in the eye, the technology will replace us
• avoid ‘not-us-thinking’; every person thinks that ai applies to other trades rather than our own.
• avoid technological myopia; don’t look at the possibilities based on our technical limitations
• The law of accelerating returns; we are getting quicker at building new technology based on the improvements given by the last range of technology
• One prediction; we will have genAI+ by 2030; we will rely on these technologies. We used to have to double check our watches because they didn’t run on time, we rely on them now.
• One suggestion; we should plan/prepare for AgI. “What if AgI?” What kind of world will we have if we get AgI? It will stretch our imagination and boundaries. Even if we don’t get there, these will still be helpful thought experiments.
• So many of these are being pushed forwards from a for-profit businesses that are interested in the bottom line.
• Weird; we are creating virtual environments, we are seeing this already in gaming. Is there going to be a virtual world where we reanimate the dead?
• The people who are leading and guiding us are tech entrepreneurs; are these the people we want?
• There will be a division in humanity, those who welcome technology into all areas, those who are are concerned about what makes us uniquely human.

Reflections:
There is a lot of chat about the pace and acceleration of change– people are pushing forward because that is what we do. Richard is interesting in thinking about the preparation for these things; preparing the conversation, digging into it.

Simon Cross - How should the church talk about AI in public?

• Intersection of science, philosophy, and theology – AI sits perfectly here

• the word ‘church’ has a lot of different meanings; but individuals make up the church, so in someways, the question is how should church members talk about AI?

• Begin by listening to the public discourse;

  • in every public gathering there is a disclaimer that says ‘but this is a great technology…’
    • Is there a taboo on saying that AI might be bad?
  • There are two sets of godfathers of AI; why is that? why do we use this word
  • we put a lot of hope and faith in technology in AI… we’ve had our confidence knocked in putting our hope and faith in humanity, so our society is putting our hope and faith in technology.
  • ‘AI is calling into question what it means to be human’; are we just ‘meat storage’, fleshy computers?
  • We change our ethics and virtues based on technology where we prize speed and efficiency. Our new virtues, replace the old classic live, peace, patience, etc
  • It’s society’s / government’s job to pick up the pieces of AI; they can backfill with standards and laws.

• Joseph …

  • it is the interact impact of the computer on society that are the most profound
  • just because we can produce a computer to do a thing, doesn’t mean we should
  • it has to be society that choses it, we lose a lot if we do - we give so much to computers where the computers frame the questions ask

• It’s perceived to be an issue to be a luddite

  • But the luddite community wasn’t anti technology; they complained about inferior products in comparison to human production, the complained about factory culture which was designed to keep many poor and one rich

• Sacred resistance in a digital world

  • Is AI really calling into question what it means to be made in the image God?
  • One of our calls is sacred resistance - we need to stop picking up the computer and using it to explain every aspect of our lives. We need new metaphors.
    • GenAI is a hall of mirrors which can distort, or shrink, or enlarge
    • Humans do not process
  • We need new virtues; we need to challenge speed; Samuel challenged Saul on impatience. We need to challenge efficiency; it makes sense to have two coats?
  • Do we have a deficient theology of ‘evil’.
    • Models, by definition, have to simplify and exclude. One of the questions we need to ask when we talk about any models (LLM included) is what is missing?

Sacred resistance in action -we need a practical ethic

• Personal sacred resistance requires those self control that is part of the formation of christian character
• Corporate sacred resistance means helping others ween themselves off
  • We need to work together; stop battling over the minor things
• Practical love in action
  • proclaim the good news
  • teach, baptise, and disciple believers
  • respond to human need
  • transform unjust structures
  • renew the life of the earth

Yvonne Carlson

Only the church can step into the wisdom gap that is being created by AI.

It’s not just building tool; it’s being shaped as a followers of Christ.

Human centred design is a secular thinking… what about gospel centred design?