“An AI Made For Us: A Theological Manifesto”

Chicoan Greg Cootsona, the Executive Director of AI and Faith (aiandfaith.org) and a pastor at Bidwell Presbyterian Church, writes that growing up in Menlo Park immersed him in “the gospel of Silicon Valley.” It was the message that “we and our human ingenuity represent the good news. You, chosen among mortals, can solve any problem.”

But he heard a different gospel as a young college student attending UC Berkeley. “I admit it: ‘Grow up in a secular home. Go to Berkeley. Become a Christian’—it’s almost laughable. But that’s what happened.” 

Later he would spend decades “teaching on science, technology and faith in churches and university classrooms,” but in December 2022, hosting his Chico State colleagues for a holiday party, AI became front and center.

More broadly, Cootsona realized that “we ought to ask not what AI can do, but whether we are shaping it to serve us, or quietly letting it go the other way.” That’s what he addresses in “An AI Made For Us: A Theological Manifesto” ($4.99 in paperback, independently published).

Though approached from a Christian perspective, Cootsona’s application of what he calls “The Jesus Rubric” (“technology is for us, not us for technology”) may aid those of many faith traditions. AI systems “lack moral agency, and so ethical responsibility falls back on us as human beings and the institutions that design, deploy, and use AI.”

Cootsona is neither a doomsdayer nor a superficial optimist. In a fallen world the key is Christian hope. “As followers of Jesus, we believe that the full humanity for which AI must be made is the humanity revealed in him, which is to say embodied, relational, morally engaged, and capable of suffering and forgiveness.”

“AI represents a dazzling extension of our created creativity. But the point of that creativity, from a theological angle, is love of God and love of neighbor. Where it undermines them, it needs to be questioned, resisted, boundaried, or redesigned. If AI serves love, it becomes a way to care for our neighbor.”

His practical chapters for individuals, communities and churches, including “Sabbath,” “Focal Practices,” and “Creative Collaboration,” are eminently intelligent—with no artificial ingredients added.

“The AI Con: How To Fight Big Tech’s Hype And Create The Future We Want”

The Book in Common for the current academic year at Chico State and Butte College lands in the middle of contentious claims from employees (and ex-employees) of OpenAI and Anthropic, Google Gemini and xAI, that autonomous AI agents will either cure cancer or destroy humanity.

But the authors of “The AI Con: How To Fight Big Tech’s Hype And Create The Future We Want” ($32 in hardcover from HarperCollins; also for Amazon Kindle), linguist Emily Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna, call foul on both claims. With careful analysis and a conversational (and sometimes sardonic) tone, the authors inveigh against both the Boosters and Doomers. 

They are “two sides of the same coin … the belief that the development of AI is inevitable and that that resulting technology will be both autonomous and powerful…. One shows a utopian world of abundance, the other a dystopian hellscape.” And, pointedly, “Neither depicts the real harms of actually existing automation, at best dismissing them as less important than the imaginary existential threats.”

Though the authors are writing at the end of 2024, their critique of AI (“a marketing term”) remains surprisingly relevant despite the debut of increasingly powerful frontier systems. (The authors refuse to anthropomorphize chatbots, calling them instead “text synthesis machines.”)

Though there is certainly good automation, the authors say, the examples of companies misusing AI (like insurance companies determining whose claims get rejected) are legion (they cite hundreds of examples). The focus on “AI safety” deals with “fake scenarios” whereas those “working on issues of concrete harms of AI systems” (dealing with “racial and economic equity, freedom of movement across borders, personal safety from state violence” and more) are interested in the here and now.

AI is high on its own supply. So fight the AI hype which “helps others get rich by giving them cover to collect (e.g., steal) and then launder massive amounts of data.” Ask questions about what is being automated, resist using the “tools” at work, demand accountability, create and enforce current legislation protecting civil rights, engage in collective action.

No AI was used in the writing of this column.