AI and Aging: The Grace of Limits (with Autumn Ridenour)

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0:00:00 – (Christopher Watkin): Welcome to Silicon Spiritualities, a podcast from the Gospel Coalition about what it means to be human in the age of A.I. i’m Christopher Watkin, and in this series we’re going to unpack three crucial questions. What can AI do for us? What is AI doing to us? And what is AI showing us about who we really are? Today I’ve got the joy of being joined by Dr. Autumn Olcott Reidenauer Mockler, associate professor of Christian Ethics at Gordon Cornwell Theological Seminary and author of two books, Sabbath Restor’s Vocation, Aging to Our Death and a new book release, Restlessness and Augustinian Wisdom in the Digital Empire.

0:00:59 – (Christopher Watkin): Autumn, welcome to the podcast.

0:01:01 – (Autumn Ridenour): Thank you. It’s a joy and honor to be with you today. Thank you, Autumn.

0:01:04 – (Christopher Watkin): I want to start, if we could, with a scenario that I think is increasingly becoming a reality for people. Imagine Crystal. Crystal lost her grandmother last year and the grief is really raw for her. Still, there’s a company that allows her to upload all her deceased grandmother’s texts and emails and voice notes and create a granny bot that speaks just like Grandma used to. She can ask the bot for advice on her wedding day and chat with granny bot just like she used to.

0:01:41 – (Christopher Watkin): Now, in Sabbath Resta’s vocation, you critique what you call the transhumanist desire to solve the problem of death. And I wonder what you would advise Crystal. You know, is grannybot just a harmless way to remember a dear loved one? Is it just like your own memories of that person? Or is there something about it that’s a refusal to accept the creaturely limit of death? What would you say to Crystal?

0:02:10 – (Autumn Ridenour): Thank you. It’s a very interesting scenario and it’s one that will be increasingly relevant in our emerging digital context. And it’s interesting. I would think I would begin by just acknowledging first and foremost grief that accompanies loss. And as believers, we recognize grief is real and actually is an appropriate response to loss and suffering. And it’s even a real recognition that death is not what was supposed to be.

0:02:44 – (Autumn Ridenour): So sometimes I think we can. As believers and in Christian communities, we sometimes jump to hope, which with the Resurrection, we do have hope, and we want to never be without that hope. But also grief is an appropriate response to loss because it recognizes that this was not the way the world was supposed to be and that there’s something about our fracturing of our own identities, body from spirit, as well as relationships that were meant to be long lasting and this desire for them to keep going.

0:03:15 – (Autumn Ridenour): My response, however, would be that I would be concerned and would urge caution, if not resistance, to utilizing AI methods to upload resources of a former loved one, largely because I think that we would be questioning then how is this changing the memory of who was as well as is this truly a reflection of the individual. And this is where you get into interesting dynamics with grief. And I’m thinking even C.S. lewis, in reflecting on a grief observed, which is his actual experience of reflecting on his own loss with his wife.

0:04:01 – (Autumn Ridenour): When you begin to want from that other person for your own sake, who they would be, in a sense of. It’s a twisted form of grief where you’re kind of. You’re thinking about yourself. If. If I can describe that. Well, now part of you will always. In the grief of, let’s say, close loved ones, grandparents, family, a marriage, there is a sense of loss of the individual, but also the. The experience of that relationship which was forged between the two of you.

0:04:30 – (Autumn Ridenour): What I would say is not wrong, is to keep a voicemail that you might listen to again, to keep a text that you could look at and reflect on the goodness of what they said. It’s like keeping a letter or a note or a photograph. Right? Those are not. Those are actual helpful tools to reflect and remember on the person who they were and their words. I have a note in my Bible that my grandmother gave me that I reflect on that note that she gave me that is a prayer for me that I think goes beyond even her life. Because it’s a prayer, right? It’s extended through time, but that it’s different than uploading onto an AI server built by a corporation that through a pattern, will now reflect pieces of who that individual was that I loved, but also can now change who they are and the way they would now respond to me.

0:05:33 – (Autumn Ridenour): And there’s actually an element of faith that is involved on the journey of life and accepting the limits that though we ache and grieve the loss of whoever that was, at whatever stage they were in, the role of faith is you are actually not alone on the journey of life. If, as a believer, Christ is with you. Right? So something is still shared. That when there’s a fellowship of communion with someone from the past, this is also projecting into the future. And this is what I would say.

0:06:03 – (Autumn Ridenour): I don’t want to look backwards at who they are, but I also want to think about who they are now. If they’re a believer, they’re in glory. And so actually there is a piece of. It was in chapel last week at Gordon Conwell, Pete James preached and he referenced this, the hymn Tis so Sweet to Trust in Jesus. And he referenced it. And this last week I found myself in one of a quiet time. I play the piano not for groups but for my. For part of just devotional life and reflection. And I’m. I mean it’s clunk, you know, it’s. I’m plucking out notes and it’s sometimes hard work to get back into a hymn.

0:06:42 – (Autumn Ridenour): But there’s something about playing a hymn that actually can both remind me of the past and can remind me of someone like my grandmother. But there is something about memory that if it’s tied to the eternal. I’m also now joining in with the saints and glory who are worshiping the living God that is actually alive and active. Now, whether they are singing that particular song. But there is something I think about in the worship service, we actually do join in with the angels and those who are in glory, worshiping that actually our hearts are aligned with them.

0:07:19 – (Autumn Ridenour): There’s a way that I would not say I pray to a grandparent, I’m just be clear about that. But there is a way that there’s a communion with Christ that can still be shared across time and history, if you want to think about it in that way. But it’s still different than me calling upon some digital device which is actually, I think more of a copy and even a projection from a pattern which isn’t a real experience, but actually turns in more into what I want them to be as opposed to who they actually were and actually maybe who they actually are in Glory.

0:07:54 – (Christopher Watkin): Yeah, it’s a beautiful answer, isn’t it? And the great cloud of witnesses, what a cherished and precious reality that is. I do just want to push a little bit further though because what I’m hearing you saying is that there’s something awry, something uncanny about this Granny bot. And I think my follow up question is what is different then between Crystal just thinking in her own mind, I wonder what Granny would say to me today.

0:08:28 – (Christopher Watkin): And coming up with, oh, I know what Granny would say. And the Granny bot actually saying something. I think you’re saying those things are really, really different to each other. How are they different?

0:08:42 – (Autumn Ridenour): I think you can ask the question about someone you knew from the past, what would they say in this situation based off of what you knew of their character? Granted they are not there in the moment to say it, but there is something that resonates with the voice that you knew of who they were. And I do think that’s different than Interacting with something that’s different, digital. And I am going to bring in Sherry Turkle here, her work on, like, alterity and difference and her concern about using bots and relating to them in human ways.

0:09:19 – (Autumn Ridenour): Because I think that’s where you then blur into the land of projection. And I actually think you are also removing yourself from the love of that individual who was their own end, if that makes sense. And a philosopher does talk about is it BC he was talking about the distinction between having a relationship with AI, which is in some ways not an actual different. You don’t have difference in goods, a real friend you enter into a relationship with, and they have their own end and good.

0:09:56 – (Autumn Ridenour): When I’m entering into a relationship with AI, it is a reflection of actually what I am placing outwardly into that device. And so it’s actually my own desire and my own wants that are coming back at me, if that makes sense. It’s not truly the other, it’s not truly distinctive. And that’s where we’re getting into. Well, the whole host of questions around this emerging discipline and field around tech now with generative AI is what is the difference between human and machine and human and artificial intelligence? And do we want to preserve that difference?

0:10:38 – (Christopher Watkin): Absolutely. And I love how the way that AI suddenly is making us ask all these questions like what is that difference? And therefore what is precious about human relationship? It’s forcing us to really hone in on who we are as we try and work out what this thing called AI is that we’re presented with. And I think that’s such a precious moment for Christians because, of course, who we are, biblically speaking, is wonderful and such a rich truth to be able to bring to a modern world that doesn’t have a.

0:11:21 – (Christopher Watkin): A robust answer to that question. I wonder if you could press a little bit more into what AI is and how we should think of it as Christians. You’ve got this really vivid image in your new book, Restlessness and Belonging. You call our digital moment a new Babel. And then you say Babel wasn’t just about arrogance, it was about confusion. It was about fragmentation. I’d love you to speak a little bit, if you could, about how you see AI through this lens of Babel. What is Babellian about AI?

0:12:00 – (Autumn Ridenour): It’s a great question and it’s a motif. I use both, I think, in the opening chapter and the closing chapter, and others have used it. But this idea of. In Genesis 11, what’s going on at Babel? Babel, how we pronounce it but this idea of to be like God, that they wanted to be, you know, they could build a tower as high as the heavens to be like God in a sense of. On their own terms, I think is the assumption here.

0:12:26 – (Autumn Ridenour): And part of what I think, and I talk about this more at the ending of the book, is it is the reversal of the first command to be fruitful and multiply and to fill the earth, right, which was to scatter and fill out. Here you see the movement and I teach it this way of they are coming together and they are building upward. They are ignoring that command. And of course, it’s to. So that they can make a name for themselves.

0:12:55 – (Autumn Ridenour): And this idea is something about them is actually concentrating power. And in a sense of actually God’s response to that is not destruction, it is merciful. And it actually spreads them out into the kind of multiplying again and it disperses power because power wasn’t meant to be concentrated. And I’ve actually, actually was having a conversation. In some ways this is the response to what you might call the first monopoly in a way that they were trying to make a name for themselves. And it was a concentrated sense of power.

0:13:31 – (Autumn Ridenour): And of course, the great reversal is Acts 2, when the giving of the Spirit, when it’s actually the multiple languages then coming back together around the common good of who God is, who is different from them, that brings them together in a unified way. So go back to Babel. And I think part of it is this desire to make a name for yourselves, to be like God, which is this question of what is the motive and what is our desire behind it.

0:14:04 – (Autumn Ridenour): Which is what I think we always have to ask in our creative projects, what is our motive and goal? But the other component, whether it’s this question of power. But is this what I look at a lot in the opening chapters one and two is it is confusing because whether it’s the multiple languages that is the result, it is also think of all the miscommunication that takes place through really what I think is decontextualized information.

0:14:32 – (Autumn Ridenour): Because I talk about knowledge without wisdom. And it’s this idea of we have all access to all kinds of information, but we don’t know how to interpret it. And this is where you could say mass media. And Neil Postman and, you know, he was looking at mass media before we got to today’s, you know, tech world with the. Both the Internet and phones and all, and all of the apps and everything. But he was looking at just the advent of the telegraph and that it was one of the first times you could separate communication from time, space, location.

0:15:13 – (Autumn Ridenour): And so words or message could now be spread at what was the pace of the railway, as fast as a railway could spread information. And there was a way that information now became commodifying because it was removed from its original location. And you could now buy or sell information. And that is where we find ourselves today, in a hashtag world with information, both image and messaging, both photography, which is sent all over, you know, the Internet. And we just look at images that are removed from the original context, and we look at information and there’s just a lot of confusion.

0:15:50 – (Autumn Ridenour): And of course, I’ll ask my students in class, like, what is the first thing they learn in their, you know, when they’re learning languages and biblical interpretation and how do you interpret a passage? And when, you know, besides language skills, it is context. Context is so significant for understanding. And here we are, in a sense, I think the new Babel is that we have all this information and it’s so removed from context and meaning, and that that is adding to the confusion as well as the miscommunication.

0:16:22 – (Autumn Ridenour): And people are. We can weaponize words. You know, there’s a lot of things that we can do that’s confusing in this particular moment, and that gets into the question. I will follow up with generative AI, and my concern is that we are now in a whole new world of what is truthfulness when we’re looking at an image or where we’re receiving information, and is it fabricated? Is it AI, you know, embellished?

0:16:49 – (Autumn Ridenour): And so that’s a whole new level of confusion, and it’s removed from its original source. We could say who is communicating.

0:16:56 – (Christopher Watkin): So really interesting juxtaposition, isn’t it? You mentioned two things there. You mentioned this idea of monopoly and a concentration of power and also a confusion. It’s two things that you would imagine wouldn’t necessarily go together, but in AI, they absolutely do. And I wonder if you could talk just a little more about the first of those, the idea that AI is rebellion in the sense of being a monopolistic concentration of power.

0:17:28 – (Christopher Watkin): In what ways do we see that, particularly in the large language models that we use today, like ChatGPT or Gemini. How are they concentrating power?

0:17:41 – (Autumn Ridenour): That’s a great question. I think it was Jared Lanier, if I’m saying his name accurately, talked about monosopies. If you use that word, it’s not like one singular corporation, but it is a few corporations that hold a lot of power, and that’s what you see, I think with Silicon Valley since the advent, well, you could say Internet tools, our web browsers and things like that. But then certainly when you get to the social media apps, they’re the few. And then you now have the AI corporations and there’s just a few that have a lot of power. And with that comes great responsibility to the public as well as questions about.

0:18:24 – (Autumn Ridenour): There’s always been that public polity question of is it good to have too much power in one or few places. And I would say behind the idea of democracy, at least in certain locations, was this idea of balance of power because there was this understanding that too much power is our sin nature as we are corruption. You know, what is it? Absolute power corrupts absolutely. You know, this, this phrase that we use.

0:18:55 – (Autumn Ridenour): But this idea, you need a balance of power because of the realities of sin. And we need accountability. So that’s significant for even if we believe in the private sector. And I think capitalism is a good in the sense of it’s a helpful, but it’s not perfect. I believe in redeeming capitalism. You take this on in your own book, right? There’s no political structure that’s perfect. There’s no one economic structure that’s perfect. We’re all on this side of the fall.

0:19:23 – (Autumn Ridenour): And so we need accountability in our structures. And so those, these corporations, I would actually suggest maybe move too quickly, I would think with social media, I do believe they moved quickly. And did we test these out? You know, if this was a drug trial, clinical trial, if we were in bioethics, you would have to test out and you’d have to question a whole lot of ways that this impacted the public.

0:19:48 – (Autumn Ridenour): Likewise, you’d have to do that. There was a wonderful colleague at a conference at Harvard, and I wish I could call his name at the moment to attribute everyone. He’s in the UK and he was just talking about airlines and the ways in which, you know, airlines obviously have to test run airplanes. You know, there’s safety procedures and so there is some nonprofit works around safety and security, you know, questioning, trying to hold AI accountable.

0:20:12 – (Autumn Ridenour): But I think we’ve moved faster than our regulations and concerns about testing these out.

0:20:19 – (Christopher Watkin): I think you’re absolutely right. And the irony of the situation is that we’ve been here before, haven’t we, with social media? We ran ahead of ourselves there. And now with people like Jonathan Haidt bringing out his research, we’re starting to think we might need to roll back. And here we are running ahead again. If we could turn now from the sort of corporate side, the AI corporations, to the users of large language models. One of the questions we’re really trying to probe in these episodes is what is AI doing to us as individuals and as users?

0:20:54 – (Christopher Watkin): And you’ve got this really powerful contrast between, on the one hand, what you call restless curiosity and on the other hand, a restful wisdom. And I’d love you just to unpack that a little bit. What’s the difference between curiosity and wisdom? And how is AI pushing us to be curious in a way that perhaps isn’t wise?

0:21:20 – (Autumn Ridenour): Yes, great questions. There’s this idea about spectacle. At least it’s the word and term that’s used to describe the way Augustine talks about curiosity and kind of a disordered curiosity or disordered form of love. There’s been some writings on Thomas Aquinas in looking at ordered and disordered kinds of curiosity. But in this sense, spectacle is when he would talk about the theater and the gladiatorial games.

0:21:46 – (Autumn Ridenour): And there’s an element of. You begin to enjoy the experience of. In that sense, he was questioning the love of violence, but you begin to. It’s the questioning of are you loving an experience for its own sake? As opposed to what is the true. We would question what is the end goal of pursuing that. That habit or that choice or that action. Right. So with spectacle here in the 21st century, we are bombarded with images.

0:22:18 – (Autumn Ridenour): These, you know, the AI knows, the algorithms know are often our interests. And they, because of our clicks, they know what we enjoy. I mean, here I study this and if I open up my, you know, my Google search or whatnot, it will immediately feed me articles or those my interests, and I can find myself just starting to go down the hall, you know, looking at articles, and I’m like, no, no, I was so much time.

0:22:40 – (Autumn Ridenour): Or we are shopping habits or, you know, the fact that you have children or whatever. It knows your desires and your appetites. And so it’s going to play on that. And part of what’s spectacle. It’s interesting superbloom that came out. Nicholas Carr, he talks about this idea in the kind of like a Darwinian sense of survival. For our sake of survival, we kind of scan the horizon and we do this a lot. He says the Internet plays to that. And it gives us this.

0:23:10 – (Autumn Ridenour): Because we’re constantly looking and you’re wondering if something else is out there, which is part of the FOMO aspect. It makes you constantly kind of scanning at the superficial level. Whereas when you actually make a choice, and this is whether you’re committing to a subject or even if it’s about relationships. I mean, in some ways I’ve had students reflect on even eharmony or whatever. These dating apps are kind of actually designed in a way to keep you looking instead of maybe you’re searching for a mate or whatnot.

0:23:41 – (Autumn Ridenour): But, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re kind of, they’re, they give you this, you’re searching and you’re, you know, it’s quick judgments. So it actually forms a habit of quick judgments as opposed to often, I mean, in the sense of when you make a choice and a relationship and certainly marriage, it’s a commitment that I’m choosing you and I am foregoing. I’m no longer looking. I’m no longer, you know, the horizon.

0:24:06 – (Autumn Ridenour): And actually that’s when you get to know someone more deeply. So with every choice we make, if you call it a limitation, it is a limiting factor that I’m now choosing this, I’m foregoing that. But it is now possibility because you can now you engage in a covenant relationship from a biblical perspective. That’s the same. If you’re going to specialize, let’s talk about, you know, in. You’re going to become a specialist in some, you know, what it is we study.

0:24:31 – (Autumn Ridenour): Right. I’m no longer, I’m a generalist, but the fact is I’m going to make a choice and I’m going to go more deeply into a subject. I’m going to have a deeper understanding as opposed to which is the deep thinking and the reflection, which is deeper than I’m supposed to constantly scan the horizon with this kind of more superficial level, which can actually be quite, quite exhausting. Nor does it actually maybe understanding the meaning of whatever. If we go back to the idea of images.

0:24:57 – (Autumn Ridenour): If I look at a lot of images, I may be missing the point of that image. And that also can become a distorted goal of whatever it is I’m seeking from that image as opposed to what that image was meant to be or that that message was supposed to be. You know, all these things.

0:25:13 – (Christopher Watkin): Guess I think that’s a fascinating insight. Certainly on dating apps, I’d never thought of it that way before. Their whole interest is that we do not find a mate that we stick with. It’s that we keep browsing and are always just on the cusp of making a decision, but never actually doing it. And I love this language of covenant you were using there. Perhaps the only covenant that the large language model companies want us to enter into is to use their model rather than anyone else’s. And then once we’re doing that, they want to keep us browsing and keep us curious in this Augustinian way, rather than in any other covenants with anything else.

0:25:56 – (Autumn Ridenour): My wonderful students have talked about this. So the dating apps came. One of my wonderful students was talking about this. So it’s fascinating to think about our habits. It is our very habits that it’s actually forming. And that’s what I think we’re not attuned to. And part of what I hope in this book and part of the broader conversation is to be aware of how the algorithms are shaping us and they are changing our habits. And they’re actually now training me to be more of the spectacle observer as opposed to maybe the learner. And certainly we could get into the question of commitment when I get to the deep caring or the deep learning that coincides with relationships and faithful living.

0:26:42 – (Christopher Watkin): Yeah. Thank you. Look, I. I think it’s high time we open the Bible in this conversation. We’ve identified a lot of problems with AI and what might be wrong with it. And what I love to hear is, in all your own thinking about these issues and, you know, you’ve thought very deeply, you’ve written this wonderful book, Restlessness and Belonging. What are perhaps some of the Bible passages that have been most helped to you in picking your way through these questions about AI?

0:27:16 – (Autumn Ridenour): That’s a great question. And there are many scriptures that we could turn to. I will acknowledge Genesis 1 and 2. The idea of Sabbath was key and then tied to Hebrews 4. This idea that we’re entering into the final Sabbath rest was key for both my first book and that is going to come out in the second book when I explore Sabbath and the good and limits. So that’s a lot of the framework I want to think about.

0:27:44 – (Autumn Ridenour): The other thing is, I thought a lot about, you know, Psalm 115 with this in Isaiah, Psalm 135, talking about idols. You know, we can create things with our hands, but do they? Their idols are silver and gold made by human hands. This is Psalm 115, 4, 8. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes but cannot see. They have ears, but cannot hear, noses, but cannot smell. They have hands, but cannot feel, feet, but cannot walk, nor can they utter a sound with their throats.

0:28:15 – (Autumn Ridenour): And this is about the things that they make. And then verse 8 of Psalm 115 says, those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them. And there’s a way that the things and Projects we fashion with our hands, we were made to create. That’s one of the ways that we image God. I think it’s a good gift, good work. And, you know, to be image of God, part of that, the good is our creative capacities.

0:28:44 – (Autumn Ridenour): We have to ask, what is it we’re making? And then what we’re making, what are we hoping from those things we make? Whether that goes back to the golden calf, you know, think about Aaron, or just here, the things that they make that they then turn their hopes toward them and ironically are looking for some kind of response from them. And that does make me think a lot about what is it we look for in the generative AI in particular, Is it actually an aid to help as a tool with human knowledge for discovery, which I think we could get into, that could be a more appropriate use.

0:29:22 – (Autumn Ridenour): But it certainly can become more slippery when we begin to ask the questions about relationships. And my concern specifically and with dialogue partners that are in the tech world, that I am very leery of replacing humans. And this idea that I would want a relationship with the AI, that to me sounds more like, am I beginning to imitate them? Which ironically, in some ways that was what the computer was, the imitation game. This idea, it is some al. It is a.

0:29:58 – (Autumn Ridenour): It is a way of being a pattern. Certainly algorithms are a pattern of. That is, they are generating from the patterns of our information that is now, you know, copied and uploaded and these kinds of things and looking at human knowledge. And so this is. Do I want to turn to that pattern to then be a source of relatedness? You know, these are my concerns. That would be where it turns into an idol. And a lot of what we think about in ethics, I think is Romans 12, 1 2.

0:30:29 – (Autumn Ridenour): And I am reading from the NIV today, just so you know, but just, you know, you know. Therefore I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is.

0:30:55 – (Autumn Ridenour): His good, pleasing and perfect will. A lot of what we do in Christian ethics today is, you know, we. We could try to do a lot of proof texting. I don’t want to do that with whatever the hot button issue is, because a lot of the issues today are not necessarily what the issue was, you know, when these original authors were writing. And yet there are principles and ideas Because I think humans haven’t changed and our appetites haven’t changed, and nothing new is under the sun in that sense.

0:31:25 – (Autumn Ridenour): And so we want to use discernment and seek. What are the principles like the ones we just looked at from my psalms on idolatry. And here from Romans 12:1 and 2, you’ve got offer your bodies as living sacrifices. Something about being human embodiment is significant. It’s a spiritual act of worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world. I think of the pattern being very significant, given that we’re thinking of AI I think it actually is these algorithms are reflective of the pattern of.

0:31:56 – (Autumn Ridenour): There’s a projection from the pattern of copying human knowledge, and then there’s this element of the renewing of your mind. And, you know, a lot of what I focus on in my teaching of Christian ethics is union with Christ. This comes out in my first book. And that we want to image Christ and have even, we might say, the mind of Christ. And this is how the renewing of our mind takes place as we are in relationship with the triune God, knowing the triune God through his Word.

0:32:24 – (Autumn Ridenour): And so we’re seeking for our minds to be renewed as we surrender to Christ, and that he would renew our mind as we then discern with wisdom, prayerfully, how we engage the world around us in many of these issues, specifically today, AI and how we engage it. So that would be, I think, a really grounding passage for all of Christian ethics, but specifically today’s consideration of AI

0:32:53 – (Christopher Watkin): thank you so much. It’s always incredibly helpful, isn’t it, as Christians, to ground our attitude to something in particular scriptural passages. And it’s just fascinating hearing which ones have really helped you with AI and when you were talking about idolatry there, it struck me in a way that it hasn’t ever before just what a powerful lens this is for understanding artificial intelligence. Because so much of the discourse around AI in the culture at large is, look at this wonderful thing that we’ve made.

0:33:28 – (Christopher Watkin): Isn’t it like us? You know, it is made in our image. If people wanted to use a biblical register. But I think what I heard you saying is, hold on. The thing about idols is not that they are like us, it’s that we become like them. We are conformed to the thing that we’ve made. And I think in relation to AI that raises this whole really important question of not how human is AI but also how machine like are we becoming?

0:34:04 – (Christopher Watkin): Are we being catechized to become as we engage with it. And I think that leads us on to the question of what it means to be human in the age of AI. How we understand ourselves faced with this new technology. And it is striking that within the AI world itself, so much discussion about what it means to be human focuses on our capabilities, doesn’t it? We could use this acronym of SASE Capabilities, saci, Sentience Agency, Consciousness, Intelligence. It’s all about that.

0:34:47 – (Christopher Watkin): But you and your writing wonderfully come at it from a very different angle. And you argue, among other things, that we’re actually defined not necessarily just by these capabilities, but by our limits, by our physical limitations, our limitations of our bodies, and by aging, which sets us apart from AI. I wonder if you could impact that a little bit in terms of this idea that you have, this beautiful idea of the middle voice. I think you call it an active receiving.

0:35:22 – (Christopher Watkin): You say machines can do, and they can be acted upon. They can be active and passive. But there’s this third way that we relate to the world that you call the middle voice. Could you just talk a little bit about that?

0:35:34 – (Autumn Ridenour): It’s a great question. And actually you’re combining ideas from both books. Thank you so much for engaging with the work so deeply. Yes, the first question of limits, and that came really out of the first project, because looking at aging like is there a good in aging? Was part of the question, the drive behind that. And I came to the conclusion that while death is part of the fall. And so you never want to separate from saying, not acknowledging that there is a loss, there is a good in our finitude, in the sense of. Or our limitation, that we were always created as dependent.

0:36:10 – (Autumn Ridenour): This came out of reading in Genesis 1, but a lot of working with Augustine and also Karl Barth too, on his reading of rest. And that’s going to be impact on how you think about Sabbath, because it’s actually this idea, and this comes out in my new book on chapter five, when I’m looking at Sabbath, is this idea that God could have created, in a sense, infinitely like he that God there is a creation that is vast. When you think about the world, right, which is different than God. Everything in creation, yet even the narrative itself, there are limits. With each species that’s created and with each limit comes a boundary.

0:36:50 – (Autumn Ridenour): And the boundary is what gives us identity. So there’s a good and the limit, because that is actually what makes the creature not only the specific species, but also the specific individual, whether it’s the child from parent, like we are individuals, because that is part of our limit of who we Are there’s a boundedness, right? And there’s a way that it’s actually was. Barth was writing in Dogmatics and it talks about if God had created infinitely. There’s a way that in choosing to limit creation, there’s a love of the actual creation that’s made and a sense of. I think of the Sabbath as.

0:37:32 – (Autumn Ridenour): And maybe this is also reflecting. I see this in Augustine to this relishing in the creation that’s made. A kind of made for. If there’s a teleological goal in the creation narrative, I’m saying here that we were God created for communion because God rested and almost enjoyed what was made. So there is an element of communion Even in Genesis 1, with the Sabbath rest of God communing with creation. And so likewise, when we think about when we create or both our experience with the humans, the particularity in our family units or in the people that we encounter, there’s a beauty and relishing in the individual that we encounter, which is the particularity of that person as well as knowing we are limited.

0:38:23 – (Autumn Ridenour): There’s a good in that and there’s a way that we can. The good of limits means I’m not. In a sense, there’s a clear purpose. If I go into a creative project, there’s a clear goal. This is part of, I think of the ancients, certainly Augustine, the way you would create and Thomas Aquinas comes out of this and Aristotle would think this way. There’s a clear goal. I don’t see that with generative AI. I see it as this.

0:38:51 – (Autumn Ridenour): It almost feels more like what I call chaos versus cosmos because there’s not a clear goal or a clear boundedness to what I’m pursuing. So it becomes also. That’s part of the confusion we were talking about earlier with the kind of the Babel experience. There’s so much going on or that I could pursue that it’s almost feels. It feels limitless though it technically, I don’t think is because it’s not God itself, but it feels that way and it has this sense of always on right. Like it’s. It doesn’t feel bound by time, nor does it feel bound by space, limits and a sense of. I feel disembodied in the sense of whether it’s the Avatar experience, you know, that it’s not fully embodied or even that it’s a kind of contortion of my body that I sit at a computer for so many hours in a day that in a sense isn’t healthy. Ergonomically, all these things, you know, we need to be moving around.

0:39:47 – (Autumn Ridenour): So there’s something good about experiencing our bodies in time and space. There’s something about this new digital moment. It kind of. It prevents me from experiencing what we call the muchness of my limitations. My full. Like Andy Crouch talks about, you know, body, heart, soul, experience. But the body, heart, soul, experience also has a boundedness. And that finitude is good. I need to rest at night.

0:40:16 – (Autumn Ridenour): I need. I can only run so far during the day. You know, the sense of these limitations actually allow us to celebrate what is. You know, whether it’s the marathon runner who actually has limits, but there’s an excellence in it. That’s why we celebrate it. Virtue ethics is actually. I always talk about courage or all of these virtues that we demonstrate is actually in the face of a limitation that you exhibit courage.

0:40:42 – (Autumn Ridenour): Right. Because there’s something that you are up against. Whether that’s a courageous act by someone who’s running into a building to save a life or, you know, all of these examples we could think of. There’s a limitation, so that’s actually part of being human. And it’s a celebration of excellence. We do virtue in the face of our limits. And of course, Christ, who’s the most virtuous, was a God who took on our very limits willingly and showed us a new way through those limits.

0:41:13 – (Autumn Ridenour): So I would just begin with that, the good and limits. And then we’ll move to the middle voice. I don’t know if you want to stop and think about the good and limitations.

0:41:21 – (Christopher Watkin): Yeah, I’d love to just come back on the goodness of limits, because I think this is a profound difference between a biblical view of humanity and. And the view of human beings that sort of emerges from the AI world. Because from what I’ve read, I think most people, most leading voices in the AI world would see limits as always bad, always constraining. You know, Ray Kurzweil has this idea of reaching escape velocity from human mortality. So we can add more than one year to a human life for every year that passes. And therefore we’re never going to die.

0:42:03 – (Christopher Watkin): As if that is an unmitigatedly good thing. Of course we would want that limits are always bad now is to be overcome. But what I hear you saying is, no hold on. Limits are not an effect to the fall. They’re actually part of what it means to be creatures in the first place. And I just wonder if you could clarify that. Will we still be limited in the way that you’re talking about in glory. And how would you distinguish the view of limits that you’re giving us where limits are actually good, they’re not just an effect of the Fall from the idea of limits that often comes out of the AI world, that they’re always negative and always to be overcome.

0:42:50 – (Autumn Ridenour): Great question. So one of the things that you’re identifying is this transhumanist anthropology, this idea that we can exceed limits. And that was actually a concern of mine with the aging project and part of the language of eliminate suffering. And this idea that part of technology is. Is this element of human progress. It has been with us whether we date technology’s fire, you know, you know, however you look at what technology is and that humans are this transhumanist anthropology, humans are evolving with our tech, becoming more sophisticated and that this is just the next step.

0:43:27 – (Autumn Ridenour): And the body, some of them would even say the body is like a prosthesis. It’s prosthetic in a sense. And our true selves are our mind, which I think is more dualistic anthropology, more Manichean. If we go to Augustine or Gnostic, if we look at the Scriptures and it doesn’t make as much out of the body. And part of being embodied is we were formed, limited in the sense we always were. When I say the good and limits, we were always dependent.

0:43:58 – (Autumn Ridenour): Because think about, you know, the creation narrative. It’s actually nefesh, the living breath, right? It’s the breath of life that is given into the human that animates us. And that very breath of life to me is. Is a miracle and is divine dependence. David Kelsey famously used to say we live on borrowed breath. And so there’s this idea that we were always dependent. And there’s a sense. Part of being creaturely is recognizing this deep sense of dependence from beginning and interdependence all the way from beginning to end through our aging.

0:44:36 – (Autumn Ridenour): And we are always this side of the Fall, subject to, vulnerable to sickness, illness. You know that we are always in this aspect of both. We are both. What do you call it? Autonomous agents. I’m not entirely anti autonomous. Like we’re, you know, we’re agents, but we’re also interdependent with the world around us. We’re never an island unto ourselves. Both in, yeah, think about caregiving and all of those things. And then that moves into though the limits that are kind of part of the Fall.

0:45:06 – (Autumn Ridenour): And you’re asking about eschatological questions. It’s really interesting when we do think about, when I look at the gospels, resurrection, there Is both this before resurrection, there’s a transfigured, you know, the transfiguration where they see, you know, Jesus transfigured and Elijah, Moses, but then there’s the resurrected Jesus who is with them, who is like he was, but different. And there is this eating, but I don’t know that eating was part of a dependency in the same way as it was before, you know, I think there was. You see things that are eating, but you do see him moving through doors and things that would be different than, you know, prior to the resurrection. So I think there will be something different about the resurrected body.

0:45:48 – (Autumn Ridenour): But I think that even in the resurrection, all humans and all creation will still be dependent on the divine. So even when we will have the ability not to sin, you know, in the future, this idea of not sinning, this ability not to sin, but we’ll not be able to sin in the future, I do think even that will still be always in reference to how we are dependent on, and you use the language of participation with the divine Trinity that animates us, that gives us life, love, all of those things.

0:46:23 – (Autumn Ridenour): Because even in the new heavens and new earth, life and light comes from the Godhead who is the source of all things. So it will be different than the limits here, but it will still always have a source and be in relationship to God.

0:46:41 – (Christopher Watkin): That’s so helpful. And I think when you look at the alternative to that, the deeper you go into it, the sadder it becomes, isn’t it? So if you think that all dependency is always a defect that needs to be remedied, then what’s, what’s the best case scenario? Well, it’s complete isolation, isn’t it? Complete alienation. I don’t need anyone. I’m completely self sufficient. And that is a shriveled human existence.

0:47:19 – (Christopher Watkin): It’s an isolated, an emaciated human existence. And so I thought leaning into dependency and limits, it is not in itself limiting, it is actually liberating for us as human beings. I’d love to press further into the difference, the real profound differences between a biblical view of human beings and the view of human beings that tends to come out of the leading thinkers of AI by inviting you to react to a particular passage in a book by a guy called Nick Bostrom, one of the leaders AI Think has worked in Oxford and he’s written this book called Deep Utopia.

0:48:04 – (Christopher Watkin): And at one point in the book he’s reflecting on the experience of being a parent in the age of AI and he throws up this thought experiment and he doesn’t actually come down, I think, on one side or the other of it himself. But I think it’s a fascinating experience. It goes like this. Imagine in the future there’s a robotic caregiver that’s learned from billions of other parents and it’s become this super parent. You know, it’s more patient than any human parent. It’s more knowledgeable, it’s more attentive.

0:48:40 – (Christopher Watkin): It’s read all the parenting textbook. It’s. It’s better than any human parent. And he says, well, hold on. In such a situation, does it become neglectful then to raise your child yourself because you are a worse parent than the machine? He’s got this quote, every hour of quality time you spend with your child is an hour of even higher quality time it’s deprived of spending with the robot. And I think that’s so fascinating because it gets to this bigger question about AI, doesn’t it?

0:49:15 – (Christopher Watkin): What does it mean for AI to be better than humans at something? So I’d love you just to react to Bostrom’s scenario. What’s going on there? What’s the view of humanity? How is that different? How would the Bible push back on that view?

0:49:30 – (Autumn Ridenour): No, it’s a great question and it’s an interesting scenario and it’s one whether you think about children and caregiving. But also at least I remember Sherry Turkle in her early alone together talks about carebots or at least throws that out there. She brings up the idea of seniors or elders relating to something and thinking it was either a child or not being aware that it was actually something technology.

0:49:56 – (Autumn Ridenour): And it raises this whole question of, you know, whether we’re thinking about care for seniors and the elderly and. Or children, would we want to replace humans? And it’s a fascinating idea that they could be better than humans. Both as you’re talking, it just made me think of, oh, you know, whether that’s like a Mary Poppins type character, which is like, you know, this magical idea person that I always joke that I wish I had the skills or could just, you know, things could come. Snap of a finger, could clean a room. But that’s the idea. That’s the longing for magic, which is something we kind of want to get away from. But it’s. It’s also an erasure of the friction of life, the challenges that are actually good.

0:50:39 – (Autumn Ridenour): And this is where I would be deeply concerned about giving over things like care to a machine. Now, it is true, if you were to think about caregiving, there are problem, you know, there There there’s evil in the world and there is sin. So there actually are bad forms of caregiving so that that is to be recognized. But you. I don’t think replacing humans with this caregiving carte block or even saying it’s better than all caregiving it raises the question of what would it mean for the young to grow up in a relationship with a machine that is not truly other than them and the way in which they’re going to imitate.

0:51:30 – (Autumn Ridenour): I would suggest actually I think it would be a lesser form because it would be something superficial quality about it. Now you could get into this. I’m gonna talk about subjective and how do we analyze these things. But you know I was thinking about with the. With the carebots in particular the importance of other and the sense of. Turkel does talk about. Sherry Turkle talks about empathy is significant for engaging the other. And you can’t really have empathy something a machine.

0:52:04 – (Autumn Ridenour): And it’s interesting being in conversation both Ros and Picard who is affect of intelligence. But she would say it’s still a machine that is reflective and does not replace humans. And so it doesn’t actually share empathy with the human being. That’s a shared experience. And I think the word solidarity goes even perhaps deeper because it’s a shared experience. Maybe empathy would be likewise because it’s something that is particular to humans that is in that moment that is also.

0:52:33 – (Autumn Ridenour): This is what I’m writing about in my book has to do with communion or you could say transcendence that takes place between human to human. And this is a concern that I have in the whole of the book. A scripture that’s guiding me is this idea we are image of God but we’re looking to a machine that is actually or. Or a photo. If it’s but in social media that’s an image of the image. And the image of the image is a distortion.

0:53:01 – (Autumn Ridenour): And what I’m called to be is actually in relationship to God. And when I encounter another human being I am encountering the image of God. So there is something about the divine presence I would argue that is in another human being, believer and non believer that you are encountering something someone who images God and how they were created. And even I would say the created world images God. Though there is a unique particularity to humans that I still think is different than silicon carbon.

0:53:36 – (Autumn Ridenour): Something that is created that is a human creation. And this gets back to the middle voice question that you were actually posing earlier. The giving and receiving. The middle voice is this idea of I can be acted upon and also act. And in some ways this goes back to even this idea of dependence we are in relationship to the world, the world of things. I think it was Albert Borgman who talks about the differences a device and a thing.

0:54:04 – (Autumn Ridenour): A device like musical, like a stereo or something or you know, we listen to itunes or whatever we listen to. Today you turn on music and that’s different though than playing an instrument which is in a thing that you both kind of act upon, but you also act with. So there’s a creative process, whether it’s the piano. And Andy Crouch talks about this, you know, music. I know a couple Travis Paciel has been writing about this. This idea of something happens when your engagement with the world, whether it’s an instrument or even you go back to the ancients talking about, you know, a tool that they are using with an end goal.

0:54:41 – (Autumn Ridenour): There’s something creative. You are both kind of, you are working with that instrument. But there’s something even more, I think that happens at the relational level of receiving and responding. Because I am now in a relationship with another and I am receiving, you know, learning from another who is image of God and responding. There’s a give and take. And this is what I think if we are imaging God truly. And part of my whole idea of when we practice virtue, I put Christology at the center which is tied to the triune God.

0:55:15 – (Autumn Ridenour): We are always in relationship to God who is behind all things. And as we practice virtue, it is for the believer we are receiving. Think about the life of prayer is a receiving in relationship to another. And then you’re acting in the world. So for whether it’s the philosopher, this is contemplation in action. For the theologian, this is the life of prayer and service. This is the life of prayer and action, which is what it is to be doing virtue.

0:55:49 – (Autumn Ridenour): So we are always as goes back to this idea of being dependent creatures and interdependent. We are always receiving and acting. Now if I’m going to go now have my child in a so called relationship with a machine caregiver, I think there is something that cannot take place between the receiving and acting that is lost in relational skills between the machine and the child. Just like I think when I off source something I’m going to be doing to learn or writing or some skill set, I am losing capacities.

0:56:24 – (Autumn Ridenour): So I’m actually would be, I think harmfully training a child to imitate a machine and not a true human. And even if we get to hopefully an excellent human is what we long for with caregivers, you know, but there’s no perfection. We’re not perfect other than Christ. So this idea of we are learning even through the mistakes, we are learning through right to be human, and that actually part of being human is to make mistakes. And that’s how we learn.

0:56:54 – (Autumn Ridenour): And that is, of course, the path ultimately of redemption. And the gospel is that we are learning prayerfully so that we can be changed and be transformed, but we actually need to be in relationship with real. I believe humans as caregivers. And that, quite honestly, would be to me, the threshold of the most important thing you would not offload to the machine. It’s one thing for the machine to do calculations, to do some kind of assist me mathematical scientific discoveries. Even if we get into language and, you know, I’m more cautious than my own fields writing, I don’t want us to lose that skill set of thinking and so to be cautious about what we offload so that we’re not losing those skills as well as the fact. I’ll just go to this.

0:57:34 – (Autumn Ridenour): There’s this, you know, philosophers like to use sometimes an example of like, the pleasure machine. Have you heard of this? Like with utilitarians. I’m thinking of. Todd May uses this from Clemson, this idea of posing the pleasure machine that is actually fake, but it’s as if you go in with a dopamine hit, but it’s not real. And people that they would interview, he talked about, like 14 out of 15 would say, I don’t want the pleasure machine because it’s not real.

0:58:00 – (Autumn Ridenour): And so there’s something about, I don’t want to put my child in a position or elder of being cared for by others who are not real. So this gets into the whole question I would pose to you as someone who thinks a lot about postmodern philosophy, is what are we talking about when we’re talking about humans? And does this pose us getting back to there is an objective reality beyond just the subjective experience, and we want to get back to something that is real.

0:58:28 – (Autumn Ridenour): And then of course, as believers, we believe if we are imaging God, there’s something that’s really real, that’s the ultimate reality, which is when our hearts, our loves align with Christ or, you know, thy kingdom come, thy will be done. This is when we are actually aligning ourselves with the truest good, you know, truth, goodness and beauty, which is aligned with who God himself, God, Christ is.

0:58:54 – (Autumn Ridenour): And that’s when we are aligning ourselves with the fullness of what we were made to be. And what we were made to image.

0:59:01 – (Christopher Watkin): I think this idea of the real that you raises is so key, isn’t it, to this whole debate. We’re perhaps living in a cultural moment where the real is becoming the premium thing, the commodity that is sought after more than any others, where the Internet is increasingly filled with AI slop. We’re searching out what is real and how well, by God’s grace, are Christians placed to speak into that moment where we insist upon the physical, bodily gathering of God’s people on the Lord’s day, in real face to face offline relationships as the core of who we are and how we live out this calling as the body of Christ.

0:59:50 – (Christopher Watkin): It’s really precious. I can hear an AI advocate sort of in my mind as you’re talking about the middle voice, saying, I agree with you, but isn’t that exactly what AI does? So the idea of the middle voice, as I understand your explanation of it, is it’s not simply giving and it’s not simply receiving. It’s sort of almost a symbiotic relationship of the two. And they would say, well, hold on, when I’m talking with a large language model, there’s a back and forth. It learns things about me, it responds to me, there’s almost a dance going on.

1:00:30 – (Christopher Watkin): Isn’t that the middle voice you’re talking about? And therefore isn’t this idea that that’s not real, just a prejudice that, you know, give it 20, 30 years, we’re gonna get past?

1:00:41 – (Autumn Ridenour): It’s a great question and it’s one to think about, actually. Chris Mesarol, he’s worked in Safety and risk on AI and he does talk about the middle voice. And it interesting because if I go to the instrument analogy, right, there is a way that new AI, and this is, I think, how we need to discern as a community, how can it be used as an instrument or tool that yes, there is a form of acting and receiving. So I’m not entirely saying we would say no to all forms of generative AI if it is involved in discovery. So I’m going to use the example of like, like healthcare and medicine and ways in which they’re looking at proteins and how supposedly they can do a lot of analysis on proteins that will help with looking at ways that we can do drug research that would be a lot faster than what we’ve been able to do with just human calculations and human analysis of the data.

1:01:40 – (Autumn Ridenour): I don’t think that’s entirely wrong. And it’s aimed at a specific goal that is also Aiding what is. You know, the researchers set up the protocol and the question behind it, and they’re using it like a tool. And it’s. It is participating, you can say, like an instrument in that activity, which is a good human activity. What we’re going to have to ask is, when do we blur the line and does it become unhealthy in the ways that it’s impacting us? And this is where I am more concerned about relationship and sociality that I don’t want to relate.

1:02:13 – (Autumn Ridenour): I’m concerned about romantic relationships with AI I’m certainly concerned about that. I’m concerned about this deceptive way of projecting, you know, granny onto AI or whoever, some human being, because I think it’s a deceptive way of loving myself. It is a form of narcissism, I think of. It’s a what do I want from this machine that is now projecting back to me what I perceive the other to be? And that’s much more dangerous form of utilizing the middle voice of, you know, giving and being acted upon than trying to use it like an instrument towards some more educated good or educative good. Do you know what I’m saying?

1:02:57 – (Autumn Ridenour): So I think you have to ask, what am I intending? What are the motives and what is the. Like, what is the goal that’s behind this use? So I think those are the key questions that will help us just prayerfully discern and. And push back to the more transhumanist AI. Is that really good to replace human relationships? And actually, I think friction happens in real relationships. Conflict is part of reality, but it’s also ways in which you can grow through difference and challenge as opposed to creating some relationship that will always get along with me and never have friction.

1:03:39 – (Autumn Ridenour): I just really concerned about that and what that does to an individual. And that reshapes really who we are. I think, actually, in a fundamentally narcissistic way is my concern.

1:03:52 – (Christopher Watkin): Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. The idea of always being told that I’m right, I think in my better moments, I find horrifying. I. I couldn’t deal with that in a wise way. I wonder if I could try and bring together your two books. So your first book was about aging and the idea of aging not being a decline that we need to fix or solve. But the beautiful word you use for it is it’s a vocation. It’s a specific calling to move towards Sabbath.

1:04:30 – (Christopher Watkin): And your second book is about AI and the digital world. And I wonder if we look at AI through the lens of aging. And the human experience of growing older and the Bible’s view of that experience. What does the reality of human aging do you think, reveal to us as about ourselves that the AI world might try to hide from us?

1:05:00 – (Autumn Ridenour): It’s a great question. With aging, it is both limit that’s good and possibility for growth. There’s also loss. So I think I’m trying to hold these tensions together in my first book. And so there’s a mixture of feelings and a mixture of experiences. And I think of the Paul passage, you know, outwardly we’re wasting away, but inwardly we are being renewed day by day. I don’t think all aging is outward wasting away, but there is true entropy and there is true loss that accompanies the aging experience.

1:05:37 – (Autumn Ridenour): And it’s, you know, you can talk about young, old, old, old, but everyone is particular in the ways that we experience, you know, loss that accompanies aging. So there’s an element of possibility for what we call, I think, even expression of virtue in a fullness that is drawing on the wisdom and experience of years that the aging community has to offer. And I write about this, like whether it’s Anna and Simeon being prophetic, you know, as they, as they talk about, receive Jesus, you know, in Luke 2, and dedicate him at the temple.

1:06:11 – (Autumn Ridenour): So this prophetic role and wise role that the elders can be for a community and still live into the virtues, and then also can be an experience of loss. What I think the transhumanist anthropology and our tech is going to tempt us to do is to cover over the limits and loss. And I mean, everything from. I’m thinking about depends on what time of day and the light that’s coming in, whether you’ll see more wrinkles on my face or not. You know what I’m just saying, the way we want to cosmetically, you know, we cover up up elements of aging. I’m not entirely opposed to cosmetics and things, but to totally eradicate the realities of aging, I think is a problem and a concern.

1:06:54 – (Autumn Ridenour): And to recognize that loss is part of the human experience. And I think that will be the temptation to cover over and to whether it’s, you know, through simulation, through images or, you know, whatever we want to try to prosthetically create with the kind of bodies that we project. We could be or house. Those are my deeper concerns. That would be. I don’t believe. Yeah, they would verge on the idea of idolatry would be my concern, would be closer to that.

1:07:29 – (Autumn Ridenour): And so what the Christian shares with the transhumanist is a recognition that something about the limits are difficult and bad and we’re not meant to be because we are the side of the fall. We’re going to disagree with the solution or the disagree with how we get there. Because my concern is any human effort to try to eliminate suffering. I think it’s. I don’t think we’ll actually ever be able to eliminate suffering. I think every time we create a technology, there are unintended consequences. And even in medicine, we look at all the ways that we have gained.

1:07:59 – (Autumn Ridenour): You know, we are living longer, and yet there are diseases that we do want to cure. And yet I don’t think we’ll ever eliminate suffering. And I’m concerned about medicine when it tries to seek that goal. I actually think that it is no longer attending to the realities of what it means to be human and the idea that care is the most significant goal versus cure and that we are actually accompanying. What Howard Ross would say is we actually are accompanying practicing the accompaniment of individuals with illness that they are not alone on this journey of finitude.

1:08:35 – (Autumn Ridenour): And that’s what medicine is for, is an awareness of the finitude and frailty of life versus trying to cover over and eliminate those realities. So that would say, would be the distinction. But there’s still hope, and I think there’s still the possibility of growth in this. Inwardly, we are being renewed day by day, and that our hope is actually on Christ. And even it could be a beautiful vision, even with the dimming of sight of a deep spiritual vision.

1:09:05 – (Christopher Watkin): Amen. Amen. Let’s talk more about that hope. After dwelling for quite a while, as we have in limits and sort of the finitude of our existence. You write beautifully about the idea of the beatific vision, this hope of seeing God face to face one day. And it really struck me that there’s a profound difference between that vision of the future and the vision of the future that Silicon Valley is offering us.

1:09:41 – (Christopher Watkin): What do you think is. Can you try and get us to the heart of the difference between a biblical vision of hope and a biblical vision of the future and the vision of hope and the future that AI is holding out?

1:09:54 – (Autumn Ridenour): That’s a great question. And quite honestly, it’s interesting even when you ask this, I’m like the core scripture that was behind the whole book for me was actually 2 Corinthians 3 and 4. This idea of, you know, we all with unveiled faces are essentially, we’re imaging God, Christ, who is the or the image of God, and I’m not quoting it Directly. But this idea that we together are imaging Christ, who is the image of God, and we are being transformed more in his image and likeness.

1:10:25 – (Autumn Ridenour): And it’s the idea of the face of Christ, right, the face of Christ, who is the image of God. And I was drawn to this idea of face. I started just kind of researching and came across this idea looking at the Hebrew term panim used in the Old Testament. Faces, often with the term presence. And this idea that presence is all throughout the Old Testament. And this idea of that Christ was among the people. Jesus walked with people. He was.

1:10:51 – (Autumn Ridenour): He bore a human face. And yet. And people were. They ate with him face to face. That’s part of the communion. We think of the. We now practice the Lord’s Supper or communion Eucharist in our different, you know, ecclesiologies. But when we do that, we are often face to face. There’s an element of communion is face to face. And it’s 1 Corinthians 13. We long. We are not yet fully face to face. So we long for this eschatological vision when we will be in the fullness where, you know, Augustine would say we are fully seen, fully known and fully loved in relationship to the triune God.

1:11:28 – (Autumn Ridenour): And that is where in time we are most known and loved. This. This restlessness that long that seeks belonging. It’s when we belong to God as image of God and we find our identity through this communion with God that we truly are fully, most ourselves. And really we are longing for that eschatological. When we will be transfigured, we will be resurrected, we will be perfected in union with God in the fullness. And they’re. All of our motives are laid bare. And we are.

1:12:00 – (Autumn Ridenour): I think it’s actually Tim Keller’s I teach from his little book on death. And he has that reflection. He talks. I think it was whether it was he and Kathy and they were talking about, when we get to heaven, it’ll be like, there you are. I saw a glimpse of you when we were in time. But there you are in all your glory and sense of as you reflect the one who is glory. And it’s the fullness of who you were meant to be.

1:12:29 – (Autumn Ridenour): And that’s what we are moving toward. And so that is the teleological vision, the goal, big word for goal, that we are oriented toward on the journey of life through time. And that goal should then shape how we think about encountering Christ. The face of Christ through His Word, the face of Christ through the communion, the fellowship, communion through the church and encountering the face of Christ through the ordinances, through the way we practice the liturgy and, you know, particularly communion, I think, in baptism and the other ordinances, how we encounter Christ in time, which is reflective of the eternal intersecting time when we again, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And our loves, our faith, hope and love is aligned prayerfully with who God is on this journey through time.

1:13:20 – (Autumn Ridenour): So that’s my hope for readers as they encounter this, but also as a community of believers, as we are discerning in this moment, I actually think it’s an opportunity. It’s a great challenge. If we think about the challenges of AI, which is actually really philosophers, you know, secularists, a lot of people are thinking now, what does it mean to be human? Up against this new questions around AI? So I think there’s a lot of opportunity even in the challenge, this idea of whether it’s the postmodern turn to is knowledge only subjective? Is there something objective as well as the question. When I look at a lot of philosophers and even more secular thinkers turning more towards whether. Whether it’s the transcendentalists wanting something transcendent, something about humans are more than machine, which I actually think is an opportunity, particularly for theology, but particularly for the church, to say, yes, we always were made to be more.

1:14:19 – (Autumn Ridenour): We image God, we have the hope of eternity in our hearts, and so we were meant for something more. We were made for communion with God, the divine Other. And that lifts up prayerfully our relationships in real time. And actually means, when I am encountering another human being, I should now have actually more of a reverence for the Holy that I am now encountering, and should actually, in a sense, begin to change our perspective of what it means to be in the presence of other human beings and certainly those that are bearing and confessing that they are followers of Christ and how we can learn from them.

1:14:55 – (Christopher Watkin): What a rich response. And look, I can. I couldn’t agree more with this idea that this is a moment of opportunity for Christians. You just pop onto YouTube at the moment, and all sorts of people are asking the question, what does it mean to be a human in the age of AI, when AI can do my job better than I can? What’s left of me? Who am I? That question is on the table right now in our culture in a way that I don’t think it’s been on the table certainly in my adult lifetime.

1:15:28 – (Christopher Watkin): And what a precious moment, therefore, for Christians to say, let me invite you into a view of humanity that isn’t based on what I can get done, and getting more done makes me more valuable. But that is, as you’ve been teasing out throughout this whole conversation about this middle voice and actually about my limits as well. Let me show you a vision of limits that isn’t just negative all the time and why that is actually liberating.

1:15:58 – (Christopher Watkin): As we draw to a close now, I am asking every guest on the show two closing questions. What’s one inefficient human habit that you’re committed to keeping in the age of AI? And if AI is a mirror, what’s one thing that it’s revealed to you personally about your own heart?

1:16:21 – (Autumn Ridenour): That’s a great question. Those are two great questions and ones I should continue to think about as you’re posing it. This inefficient human habit, whether it’s the way I take notes, you know, that I don’t. I don’t want to offload writing. I don’t want to offload my concerns about the educative goods that I would lose certain capacities. But also I am concerned about multitasking. And this is something I think about even whether I’m in a meeting or if I’m encountering, like a student in office hours, this importance of pausing to listen. This goes back to the middle voice, listen and respond, which I actually think means I am called to be attuned to the presence of God in that individual.

1:17:12 – (Autumn Ridenour): And that’s inefficient in the sense of I could be outsourcing in a meeting. And often if I do that, I’ll miss the point of what the meeting was about, even though I don’t love being in meetings. But I’m just saying it requires my focus and attention, whatever it is I am tasked to do in that moment. But people are not tasked. So in the moments that we are encountering others, that may be considered inefficient from a productivity mode, but actually it’s deeply beneficial relationally.

1:17:37 – (Autumn Ridenour): And I need that. I need to have focus on others and that I receive a lot from learning from others, right? And then ultimately also learning from God and then AI being a mirror. I mean, if you think about just even the ways that it bounced back, whatever interesting little headline or whatever is I see it reflects my appetites and, you know, what do I dwell on or what am I too easily, you know, captivated by? Whether it’s, you know, just all of these things that I think we have to be tempered by.

1:18:13 – (Autumn Ridenour): My biggest concern is that, you know, tickling ears or itching ears are we. We are drawn to hearing what we want to hear and often that is self praise. So I am concerned about ways that we could imbibe technology that is too narcissistic. And I have to look at ways that. I’m just gonna be honest, even in this particular. What are we. We’re having this conversation. There’s this image of myself over here on one side, an image of you.

1:18:43 – (Autumn Ridenour): And I actually don’t think we were made to have conversation where there’s images of ourselves pointed back at us. So actually I do much better if I’m not looking over at myself and I’m looking at you as if I was in a conversation in a room with you. Though, you know, it’s helpful for people who are joining in. It’s if they’re in the conversation with us. Us. But I don’t think we were made to have all of our zoom and all these things where we actually have these reflections of ourselves back at us all the time.

1:19:09 – (Autumn Ridenour): Recordings, actually, I hate recordings. I’m sorry to remember doing this in a sense of we weren’t meant. I will make mistakes and I don’t really want to obsess over them or listen to them and go back and replay. But there’s something through our mistakes or through the human habits of conversation and whatnot to be learned. And that, that spontaneity which is the human reality, which prevents us from then making it an idol, which is like something that’s stagnant.

1:19:36 – (Autumn Ridenour): And you know, that I just go and observe and watch. So there’s something good about spontaneity and then not being absorbed into. How do you call us, a kind of narcissistic kind of self obsession, you know, whatever it is that would tempt us. It’s just ironic that we have images of ourselves reflecting back to us all the time is, I want to point out,

1:19:59 – (Christopher Watkin): what a brilliant observation. I’d never thought about it that way before, but you’re absolutely right. Like how long do we spend during the average zoom meeting or teams meeting actually looking at ourselves rather than looking at the other people? Whereas if we’re, you know, in the room with them, you don’t spend any time looking at yourself because you can’t. You can’t see yourself. And yes, that is profoundly disorienting and narcissistic.

1:20:28 – (Christopher Watkin): Look, we’ve raised a lot of issues in this episode and people watching or listening might have follow ups they want to explore or questions they want to ask. And I just want to say, if you do want to take these ideas further, please do come and join the Silicon Spirituality’s Discord, where we’re learning together how to follow Jesus in a text saturated world. You’re going to find in there practical life experiments for every episode, things you can do, behaviours you can cultivate in the light of each of these episodes, and you’ll also find details of an upcoming online cohort as well.

1:21:08 – (Christopher Watkin): The link’s waiting for you in the show notes and we’d love to see you there, but for now, Autumn, it’s been an absolute pleasure speaking with you about these things, just scratching the surface of the deep things of God in relation to artificial intelligence. So thank you ever so much.

1:21:27 – (Autumn Ridenour): Thank you. Thank you so much as well.