Discovering a Theology of Technology – Classic

John, welcome.

So, I grew up liking that stuff, and yet, when I was a kid, that wasn't very popular to like. So, I always kind of hid it, tried to act like I liked sports and sports ball and all that, but then hide my computer stuff in the background.

So, it wasn't until I took a job as a youth pastor, and I didn't make enough money, that I finally had to go out and get a job in technology, and that's how I knew just enough about how to make a website to fake my way into a Web job and learn on the job.

And then people started giving me these books that had titles like Is Google Making Us Stupid? and How Television is Ruining People's Minds and all this stuff. And it made me think like, "Well, maybe there is something wrong with what I'm doing."

And so, it seemed like most Christian writing on technology is either how to – like how to use it to make your ministry bigger and all that kind of stuff, or how it's morally bad and scary. You know?

So, I got more interested in looking at those things and how most of the way technology affects us is more subtle than just good vs. bad.

So – and going back to my youth pastor days, half the kids had Bibles that they would bring, and we'd hand out the Bibles to the other kids. And so, this was just when projectors were becoming popular at Churches. So, I asked for a projector to put in, started showing the Bible at church, and then I found that none of the kids brought their Bibles anymore. Right?

But when you show the Scripture up on a screen, now everybody is looking at the same passage at the same time, and it's more like it was before the printing press.

So, let's talk about another category that people don't think very much about. We were talking about this a little bit before we started recording, and that is what happens with jobs? There's an unintended consequence with jobs. We tend to think, "Well, jobs have simply moved from one location to another, but they've actually moved into a different mode than another, and that actually complicates the picture a little bit.

And there was this leader, Lud, that they all liked, and it's all this – it's very legendary, but that's – that's where the term the Luddite comes from, from people losing their jobs.

So, even here in Dallas, I think Uber just met with all of their people to say, "In three years, you're not going to be a driver anymore; we're going to have machines for this." So, there's always this movement of technology coming in and doing jobs.

And the theory is that, hopefully this frees up people to do more creative things and less manual labor, but in that disruption, it can be really, really hard for people.

So, when we talk about jobs in American politics, a lot of that has to be training as an adult, because it seems like, in a prior generation, someone might have a job for 40 years or 50 years, and they retire. And now, people change every five or ten years. And from my generation and below, that's just sort of the normal thing, but it's very disruptive and difficult.

So, obviously, the way into that conversation, in one level, is thinking through how violence works and that kind of thing, and then working with principles about what you're dealing with. So how do we think about technology biblically? I mean obviously computers postdate the Bible. So – and technology, to some degree, postdates the Bible. So, how – what's your hermeneutical weigh-in in thinking about this?

But I mention Jesus, too, because our word "technology" comes from the Greek term tekton right?

And he says, "There's two reasons for that. There's no rain, and there's no man to cultivate or to make things from it." So, I think even in the beginning, in Genesis 1 and 2, God is saying, "Here is creation; I want you to make cool stuff from it. So, I want you to make tools; I want you to make bridges over the rivers and move these things around." I think he's always envisioning us as being people who are going to make things and make from what he's made.

And then we look to the end of the story, and always it's ending in a very physical world full of roads and trumpets and banners and cities. And most of our eschatological visions don't say, "God wants to get rid of things." It says, "He wants to take swords and convert them into plowshares." Right?

And so, in one sense, what I'm hearing you say is that technology's been with us, basically, from the beginning.

But a lot of what we do with this communication technology, and even in the garden, Adam is there, creating language and words. And we talk a lot about our tone and the language we use, and depending on the words we use to describe people, that shapes what we see and what we don't see about them. Right?

And so, people use a medium that sometimes can be difficult to communicate shades of nuance and emotion in ways that are appropriate, particularly in sensitive areas, and it ends up backfiring on them in terms of the communication.

So, I think being aware of that is important. And there's this little, great passage, at the end of 2 John and 3 John, where he's making this differentiation between things he wants to do face to face and things he wants to do with pen and ink.

And then you have Paul, in the Corinthian letters, sometimes saying, "I wanted to come to you, but I thought we would have fought, and so I wrote you a letter because I thought that would be more redemptive. And then once you've dealt with that, then I can come to you face to face.

So, I think even there, wrestling with – not that one is good and one is bad, but that they do different things and they accomplish different things – and being aware of that, I think, is going to be helpful for us going forward, too.

I know now, when I log into Facebook, it will often say at the top of it – it'll say, "One hundred and fifty of your friends have posted today. Why don't you post, too?"

So, if you want to get really good at reading long novels, you've got to practice that instead of reading short things all the time. And if you want to get really good at consuming lots of short bits, that's great. So, you would just kind of think about, "How do I want my mind and my soul and my body to be," and then think about how you want to consume to shape it in that direction.

It operates very differently than a web page. You go to a web page, and you've got that thing, and you got – you're full of choices, and you can do it in any order that you want, etcetera. And so, some people have argued that that has messed with the way we think and build and our understanding and appreciation of how arguments are built and that kind of thing. Do you have a take on that aspect of thing?

Or when I go and I want to change something under the sink and just fix it, I want to find a guy who shows me the video, and I don't really care about taking all these classes on how plumbing is supposed to work. I don't want any of the foundation. I just want –

But yeah, I mean that's something we take for granted now. We think in terms of verses, and we think in terms of bumper stickers and all those things. But those – you know, Jesus didn't have life verse. [Laughter covers speaker] He didn't have one. Neither did Paul or neither did Augustine.

And all of a sudden, I recognized that what happened is is that the dynamics of pedagogy had changed. There were certain strengths and weaknesses; there are certain things that I gained, and there were certain things that I lost, but the experience overall just needed to be crafted to the medium that I was in rather than saying, "Oh, this is all good or all bad."

So, I think technology's at its best when it's kind of a mirror. It helps us evaluate things and see new things that we didn't see before.

I think about when I grew up – okay? – and I was doing this, but when I grew up there was no really such thing as IT. I mean the people who worked in computers were the exception rather than the rule. A whole set of industry and a whole segment of our economy now is tied to what happens technologically.

So, I think certainly one of the biggest ones, I think, will be the artificial intelligence phenomenon. And whereas at the turn of the previous century, from the 1800s and the 1900s, electrification was the big deal – so, you can take a water pump and add electricity to it, and you had a new product.

So, 20 years ago, there were these big worries that people would have these radically disjunctive lives of online and offline. But now most of us are always weaving it together.

I'll never forget one day I was writing, and the way our house is set up is – well, I oftentimes am writing in our living room and TV room, but if I need to look something up, my library is in a completely separate part. In fact, it's completely separated from the house; it was a garage that's been altered mostly into a library and study.

And I was writing something, and my son happened to be home. He was in college at the time, and he saw me get up, and he knew, by the way I was getting up, I was headed out to the library. And he said to me, "Dad, what are you doing?"

I said, "Oh, I need to look something up."

He says, "What do you need to look up?"

And I told him. So, he said, "Just stay here." He sat down, and he instinctively did this. He instinctively knew where to go and what to ask for. And he said, "There it is."

And I went, "Amazing." You know? It was like I was so used to doing it one way, and he was instinctively drawn to doing it the way he had always done it, because he had always been in a technological world. And the linkage – the linkages that have been created for us, and I expect this is only going to grow – this isn't going to – this isn't going away; this is only going to exponentially continue. And I'm walking into my library a lot less these days.

When do we get the horse and carriage downtown because it makes the date more special? And when do we say, "I'm going to make the meal myself rather than use the microwave or go out?" Do I go for a jog rather than use the car? All of these things that we say, "Where are there places where I might do something that I know a machine can do, but it's helpful to me?"

And then when are the other times when I use machines to speed things up so that I have a chance to do this other thing? And I think finding that balance is tricky for everybody.

I'm finding a lot more people who are negotiating with their businesses about where they do their work as a result of technology.

So, figuring out how to work in the modern world, which has e-mail all day, and yet to do good, productive, creative work, ‘cause I think that you often hear these things, that creativity takes a good at least eight minutes to start up, but the average worker gets interrupted every two minutes. And so, it becomes very hard to do creative work without having some kind of separation.

So, even as much as technology can free us up, sometimes it re-enslaves us in different ways. And you just have to constantly be evaluating that and deciding where you need to change.

And she answered and said, "You ought to ask an expert that question."

And when – every time you brake your car, an AI and antilock brakes is handling the brakes better than you can. We use calculators. All those things have been AI for a long time. So, I think just like our brakes and our airplanes, we'll just see it incrementally added to more things. Like a refrigerator that can self-regulate the temperature, that's AI. A wall thermostat that can change things, to an extent that's AI.

But I think we're getting to an environment where the interactions feel a little bit more natural. I think that's what people started to think of as AI. So, my phone, I dropped it and I broke it recently, and now the screen doesn't work at all. So, all I can do is use Siri. And I do think we're getting to that place where a lot of what we do with our phones, there's just a lot of annoying tapping that you do.

So, you know, when you go travel somewhere, and at the end of the day, you've done something, and you're going, "I just want to get back to my hotel." But you've got to look up all these – you've got to look up the e-mail, what the registration –

I mean when I'm writing, and there's a grammar correction, for example, I'm sitting here going, "Who has done the programming to make that happen? I mean that seems to me to be an incredibly intricate exercise that – where – there's been a lot required in order for it to analyze what it is that I put there on the page that didn't exist two minutes ago – to be able analyze, "Eh, you've got – do you have a subject verb agreement here that you need?" You know?

So, what's happening now with the AI things is they're trying to create things that are more like what we think people's minds are kind of like so that they're able to actually learn things. So, instead of now hearing about an AI that's beating someone at chess, it only knows how to do chess, you're starting to hear more things like, Goggle's sitting an AI in front of a video game that it's never seen before and learning how the game works and then getting good at beating it.

So, creating learning machines is the big thing now, where you're not actually trying to program in all the rules, but you're actually gonna hand it a bunch of good papers and say, "This is what good writing is, so that when it sees a bad paper it knows these problems." Right? So, it's going to learn by experience.

And there's a great Twitter account that – it's RNN_Bible. It's Recurrent Neural Networks, which is what some of these things are called. And so, it tries to produce new Bible verses. And they really sound like biblely things, but they're ridiculous. So, I don't know if I want to get in the numbers game of when these things will come.

But if that thing is pleading with you, saying, "I'm going to die; please let me go," and the voice feels real – it will feel different. And you may have seen some of the videos from the robotics manufacture, Boston Dynamics, where people are pushing a robot and knocking them down to train them how to get their balance back – and it's funny, when I watch those, I find myself feeling something. Like it feels bad to kick the dog robot –

And then I think we have a whole other set of questions to ask about how we would interact with devices, and when we would give, say, a robot caretaker to kids or to the elderly. So, the easiest thing to do would be to say, you know, when someone's in a home, just give them a robot. I probably won't face this issue, but my kids will have to face whether or not that's a – I think if that treats humans with respect or not.

So, I think that's where we start getting into some deep theological questions about the nature of what it means to be human and where are we going in the future. So, there's a whole movement called "transhumanism" that would say that we need to use technology to augment ourselves, and that it really sounds very – their language is very religious. So, there's a savior in its technology. There's a date. It's the singularity. There's a sense of resurrection and that we get put on – our minds get put onto computers, and we become eternal and all those things.

So, I think we, as Christians, need to be able to articulate, "What does it mean to have a soul, and is there any way to talk about that outside of just Scripture? I mean Scripture tells us we have an immaterial self, but can we talk about that in the public square in a way that's useful?

And then there are other people who are concerned about what might come. I mean how's that kind of fall in here?

So, a lot of people turn it down, even when it's free, just 'cause they're worried about it. So, there's a lot of ethics with regard to insurance that are coming along. And then, of course, the abortion question of, if you find out something, should you abort early.

And I do think – I do find it fascinating – I'll end with this little story – I do find it fascinating that the situation has now come where sometimes your eight- or nine-year-old knows more about what's going on than you do, and that can be a very, very humbling feeling as the younger generation instinctively gets involved with technology and we try and catch up.