The AI Revolution Is Here
Also, the limits of compassion and life beyond the clock.
Living with the AI Revolution
Paul Kingsnorth with four questions concerning the internet
After many years of birth pangs, Artificial Intelligence is here. 2023 is witnessing the emergence of AI-generated content that has probably already blown your mind. There is a revolutionary feeling in the air. How should we think about it?
In two rich, provocative essays — The Universal and The Neon God —
probes four questions concerning the internet. Characteristically, he pulls no punches:…the global digital infrastructure we are building looks unnervingly like the ‘body’ of some manifesting intelligence that we neither understand nor control. … if we view the digital revolution in spiritual rather than materialist terms, we will have a better chance of seeing it for what it is. See the Internet as the inevitable result of eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, rather than the fruit of the tree of life - see technological ‘progress’ as a result of choosing information over communion - and the story that emerges is the Faustlike summoning of something we are not nearly big enough to be playing with.
Whether you agree or disagree, it is an important perspective to consider (especially if you’ve had the misfortune of meeting Sydney). f Kingsnorth is right, the most needful question is, ‘How do we live with this?’ His answer is askesis—the exercise of spiritual self-discipline that is willing to draw lines or opt out. Most of us couldn’t (or wouldn’t want to) do the latter, but considering the former seems like an important task for our moment.
Read The Universal and The Neon God over at
.
Compassion Isn’t Enough
Matthew Loftus and Louise Perry on assisted dying and surrogacy
Grab a cup of coffee and read these words from theologian Oliver O’Donovan a few times:
Compassion is the virtue of being moved to action by the sight of suffering … It is a virtue that circumvents thought, since it prompts us immediately to action. It is a virtue that presupposes that an answer has already been found to the question “What needs to be done?,” a virtue of motivation rather than of reasoning.
Compassion is a virtue, writes O’Donovan, but not a virtue that can immediately reveal what is right and good. If we let compassion drive us in any and every situation, we can easily wind up in a moral quagmire. Here are two articles that explore current issues to show how compassion can be calibrated by higher virtues.
The first is by Matthew Loftus, a family doctor in Kenya, and it concerns euthanasia. When someone wants to die, compassion increasingly answers the “What needs to be done?” question with “Help them die.” But this answer can keep us from asking bigger questions about how suffering can be shared and about “plugging the cracks in our welfare system so that no one has to think that death would be preferable to living.”
The second article looks at “What needs to be done?” when a couple cannot conceive a child, or when a woman is fearful of the physical toll of pregnancy. A popular answer in 2023 is surrogacy. But
offers a closer look at this practice and reveals what compassion misses: the severing of the mother-infant relationship that is so vital for the flourishing of mother and baby alike.Read Arcs of Life over at The New Atlantis and Womb service: the moral dangers of surrogacy at The Spectator.
Life Beyond the Clock
Jenny Odell on her new book, Saving Time
Time is money. But is it, really?
Visual artist and philosopher Jenny Odell says No—and in fact, it shouldn’t be. Her new book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock sets out a history of our measurement of time in seconds, minutes and hours and shows how the clock was invented not to benefit people, but to maximise profit.
Even more importantly, Odell offers a roadmap for experiencing time in a different way, taking cues from pre-industrial cultures, mapping out the difference between chronos and kairos, and revealing what nature teaches us about living in time. Here’s Odell in an interview, talking about the Douglas iris that blooms around her Oakland locale:
The Douglas iris does not have a calendar. And then I was thinking, what is time to the Douglas iris? It’s water and temperature and maybe sunlight, you know, and probably some other factors I don’t know about. But those were all present. And so for the Douglas iris, it is time; it is time to flower. And I think about the same thing with birds and nesting and all of the sort of messages and cues that they’re interpreting that are not the calendar.
Or, as she writes more poetically in Saving Time,
As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days; inside the weather, where certain flowers and scents come back, at least for now, to visit a year-older self. Sometimes time is not money but these things instead.
Listen to Another Kind of Time—An Interview with Jenny Odell over at Emergence Magazine, or read the transcript. You can also read an excerpt from the book at Penguin.
Phillip and family are in the midst of their yearly visit to the USA—the land of 70mph cruising and countless beloved people, including our faithful Instigator and family. The Johnstons and Pattons enjoyed a Saturday morning catch-up where Lindsey devised a revolutionary honeyed focaccia, Muhamarra, and egg breakfast sandwich. Until next time…
Reading: Phillip’s four-year old is loving Bare Tree and Little Wind: A Story for Holy Week. Bare Tree = “The trees of the field will clap their hands” (Isaiah 55:12). Little Wind = “He makes the wind his messengers” (Psalm 104:4). He also packed some of Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on Song of Songs for this trip—and they are beautiful.
Listening: On Easter morning for the past few years, after the opening tracks of Resurrection Letters, Vol. 1 and Bach’s Easter Oratorio, Phillip has turned on this playlist from Art & Theology where one particular selection always hits him like the proverbial ton of bricks. It’s all there—and the album is great too.
In addition to enjoying a visit from the Curator himself last week, Andy has been enjoying the BEMA Discipleship podcast. It picked up right where BibleProject’s podcast, courses, and videos left off to supply seemingly endless hours of deep-dive Bible nerdery.
Listening: And the award for the most meaningful use of a consistent metaphor in a song goes to… “On Board” by Alanda Henderson and Joshua Burnside. (If you want something more upbeat, try this playlist on for size.)
Favorite Books On…: This list goes back to last year’s writing project on deconstruction. Here are my favorite books to recommend to someone who is thinking through deconstructing their faith: After Doubt by A. J. Swoboda, Finding Faith, Losing Faith: Stories of Conversion and Apostasy by Scot McKnight and Hauna Ondrey, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman, In Praise of Doubt by Peter Berger, You Lost Me by David Kinnaman, and How (Not) To Be Secular by Jamie Smith.