How to Not Be Overwhelmed By AI News
Having hope in a wide open future
Earlier this week a friend shared a compelling article on AI and the way it will affect labor in the near future. It was so compelling that my stomach felt like it dropped from my body. What would my future look like? How would I provide for my family? What does the future of work look like? What does the future of democracy look like? All these questions raced through my head. And with them came anxiety. Anxiety about the future and its manifold uncertainty.
And if you have read any AI coverage, you are probably familiar with this experience. An AI CEO gives some gleeful interview and makes some bold prediction (to improve the value of his company) and yet the prediction usually looks like the desiccation of human life. And so we close the tab and walk away and do something else. We turn away. Because it’s all too much. And we can’t stop it. OpenAI and Antropic, and all the “smaller” AI models (which are still run by massive companies like Google and Meta and SpaceX) are running away with their agendas and there is nothing we can do about it—so it feels. We stand as atomized individuals before these companies (by design), so all we can do is whine about things on social media—which is also controlled by the same companies that build these AI models, so even our whining is scrapped to train AI models!
When you think about all this, it’s easy to spiral. It’s easy to get lost in AI news and feel like humanity is headed toward a cliff, like elite companies are driving us frantically toward an unknown future out of greed and scientific passion. And that by the time we figure out what the costs are, it will be far, far too late to do anything about them.
How are we to hope and not be overwhelmed by AI news? How do we avoid doomerism? How can we keep from despair and inhibition?
The most frightening thing about our AI future is that it is radically open. Despite all the “predictions” by experts, nobody knows what will happen tomorrow. We are treading new ground here. We have never had a technological innovation which will be so disruptive, so widely, and so fast. It’s that uncertainty about tomorrow, that wide open future that is so deeply unsettling to us. How will the government react, how will it shape human cognition, how will it affect the economy, how will it change the purpose people find in working, and so on—these questions haunt us.
For small uncertainties you only need little hope. But for vast uncertainties you need an expansive hope. Our times call for an expansive hope, and in our faith we have the resources to support this hope.
Hope is grounded in what God has promised us in Christ. And he has promised us that he will provide for us (Matthew 6:26), that he loves us (John 3:16), and that he will work our good (Romans 8:28). That is our reality. Everything must begin there. In times of uncertainty, we need to ground ourselves in those facts. Whatever the future may bring we can walk in confidence knowing that we will be provided for, loved, and that God will work our good.
Hope also allows us to break out of our atomization, to work in institutions to resist the effects of AI. I have argued before, and still believe, that AI is a choice that we are making, not a determined fact. But as for what we can do as people who don’t control AI companies, we can act together in communities to have shared values and virtues that buffer us from some of the negative effects of AI. What does this look like? This looks like churches that choose not to use AI for sermons, art, music, or videos and that encourage members to come to elders and pastors with theological questions rather than turning to AI models. This looks like colleges that ban or heavily restrict AI use in the classroom so that students don’t cognitively offload their thinking onto machines. I’ll have a lot more to say about how institutions can help us in my next book.
Hope begins with you and your neighbor, your family, your friends working to love one another, glorifying God in the here and now. Choose to read a poem. Go for a walk. Pray. Read the Word. Have coffee with a friend. Not in ignorance of the future, but choosing a good future in your sphere of influence. And what is beyond your influence, trusting that God will provide, even if you cannot imagine what that looks like. That’s okay. You don’t have to. Your imagination isn’t the one in charge.
Alan, you might be interested in Cory Doctorow's recent book "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI" - he's a tech/culture critc whose work I've respected for a long time, and I found his analysis of the whole AI situation very helpful. He zeroes in on the way that AI is being pumped up for investors (not for users) and argues that the real danger is (this is my awkward paraphrase) not whether AI will be able to do my job, but rather whether AI companies will be able to convince my boss that AI can do my job, though it will in fact do it badly. He's more sanguine about AI and intellectual property issues than I am (I think that there is something different, and immoral, about using scraped text to generate new text, than in the examples he gives of fair use applications), but this is actually a minor point in his overall analysis, which I found incisive and convincing. I definitely recommend it.
So grateful for the encouragement this morning.