What Would Redemptive AI Look Like?
Plus, the dilemma of this year's election and fighting for a better world.
Welcome to Three Things.
This is our main monthly issue of three items to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture.
Imagined Countries and Our True Home
Tara Isabella Burton on Narnia and Middle Earth
Why do so many of us continue returning to Narnia and Middle Earth? Of course, there is the enchantment of entering a deftly crafted secondary world, but Tara Isabella Burton argues that it is a particular kind of enchantment that grabs us. It is an enchantment of particularity: "magic and myth that is rooted not just in a generic Jungian world story but rather in the specific meaning of this tree, of that root or leaf, of the story of this village."
The particularities of these worlds evoke the British past—and they do so in a markedly different fashion than another fairy tale that was gaining ground in Tolkien and Lewis’ day: Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, a vast saga of national greatness “that reached its apotheosis in the Third Reich’s fetishization of blood, soil, and soldiers’ glory.”
That’s not Narnia. As Burton writes,
Nobody, in Narnia, fights for glory, or for grandeur, or for Greatness. They fight for Narnia—and they fight for each other. They fight so that they can go home and sleep in warm beds and eat food far more wholesome than any boarding school will ever serve. …
Lewis knows, as I think we all know, that although our love of country, of our own places, helps us understand something vital, it also illuminates what we’re missing. We are all, for Lewis, wayfaring strangers, whose country is not the place where we were born or whose passport we hold, but God’s own land, the Narnia beyond Narnia. And our love of home is also always a homesickness for that place beyond the place we remember. To love Narnia is to love real-life England, but it is also no less important to love the country Narnia points to and at the end of the Last Battle collapses into Aslan’s own country.
Read on Narnia at The Line of Beauty. For more from Tara Isabella Burton, check out her important book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. It was our summer book club choice last year.
Choosing Not to Choose
Matthew Franck on the 2024 election
We don’t want to tell you who to vote for. But we do want to reassure you, with all the resources we can muster, that you do not have to choose from the two options you’re likely to find on the 2024 US election ballot.
To the choir, we’ll add the voice of Matthew Franck. He’s a lifelong conservative who writes over at The Dispatch. Back in 2016, Franck wrote about not voting for either Donald Trump or Hilary Clinton. He’s now back with more of the same:
Trump’s signature qualities were incompetence and recklessness, constrained to positive effect only by Congress, the courts, and many of his own appointees. Then he did his utmost, up until the evening of January 6, to steal the election from Joe Biden. A second term for Trump would be a four-year master class in indecency and mendacity, strongly inflected by an urge to authoritarianism that may sorely test our civic institutions.
Biden, as all can see, is showing many of the weaknesses of his advanced years (though here, Trump appears in better shape only by comparison). Never a strongly principled man even in his prime, Biden has long enjoyed an undeserved reputation as a “moderate” Democrat because he is a trimmer. Now his sails are trimmed to capture the wind that blows from his party’s hard left.
But why not vote for “the lesser of two evils”, whoever you deem that to be? Franck expresses it well:
For at the end of the day, that is what voting is: a kind of investment. Not of our money, but of ourselves—our will, our intention, our passion, and our conscience. Of course, our investment can be a light matter to us, if we cast our vote in a throwaway mood, thinking “better this guy than the other guy.” Then we might cut our emotional losses when he disappoints us. “Live and learn.” Yet paradoxically, if it took a great effort to “screw your courage to the sticking place,” as Lady Macbeth put it—if, that is, you had to swallow hard to vote for a candidate, and he won—you may find your investment in him very heavy, and your felt need to defend him equally so.
Read Choosing Not to Choose over at The Dispatch.
Redemptive AI?
Andy Crouch on repairing and redeeming artificial intelligence
We’ve pointed you toward some hot takes on artificial intelligence over the past few years and I (Phillip) stand by them. But AI isn’t going anywhere. It is as consequential a development as agriculture, electricity, or the Internet.
Can AI, like those developments, be harnessed for good? The question requires a few deep breaths to keep fools from rushing in. But with ample caution in place, and from the foundation of a Christian understanding of human beings as image-bearers of God captive to deception and living in a very good and very distorted world, Andy Crouch jumps in:
Like the Internet, electricity, and agriculture, AI is a general-purpose technology that can be harnessed to many ends. Redemptive entrepreneurs can lead the way in demonstrating that AI can be deployed—in fact, is best deployed—in ways that dethrone pride, magic, and Mammon and that elevate the dignity of human beings and their capacity to flourish as image bearers in the world.
What might this look like? Crouch provides six “redemptive directions” for the technology, with examples for each:
Redemptive AI will inform but not replace human agency.
Redemptive AI will develop rather than diminish human cognitive capacity and extend rather than replace education.
Redemptive AI will respect and advance human embodiment.
Redemptive AI will serve personal relationships rather than replace them.
Redemptive AI will restore trust in human institutions by protecting privacy and advancing transparency.
Redemptive AI will benefit the global majority rather than enrich and entrench a narrow minority.
Read A Redemptive Thesis for Artificial Intelligence over at Praxis. For more from Andy Crouch, check out his brilliant book The Life We’re Looking For.