6,768. That is the number of days between August 29, 1997, and March 10, 2016. The number of days between the fictional date of the sentient rise of Skynet in the movie, Terminator 2, and the actual date on which Google DeepMind’s AI program, AlphaGo, made an “unthinkable” play against famed professional Go player, Lee Sedol.

In what is now known as “Move 37,” AlphaGo defied the assumed logic and number-crunching statistical options available in a board game far more complex than chess, making a play that the commentator could only describe breathlessly as “Beautiful.”

“Move 37” made no sense—initially. But that was the beauty and terror of it. Non-sentience acted counter-intuitively and ended up winning the match. Like a wily thief feigning injury in order to mug an unsuspecting tourist, AlphaGo deliberately suckered in Lee Sedol with a seemingly less than optimal move.

Beauty or terror, which is it? Or, as Stephen Driscoll argues in his award-winning book, Made in Our Image: God, Artificial Intelligence and You, why can’t it be both?

Driscoll’s book deservedly won the Sparklit Australian Christian Book of the Year 2025. It provides urgent biblical insight into our current civilizational moment. Big tech and governments are pumping trillions of dollars into artificial intelligence. It is no longer possible to ignore the fact that the world is set for massive disruption because of machine learning.

Yet as Driscoll observes, it’s too early to tell where things might head. All sorts of airy predictions are made, but there is little certainty: “We invent things that change our world, and yet the exact impact is usually not what you would have predicted. There’s the invention and then a time of expectation. The futurologist guesses, but history is never quite what we expect” (p. 11).

As a late adopter, that gives me all sorts of excuses for ignoring AI, or dismissing its ability to seamlessly replicate my writing, or indeed to garner all the information required to find a cure for cancer. But resistance, Driscoll insists, is futile. The AlphaGo machine that made “Move 37” was subsequently beaten 100 games to zero a few years later by a successor model. Yikes!

If you, too, are a late adopter, Made in Our Image provides an accessible and informative breakdown of how artificial intelligence actually works. We are not talking mere number-crunching but self-building neural networks that reshape and refine learning pathways, constantly searching for alternate and increasingly economic ways to employ data.

They think! Or do they think? Who knows. What’s important is that many of us now think they are thinking. And that changes everything.

Driscoll’s writing snaps and pops with verve. He employs great illustrations and, having heard him speak on this topic, writes in a manner that reflects his personality. The humanness of Stephen Driscoll comes through. “I’m not an artificial intelligence,” he humorously insists. “I am (or believe that I am) a human” (p. 3).

Which is perhaps the point. Driscoll’s central thesis is that there is an intrinsic difference between humans made in God’s image and machines made in our image. Simply put, conflating the two is a category error. Yet, without a theological framework, many today are making that error. And as AI increases in power and possibility, many more will also.

Driscoll has a keen theological eye. Having established AI’s possibilities, exploring the sociological promises and threats on the horizon, he organises the rest of the book around the familiar yet immensely helpful four-fold framework: Creation, Sin, The Cross of Jesus, and The New Creation (p. 29). In other words, basic biblical theology.

Basic, perhaps, but applied deftly. Driscoll examines how each sector of the framework intersects with the sociological, cultural, and existential churn of the modern world, before offering a biblical and Christocentric response.

The chapter on creation is entitled “Identity Implosion.” Our angst around AI is significantly underpinned by our angst around ourselves. Many modern people no longer have a solid understanding of who we are socially or individually. We are facing this radical new technology with no identity coin in the bank. Is AI replacing us? What do we even mean by “us”?

Driscoll unpacks what it means to be made in God’s image. He explains that as those called to live in the creation under God’s rule, to subdue and fill the creation, and indeed to be sub-creators ourselves, we do not have the option of ignoring technological advancements. Yet this does not mean an uncritical acceptance of all technologies as merely neutral tools which are at our disposal. We have been created with wisdom and discernment. What will lead to our good and to human flourishing? A good theology of creation means that we neither fear nor venerate new technologies.

The chapter on sin, “Less Dead than Others,” is a fine example of applied theology, with Driscoll trawling through the biblical accounts of technology being used for both good and evil before landing in the modern world. God has given us a good creation, but sin has marred it and us. We should expect mixed—and missed—results.

These two chapters provide a helpful counterpoint to the almost naïve assumption of the tech gurus such as Peter Thiel, who in an interview (in July 2025) with New York Times’ columnist Ross Douthat, a conservative Catholic, struggled to affirm any desire for humans to be involved in the future of planet earth. Douthat finally wrestled him into a concession, but it’s clear that less theologically minded souls see the answer to the world’s problems lying in technology, not theology. And if humanity—augmented or supplanted—is required to achieve this, then so be it.

Driscoll provides solid advice for individuals and churches in dealing with, and teaching on, the issues that AI will continue to throw at us. What about deep fake? What about the loss of trust when information is manipulated? How do we deal with the promise of transcending the “surly bonds” of our corporeality?

Then, in a chapter significantly titled “Intellect Overthrown,” Driscoll turns to the cross of Jesus. Faced with all this crazy tech and scary smart blokes, it is convenient to forget that the cross confounds earthly ideas about how to resolve our problems. This chapter is the highlight of the book. Driscoll explores not only how the mind of God supplants the mind of humans but also how the love of God safeguards us from technology’s rapid race to better the planet. In this regard, he notes that

The denouement of Made in Our Image is that of all AI hopefuls: a new creation. Of course, it is instructive that, while the technologists of our era all promise an eschaton, they fail to explain how anything made in our image will not ultimately reflect our own withered goals and reductionist dreams—not to mention our corrupt natures. In other words, no matter how many iterations machine learning will be removed from actual humans in another 6,768 days, it will still contain the smudgy fingerprints of its creators. And that will be both its beauty and its terror.

In the end, Driscoll insists, the new creation we need—one that will satisfy all desires and deal with all evil—cannot be brought about by something made in our image, but only by the Someone who has made us in His.