Introducing ‘Silicon Spiritualities’

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Christopher Watkin 0:00
Artificial intelligence is not just changing what we can do today, it is changing us and it is revealing to us who we think we really are. I’m Christopher Watkin, author of Biblical Critical Theory and Fellow of the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, and I’d like to welcome you to Silicon Spiritualities, a new podcast from the Gospel Coalition. We all know, don’t we, that people are turning to AI today to write emails and produce images, to transform workplaces, and to ask deep personal questions, to seek life advice, and even to find intimacy, but beneath all the excitement, beneath all the anxiety lies a deeper set of questions. Why are we so drawn to machines that promise to know us, to help us, to remember us, to advise us, you know, perhaps even to love us. Why do we dream of intelligence without bodies, creativity without suffering, productivity without limits, and even life without death. And why, as we grasp for more control, do many of us actually feel more anxious, more lonely, and more powerless? It’s with those questions that this podcast begins. Silicon spirituality is not mainly about the latest tools or predictions for the future, it’s about the spiritual stories beneath the technology, it’s about our hopes for salvation, our fears of apocalypse, our dreams of mastery, and our hunger for meaning, and it’s about how AI seeks and fails to fill those spiritual longings. Across the series, I’ll be speaking with theologians, technologists, creators, and researchers about work and worship, about education and embodiment, about truth and power, and human community, all in the age of AI, and we’ll also be exploring how scripture reframes the whole conversation, not with panic, not with naive optimism, but with wisdom, with hope, and with a better vision for what it means to be a human being today. So do please join us as we explore the deep questions that AI raises about our dreams and our fears about our world and about ourselves.