AI Is Going to Destroy Us All — Just Like Everything Else Was Supposed To

On Wednesday, my friend, colleague, and partner in podcasting excellence, Stephen Kruiser, and I recorded an episode of Faith All Over the Place in which we talked about how Christians should approach and use artificial intelligence. The next morning, I heard an episode of the Breakpoint podcast that I wish I could have heard before we recorded because it tied in well with part of what we talked about.

Related: Faith All Over the Place, Episode 41: Christianity and AI

Breakpoint host John Stonestreet spoke (from a script he wrote with Dr. Glenn Sunshine) about how Christians shouldn’t fall for the doom-and-gloom scenarios surrounding AI. Stonestreet reminds us that AI is far from the first thing we’re supposed to have panicked over.

Stonestreet reminds us that the recently deceased Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb struck fear into the hearts of plenty of leftists. The dire, catastrophic projections of what would happen as the Earth’s population grew proved to be wrong and downright silly.

The 1970s became a hotbed of panic and despair. We were going to run out of oil by the ‘90s. Our climate was going to cool, and we were going to experience an ice age. By the time the ‘80s rolled around, we had acid rain to worry about, and then there was the hole in the ozone layer that was going to vaporize us all.

The climate Chicken Littles kept going. Maps showing our coastal towns disappearing due to melting polar ice came out. Rising sea levels would engulf entire island nations. We were supposed to worry about the poor polar bears.

Seriously, how many times did we hear that we had five, 10, or 12 years to save the planet? Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, and countless celebrities told us that the clock was ticking — they still do. I still get breathless press releases from an outfit called We Don’t Have Much Time.

And then there was Y2K. Everything was going to grind to a halt as soon as the clock struck midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, because computers couldn’t keep up with the change from “99” as the year to “00.” Our cars, our computers, and nearly everything else electronic would become bricks.

My pastor at the time, who was no leftist, held a special meeting in which he told the congregation that we needed to buy a stash of food in case nobody was able to buy groceries. My stash consisted of a single can of green beans because I couldn’t get on board with the worry. I was directing our student ministry’s New Year’s Eve party that night, and I told one of the tech volunteers that we’d know soon enough, as we counted down to midnight. The worst thing that happened was the trouble we had cleaning up foil confetti the next morning.

And that’s just from the second half of the 20th century. There were also Cold War fears, worries that train travel would destroy the human body, and concerns that electric lighting would wreck sleep cycles. Every new medium of transportation, from trains to automobiles to planes, would mean the end of civilization. Movies, radio, television, and even recorded music would ruin our culture.

Every technological leap has brought predictions of calamity. As I mentioned on Faith All Over the Place, the Bible reminds us that there’s nothing new under the sun, so catastrophic prognostications about AI sound like every other fear we’ve heard for generations — and even long before we were born.

I think we shouldn’t buy into the AI panic. As a Christian, I remind myself that God’s got this. No technological development is perfect — that’s for sure — but we don’t have to freak out. We can worry, or we can live our lives.

AI may not be ending civilization, but bad ideas, bad politics, and bad media narratives still deserve a fight.

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