Who Pays for the Data Center? AI, Politics, and Faith: Politics and Faith #14

00:00:01
Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I'm joined by Dr. Ashish Varma. And today we're going to talk a little bit about artificial intelligence as it relates to politics. So we've been doing our political series here on Thinking Christian for a while now, and we're kind of in the midst of it. And so instead of having another guest on or doing one of our reaction shows, we're going to deal with artificial intelligence and its role in politics. And we could start with something that's very specific. Right now, there are several articles out. I wrote one for Christianity.com, but there are other pieces out there. If you check to Google News and just maybe got on there and said like data warehouses and politics, you would pull up a lot of news pieces where people are frustrated about the sort of data centers that have to be built. to handle all of the energy needs to train and deploy artificial intelligence. And these are becoming bigger deals because they do take up an awful lot of space. They take up an awful lot of natural resources. But on some level, more telling, they also don't add a lot of jobs to the places where they're put. And so this isn't like putting in, you know, in the old days, we might've had like a car factory where, you know, there would have been a lot of people employed by that car factory or a steel mill or something like that. Those also took up natural resources. Those also took a toll on the environment, but there was a sense in which the economic life of a community could be bettered by providing jobs within these spaces. And AI data warehouses simply don't seem to be doing that. And so we'll dig into that a little bit more. But just as a preface, that's what we're going to be talking about today. That's the general direction of this. And really wrestling with the tech lobby and where we need to go to be thinking about and really deeply considering the sort of regulations that maybe should be put around tech and ultimately the way we respond to it, use it, all those kind of pieces. So I'll leave it there. Ashish, if you want to kind of riff off that, feel free. But otherwise, let's just dive in.

00:02:52
Speaker 2: I do. I want to riff, but I also want to maybe supplement. There are a lot of issues at stake in this conversation, right? You mentioned some of them, job creation, use of resources, Arguably, even the question of how we understand the world, do we understand it as a set of resources, is a deep theological question that puts something, I think, of a wedge between if we're really thinking through the biblical narrative and theological being and the ways that our current forms of politics, government, social order, think about land resources use. And that's something maybe we can get into as well. Kind of on a meta level, I want to introduce what might seem like an inane topic, but you and I have both heard plenty of times. You know, we've read our Bible, we've heard the pastor preach, we've heard this doctrine, this, that, or the other, and it sounds really important and we accept that, but we don't really get how it matters for everyday life. And I think to some degree what we've done, both in talking to Kevin Flatt and in the ways that we've tried to bring that into a variety of discourses is to show that the ways in which we're approaching the faith are themselves already a bit skewed when we just think in terms of the content of our faith are these dogmatic claims. And don't hear me as saying these dogmatic claims don't matter. They do matter, but they are second order. And what we've said about this before is that Second order is always an attempt to make sense of a way of being, right? To make sense of a biblical narrative, to make sense of theological posturing, to make sense of a way of being. They are not meant to be themselves replacing of those other things. And when we replace them, we get the sort of things that Kevin Flatt talked about, which is an idea of religion as a set of practices and beliefs that often seem set apart from the everyday life. And so the questions make sense. But I think what we're getting in a topic like this is that theological being, biblical being, whatever one wants to call it, is a question of what does it mean to faithfully inhabit the world as the people that God has made to be caretakers of the world, to be part of creation, to be drawing from creation, to have that creation drawn into us, even as we represent in some sense, as image bearers, the presence of God to it, to cultivate it. to bring it into its fullest sense of thriving on its own terms, how does that mandate and that sense of creational being sit alongside the idea of what technology is trying to do and what technology is trying to serve? Something like AI is trying to serve, something that you yourself have hinted at both on the podcast and in your writing of all the ways in which we use AI to create nothing to do, to do utterly nothing other than just to say, we made this silly video, right? Or we made this deep fake of fill in the celebrity, right? Um, there is a wedge here between what we're trying to articulate as a way of being in the world and what these programs are after. And that's going to come to a head then and how we understand all these other issues, right? Like the toll on the environment, um, The use of space, the communities that are most affected by the space, the use of energy, and the powering of these sorts of things. What sorts of goals are we after? And it seems to me that big tech, if we can use that term, or coin that term if it doesn't exist, has particular goals that might not align with what we see as theological or biblical being in the world. So I want to kind of set that up as a supplement to what you're saying. as the ways in which we're trying to approach this topic.

00:07:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's really helpful because I would argue that even when the goals of technology are stated, they tend to run afoul with what we normally would think of as a biblical or theological lifestyle. And so let's just take one. Let's say one of the goals that you often hear with any technological tool, any technological system that's put out is it's going to make us more efficient. This is largely an argument of AI. It's going to make us more efficient, going to be able to do things more efficiently. We can do things faster. We can do things with greater ease. Now, all of that doesn't sound that bad, right? Efficiency on its own, applied to specific scenarios that probably any of us could think of in our head we're kind of sitting back going yeah it'd be great if that were more efficient that could be helpful i think the trouble is that as we've made things more efficient we haven't slowed anything else down and so there's a difference between saying uh yeah we can make this more efficient um We were just talking about working out before we got on the podcast. And as I've gotten a little bit older and a little bit wiser, I don't spend three hours a day in the gym. My workouts have gotten more efficient. I've learned what's effective to produce strength, to build muscle, and to get a good workout in. And so I can get in and out of the gym in, let's say, an hour, as opposed to three. I've eliminated a lot of what's usually referred to as junk volume. That's a good sort of efficiency. I'm doing what's effective for me in the moment to accomplish a very particular goal of getting stronger, taking care of my body, being fit. And I'm not spending three hours in the gym doing things that are completely unnecessary to that. That's a good sort of efficiency in my mind. A lot of times what we get in technology, though, is we get the ability to be efficient for 12, 15, 20 hours a day. because part of the efficiency that occurs creates actually more work for us. And so I think we've used this example on the program before, but if we think about, you know, sort of how email or texting has created an ease, a more efficient way for us to communicate, that's true. It's, it's quicker than the snail mail that we used to use. It's, more reliable in some ways than the telephone because we know people are receiving it. You don't have to leave a voicemail or just miss someone altogether because they're not in the same place as a phone. And I'm thinking a physical wall phone like I had in my house, right? When I was growing up as a kid. If I wasn't home, I was missing those calls. And so there's a lapse in communication there. Well, when you text someone, the general understanding is that 100% of those are getting received. And the problem with that is that when we're receiving 100% of the messages that we're being sent, we feel like we need to respond to or read or be on alert for all of those messages. It becomes this sort of social expectation that now we have one other thing in our lives that we have to respond to. It's all these texts. Well, that's not terribly efficient. It just isn't. Because we've gone from maybe somebody thinking twice about a letter that they're going to write and send or a phone call that they're going to make, right? Because they know that they have to put some level of effort in to getting texts from companies, from getting random texts from friends, to getting all of these different sort of communications that because it's easier to send them, we get more of them. And as we get more of them, we either have to begin ignoring them which isn't terribly efficient, or we have to answer all of them, which isn't terribly efficient. And so what we've created in this efficiency, right? And I'm using air quotes for those of you who are just listening. This efficiency is really quite inefficient if you think about it in the right way. And then what that ends up doing as we think of it from a biblical and theological perspective in the ordering of time, We're very much collapsing time in ways that I don't think God ever really intended. For us to have that sort of instantaneous communication with people who are disembodied from us, if you just think about that for a moment, it's not a bad thing that we're able to communicate, but it isn't exactly natural either. And as we let more and more of this communication in, and it isn't just ads, it's everything else. As we let more and more of that communication in, our time becomes something other than our own. It becomes something other than something we could give to God. It becomes much more difficult for us to carve out space to just say, I'm not going to look, I'm not going to read, I'm not going to answer, I'm not going to do anything right now with my time. And if I want that time, I have to do something like put my phone on Do Not Disturb, which I have it on for the podcast. Right. So we can have a good interaction and I'm not seeing messages pop up all over the place. Point is that what's promised is efficiency isn't always efficiency. It's almost always a you can do now more work over a longer period of time. And that expectation will build and build and build until you break. And I think we have to be cautious about that sort of, quote unquote, benefit or efficiency of technology because it isn't really benefiting us as humans.

00:13:17
Speaker 2: This is good. A lot of different angles to take from that. So maybe I'll just bullet point them and see which ones stick, which ones we want to work through. I appreciate the use of the conversation on efficiency because I think that it signals a bit of a tension point, right? On one level, what's efficient for one person seems like it may not be efficient for someone else, right? It's efficient for me to send you the text message, and it's efficient for 100 people to send you the text message, and there you are with 100 text messages or the email, right? I think about before that with the email, studies showed that whereas conventional logic might have thought that emails, because they're not using paper, reduced the need for paper, it turns out it actually increased the use of paper because now you send that mass email to everyone in the office and you call them to a meeting and everyone then prints it.

00:14:18
Speaker 1: Out, right?

00:14:21
Speaker 2: Whereas previously, perhaps they would have just gone and just presented points, right? So even the efficiency of an email created the inefficiency of the use of resources. Or we could speak the same about the text message, right? The fact that I can get it on my phone might mean that I have fewer things to print out now. But that also means that I'm more frequently charging my phone and then charging my computer. And then everyone else in my household is charging their stuff as well, right? And so perhaps we're actually drawn greater upon energy resources than before. So the efficiency thing is a bit... It hits at one of the key issues, right? That what's efficient for one may not be efficient for others. But I think on top of that, I also want to use efficient in scare quotes. Because what we think of as efficient may in fact not be what's best for us. Right? To do something efficiently, in one sense, might reduce the reality of the building of character, let's say, or the patience that's required to do something the long way. I think about my middle schooler and the use of the calculator. Of course, when he's my age, I don't expect him to sit down with a piece of paper and do long-form math on everything that he needs to do. But might there be a benefit to his development right now to minimize the use of the calculator? There might be times that he needs it. There are times that he needs it. But to truly understand it, to understand the math, for instance, he has to do the work and go through the process. And in that process, he might actually learn that he's stretching his mind in ways that develop it for ways that when he gets to other disciplines, whether it be math or something else, he's built these habits of mind into him. Or we think about the efficiencies of the use of land, right? What might be an efficient use of water by building a dam in order to create electricity out of it also might be deeply harmful to the other creatures of the earth that depended upon water flowing in certain kinds of ways, right? It might actually be ecologically devastating, those sorts of things. And so the question of efficiency, not only is it relative, it also sometimes goes against what might be actually best for us right and i think that's a theological concern that has to be built into this as well right so so we think about ai and data centers ai does help us do some things really fast perhaps it helps us write a report faster but does it do we lose something in the process the ability to actually write reports or the process of learning that comes into it when we're writing the report in which it's not just the finished good but it's It's every step along the way that's shaping us and building us. I've mentioned this before on the podcast. I've long had in my mind the great coach of the Chicago Bulls, Phil Jackson, would always teach his teams that, of course, we have a goal, and that goal is to win a championship. And he did it at a higher clip than any coach in NBA history, having won 11 as a coach. But what really set him apart was the steps that we go through It's a thousand mile journey, and it's one step at a time. And he wanted to emphasize that one step at a time. And one of the ways that paid off for him that I thought was really significant, and I don't see teams doing it very often now, and I think it's to their detriment, is often in late game situations, when everyone else calls for a timeout to draw up a play, Phil would say, no, we're not calling a timeout. Because if I call a timeout, the other team gets to set up a defense. I have to trust that the steps that we've taken along the way mean that my team knows what to do in this moment. And they've built those habits of practice within them that they can take the next step. And, you know, of course, they had his early team said Michael Jordan, his later teams said Kobe and Shaq. Like, let's put that into perspective. But there was a remarkable success of that, right? And I think there was something to his philosophy that's instructive here, that efficiency is might actually undermine a larger goal, which is to build character, right? To build a fruit of the spirit, which is ultimately what theological being is gearing us towards, to be certain kinds of people. Does this make sense?

00:19:01
Speaker 1: It does. I think I'm going to get this gentleman's name wrong. I was struggling to remember what it was, but I think it's Pincus wrote an article in the 1960s or 70s He was an economist and he talks about the tyranny of small decisions. And I think this is part of what we're struggling with when we're executing on some of these technologies. Now, Phil Jackson, the way you described him, he's got a bigger vision in mind and he's going to architect back to the small decisions. Those every that very next step, right? Every step matters in this thousand step journey. He's architecting backwards. He knows where he wants to get to. He has a clear vision of what he needs to do. And so now he can sort of manufacture all of those steps along the way to prepare his team to do what they want to do. By contrast, what we often do is we're presented with some new technology, some new ideology, some new whatever it is. And we're given a choice. Do you want it or do you not want it? Would you like to use email?

00:20:16
Speaker 2: Sure.

00:20:16
Speaker 1: Seems easy. Right. Would you like to use social media? Yeah, that sounds great. Who wouldn't want to keep in touch with their high school friends that they didn't really like even when they were in high school? That sounds amazing. Right. Amazing. Right. And so we pick these things up. And we just start doing them. And we don't give any real thought to where they're taking us. And so in this example, we don't have a true end, a true telos that we're aiming for. What we're doing is we're picking this thing up and we're saying, yeah, I'd like to do that. Now, what he describes in his article on these tyranny of small decisions, he says, let's say an alien race comes down and they present you with a car. And they say, if you move away from your horse and buggy, we'll give you these cars. And everybody said, you know, they'll be able to get you to where you're going faster. You know, you can take more people with you. They don't need to be, you know, fed. They don't get tired, you know, whatever it is, right? All of these benefits of cars. And he says, most of us, and we have as a society, we bought into cars. Yes, cars sound great. They have these huge benefits and it's amazing. Now, the way he phrases it, he's like, now let's say that same Maryland race came down and said, in addition to that, you're going to ruin your planet through carbon emissions. And, you know, you're going to have less time together with your family. You're going to have less community because you're commuting and stuck in traffic jams constantly. You know, you're going to have smog in L.A. You know, all these negative benefits. Would we have thought twice about it? And that's sort of his notion of these tyranny of small decisions. We're all making these small independent decisions about what we're going to use without any context of a future negative state where we sit back and say, oh, there was a real downside to picking these things up, right? There are downsides to cars. There are downsides to email. There are downsides to AI. But if we're not clear on where we're going, We can't gauge whether we're willing to live with those downsides or whether we want to set aside the technology and say, no, we don't really want that world. That's not where we're headed. And so this analogy, I think, that you've used with the Bulls and Phil Jackson and all that, it's like because he knew where he was going, he can understand the steps that it would take to get there and then coach his team toward that end. What we have is we have no discernible telos other than some sort of amorphous, it'll make life better. And then we're presented with tools that really do have clear benefits in the near term at the very least. But we have no idea where they're actually leading us. And without that final telos, that goal, that vision of what the future is going to be It's very difficult for us to assess whether any given technology is actually going to help us get there or whether the downsides of that technology are ultimately going to hinder us from getting there. Now, for Christians, we have sort of that entelos. We just need to understand it. We have a theological anthropology. We have an eschatology. We have all these things. We understand where we're going and what our aim is. Our aim is to pattern our lives after Christ, to conform to his image. And so we can ask ourselves, how are these technologies actually helping us do some of that? Are they really helping me order time? Are they really helping me order space? Are they really helping me align and be that sort of, to gesture back to Kevin Flatt's conversation in the sacred social order, is my social order reflecting God's sacred order or is it doing something else? We have the understanding of where we're going that would allow us to ask those questions. I'm just not always sure we always do. And I would just throw in there that it's very difficult to avoid all of the inconspicuous patterns that technology tends to build into our lives. It's very difficult to avoid them. And that's why I think the data centers are so interesting because the data centers are not inconspicuous. They're an intrusion, a big intrusion. They're noticeable. I mean, these are huge multi-acre sites, right? They have to be built. They're physical. They're staring you in the face if you have one in your community. But I don't think data centers are the only problem. They're an intrusive aspect of a bigger problem that should prompt us to ask questions about six or seven or eight or nine or 10 steps back and say, If I don't want the data center, what am I willing to give up not to have it? This intrusive thing that I don't want, and intuitively I know it's not good for my community, am I willing to surrender Claude? Am I really willing to get rid of a lot of these AI tools that are coming out? What am I willing to get rid of so that I don't even have to have the conversation about this because this is not where I want the world to head? And I think that it's the intrusive aspect of these that's really crucial to grasp because everything else about these technologies or most everything else about these technologies is very inconspicuous. It trains us in ways that we don't really notice most of the time.

00:26:28
Speaker 2: This is key. We got here from several steps before, right? We didn't just suddenly plop into this moment. it's a bit of a natural progression, not in the sense that we had to end up here, but it's not as if there aren't already data centers that existed, right? They existed before that for the cloud. We use Dropbox. We use Box. We use Microsoft Drive, Amazon's version, whatever they call it, Google Drive. I guess Microsoft's is OneDrive, whatever it is. They all require these data centers, but they could be more conspicuous. But now with the proliferation of AI, They can't be hidden so much. And they very much do connect to the issues of the physical that it seems like that they've transcended above. They do not exist without the physical, and that's the physicality of the places in which you build them, the resources that they use, the clean water that's being used to cool them. All of these things matter. But to your point, it's the questions. and the issues that came before them. So even if we don't have a telos for what these things are, they're given to us, we have been inscribed by our very enculturation into a way of life in which someone else's telos has been put upon us, right? Fill in the name of whoever that is. The people that control these things do have a telos. They do have a goal that they're working towards. And that goal, there's a variety of things. Some of it is influence, right? You think about Just after 9-11, the way that Elon Musk used the event and the legal system to ensure that he would be forced into a contract with the government for his Starlink process, he had a goal, and that goal was to nestle himself into a place of influence and a sense of dependency upon him. That's where he knew his wealth would come from. His concern was less about the companies that were being displaced. and I don't have a lot of sympathy necessarily for the companies being displaced, but his interests were also less with what this might enable in terms of creation of jobs long-term. It was his own influence. And that's what animated him, and that's what animates a lot of these tech companies. How do we sell this particular way of life in order to trade for influence? And that influence comes in the form of capital, comes in the form of proximity to those who are policymakers. It comes in the form of the ability to ultimately be able to dictate a way of life that should be concerning to everybody, right? Not just people of the Christian faith, but also to those of the Christian faith, because it requires a series of micro-compromises, right? So on one side, we want to talk about the importance of recognizing the moment that we're in. That does matter. We can't affect something that's outside the moment we're in. It's not within the majority of our capacities to be able to say, I think the right way of being is fill in the blank, and I'm going to make it happen. I can only make decisions within the moment I'm in. But how do we get to these radical moments? It has to be a series of micro-compromises, right? Well, you know, that one thing is okay. I think about this in the world of computing. I'm sitting in front of you with my phone with its steady-state hard drive and its sealed compartment so that you can't change the battery, and my Microsoft Surface device with its steady-state hard drive and its battery that I can't access, and its hard drive that I can access nothing inside of. It is a sealed device. I take that back to the days in which I was in the computer world, in which one of the coolest things for me was to buy these shells so that I could build a computer. Now, that's definitely a nerd moment. But one of the great advantages of it was that the video card is no longer sufficient. My motherboard can support something better. I pull out the video card, I go down to the electronics shop, and I buy a new video card and I put it in. The degree of waste that's in there is pretty minimal, right? And those cards could then be recycled in some sense, right, to these companies. When my Surface is done, it is done. I cannot open it and still have it to be a functioning device. I cannot go down to the store and find the products to be able to hot swap things in and out. When it's done, it's done. And I'm on, I think, my fourth Surface device. If I'm counting correctly, I like the device. But I can't upgrade it. I just have to be done with it and move on, right? Why is that significant? Well, it puts me in a position now where I've had to make a series of compromises where the tech companies made their wager that people will take the cool-looking factor of these sealed devices and they could sell cool And we could get away from the model that made them less money, which was me going to the store and just buying a new graphic card. Or buying a new hard drive. And they were right. They wagered correctly. And now we're in a position where I actually don't have much of a choice unless I go and I build my own clunky machine that's just not portable. I can't take it anywhere. The advantage of this device is I can take it wherever I go. Small thing, but a big thing, right? Because it represents the larger landscape that gets us to the present. in which we didn't just plop here with data centers, a bunch of micro moves. And those micro moves are things that we have to have a certain sense of culpability for. But it also means we have to at some point be willing to say, let's thickly examine what's really at stake here. Thoughts on that?

00:32:45
Speaker 1: I agree. I mean, I think that, you know, the example of the computers, I was never much of a tech guy, but I can remember buying additional hard drive space from my computer and installing it myself on a laptop. I mean, I can remember doing it and you can't really do it anymore. And it's just a great example of the way that we tend to get a little bit squeezed in, right? If you think about right now, and I actually think McLuhan has these four laws and I won't go through all of them, but one of them talks about sort of a, almost like a recursive moment where, um, Technology is going to make certain things obsolete, but then there's a tendency for it to bring back things that had been made obsolete previously or bring back things that were around previously. And my tendency is to think that we're going to come into these recursive moments, that we may not ever go back to writing letters as our main source of communication. but I also don't think that we're going to be driving into this completely digital VR type world where, you know, you see in things like the books, uh, ready player one and ready player two, like a totally virtual environment or something like the matrix where you're plugging in and you're interacting in this totally virtual world, the metaverse that.

00:34:16
Speaker 2: Um, we don't know it.

00:34:18
Speaker 1: Yeah. Unless we're already in it. We don't know it. Um, The metaverse that was proposed a few years ago, I just don't know that I see that coming to fruition. I think that is a radical step that probably won't be taken. But I also, and so I say that to say this, I think there is some hope that we're seeing Generation Z sort of returning to the movie theaters as opposed to watching things just on their phones. But you have to be careful because it's not just on their phone. I think what we're going to move toward is a more hybrid future. And there's something in that that is helpful because it shows us that we're not caught 100% in this loop that you're describing. Yes, I probably can't go and build my own laptop. That is not something that I'm going to take the time to do, nor is it something that I feel like I have the technical ability to do. And if I were to be able to do it, the way I would be able to do it is I would go on YouTube and watch a YouTube video and construct my own laptop, which sort of defeats the point. You don't exactly escape the loop at that moment. But I do think that what these little sort of, like I said, you know, Gen Z returning to the movies, right? This sort of renaissance of vinyl, right? Albums and the coming back of some of these, what we would consider to be like vintage or analog sort of activities. I think it's a really crucial sign that we don't want to lose, right? We're not all just moving like zombies inexorably toward a digital future. We are starting to step back and say, no, I don't want this digital. I want this analog. I want this physical. I want it different than you're giving it to me. I think we saw a similar dynamic with eBooks and print books. Print books should be dead by now. They're not. People still like print books. And so as much as we talk about, yes, I agree with what you're saying. And like I said, I think you have all these different inconspicuous patterns that are sort of built in that are very difficult to avoid. It isn't impossible for us to avoid all of them. And I think that AI is probably the most inconspicuous of all of these. It's easy to think that. especially with the way AI interacts, that it's giving you good information, that when you pull up a Google search and you just hit AI mode, it's giving you the right information. It's pulling from all the websites that you could possibly visit, and it's giving you the best possible information. It's easy to believe that. I'm not sure it's true, but it's easy to believe.

00:37:12
Speaker 2: It's definitely not true, but it's right.

00:37:15
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, we can subvert that by just saying, no, I'm not going to use that AI mode. Or I'm only going to use that AI mode for what's the best restaurant in my area sort of queries, not deeper research, certainly not biblical and theological information. Just don't use it. And I think there are those little ways that we can sort of step back from all of this and start saying, I'm going to force myself back into what would be considered an inefficient approach. I'm going to take different steps because I'm heading toward a different goal. And now I'm breaking out of these inconspicuous patterns where I'm capable of doing so. And then accepting, to your point, there are going to be those moments where I'm not even sure you can buy a flip phone anymore.

00:38:07
Speaker 2: You can't actually.

00:38:08
Speaker 1: Can you? Okay, there you go.

00:38:10
Speaker 2: To your point about vintage, they've come back because... Parents don't want their kids to have the smartphones.

00:38:15
Speaker 1: Parents don't want their kids to have the smartphones. And so, I mean, that's a great thing. Like, get a flip phone instead of a smartphone. I don't know how I'll find my way places. I'll have to buy maps too and just be lost most of the time. But it is what it is, right? Like, now there are starting to be these ways we can step out of it. But there will always be, I think, ways that we're going to get squeezed into that sort of bubble where it's like, this is just part of our time. And there really isn't another way to live, quote unquote, off the grid in this moment. To do so is to give up an awful lot of other things that most people, myself included, would not be willing to give up.

00:38:58
Speaker 2: This is good because I think it could be easy to be lost in the criticism. And I've offered a lot of criticism. And I think what you're showing us is that the payoff is the small compromises don't have to be the small compromises. It might be inefficient. But maybe there's something built out of the inefficiency that's better, right? So I can't turn off AI mode on my search engines. The makers of them have not allowed us to. They used to, and then they've gotten rid of that. But what I can do is instead of going and being satisfied with the AI overview that they give you and then clicking the see more button, go to the webpage. The webpage is actually what they're taking these materials from, and the organizers of those webpages are the ones who are actually losing when we just allow AI to aggregate their information. Inefficient. But what we might learn is that the aggregation left stuff out, because you have to leave things out when you aggregate, right? Or even better, if you want that recipe, go to the library, pick up the recipe book, or go to your parent or your friend or to your neighbor and say, hey, I know I could get this online, but I really like how you make that. You want to walk me through this or you want to give me a recipe, right? Those sorts of things. If it's the map, yes, it'll be inefficient to get lost. I don't know about you. I try not to use the maps function just simply because historically I learn a place better when I get lost, which is very inefficient. But when you learn a place better, the ability to navigate and the ability to understand where you are is so much more fulfilling, just to be blunt, right? So there's little things like that that are training us. If you're doing research, do real research. Don't be satisfied with what AI is giving you. AI is aggregating again, and then you have to ask the question of what is it aggregating? Why is it aggregating the way that it's aggregating? Why are some sources valued and others not? Those are complicated questions to answer. Go find out for yourself. What's going on in these particular sources? What's being done? What is the aggregation? And I'll even say just anecdotally that I've had plenty of conversations where we've allowed just as a test for Zoom's function or Google's functions to say, let AI take notes for you. And there's just enough right there that if you're not paying attention, you could say, wow, it took great notes. But it's actually quite bad. It misses antecedents that change dynamics altogether. Don't trust it. That doesn't mean it's not useful again. But there are bigger things at play here than just simply buying into the system. And it's those little compromises again that puts us in the situation now where we have to ask the question, can they build this data center here? Well, the answer is yes, they will build the data center. Even if we fight it being built at point X, it'll be built at point Y because we've made the small compromises and allowed that way of life to really undermine our ability to navigate the world in other ways, ways that are considerate ecologically, ways that are considerate of our neighbors who have to deal with all the realities that go with these data centers, ways that are inconsiderate to maybe even my own children's future and finding jobs, and ultimately ceding them to the few that have the most to gain by these, right? The few in the tech industry that are making these things, that are pushing them forward, that are bringing them before us and dangling them as really temptations in front of us, what they have to gain is They don't have to pay your health insurance now. Maybe do the research of why that's the way that we even think about health insurance. It goes back to the civil rights era. It's really interesting. Maybe that's for another time. All of these little things are real opportunities in front of us, but it's when we don't take them seriously. And I think this is why we're doing it as part of a politics and faith part of that series is that No, there are opportunities in front of us to actually exercise a voice that aren't just merely subservient to the politicians who get their money from the tech people. But our ability to exercise our concerns and say, you know, here's what we really care about. Here's what we really value, not just what you told us we need to care about or the flashiness that you've dangled in front of us to make us think this is the right thing to care about, right? That 10 steps down the line we'll regret.

00:43:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think about some of the conversations we've had, which probably haven't aired as we're recording this one, but we've talked a little bit about, you know, sort of local engagement and political process and what you can do in your local community as part of your political engagement as a Christian. And I would say this ratchets it down another level, right? If there's a coordinated effort of Christians to sit back and say, hey, we're leery of using AI for this. okay, just stop completely, right? That would be an interesting political move. It probably wouldn't be sufficient enough to sort of cut into anybody's profits or even as a usage notice, but I think as a community, it would be a very interesting thing to try. These sort of concerted efforts to sit back and say, yeah, as a community, we're just not interested in that. Stanley Hauerwas wrote an article way back when about Christians participating in the military. Now, he's a pacifist and he's got his own bent on this. But I think the kernel that I want to sort of draw out of that article is just this, is that it's strange that Christians are embraced into the military. From his perspective as a pacifist, he's sitting back and saying, isn't it odd that Christians would be such great fighters? And And what I think he's sort of hinting at is we tend to get assimilated into these ideas and embrace them in ways that then keep us from really resisting where we should. And I think it's just an important thing for us to think about that sort of local aspect of this. When we are making personal decisions, when we're making local and community decisions, about technology use and where we're going to execute and use technology in things like worship, in giving, in any sort of form and function, we need to be having these sort of deeper theological conversations and trying to understand where this is taking us. So I'd say that for one. The second thing I want to bring out is an insight that I love from George Carlin. He was a comedian back in the day. If you're familiar with Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, he's the guy who sort of shepherds Bill and Ted on their adventure. And he was on Bill Maher's old show. Bill Maher had a show before the one that he has, I think it was called Politically Incorrect, if I'm remembering right.

00:46:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, the PBS one, I think, wasn't it?

00:46:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Or no, ABC, I think it was. Yeah, one of those. And- Carlin makes this point. He says, you don't have to have a conspiracy where interests are aligned. And so what I want to be careful of at this point in the program is saying that we don't want to run the risk of feeling like conspiracy theorists. What I would say is happening is there are interests converging that not only political players' interests and tech players' interests, but our interests. These are things that we're all interested in and that we believe will benefit our lives. And so as this is all coming together, we have to really rethink what our interests are. We need to ask ourselves, if I can sort of misappropriate Augustine language, whether we have misdirected interests. Augustine would have talked about sins in the terms of misdirected desires. And so misdirected interests. What is it that we're trying to do and be in the moment that may be hindering us from conforming to Christ later down the road? What's going to become an obstacle even as it helps us in this near term? And I think that we've got to wrestle with that a little bit because it isn't just the big tech guys and the political guys colluding in a back room somewhere where, you know, somebody's sitting petting a cat and twisting their mustache. Like, It's not, I don't think, a conspiracy. I think what it is, is it's a wired in set of interests that are not taking the theological reality, the theological fabric of the world into account. And Christians have a, we're the only ones with a unique perspective to really disrupt that. And I think that we need to take a step back and really think through how we would go about disrupting that.

00:48:25
Speaker 2: Agreed. I don't want to sound like I'm peddling conspiracy theories. I'm not sure I would agree on the non-theological part of it. It may not be overtly or intentionally theological, but I think it's deeply theological in the ways that the use of the word pseudo-theological, the way that J. Cameron Carter at USC would talk about it, that there is a theology at place, there's an elevation at place, there's a sense of supervening upon creation that's deliberately at work to say this is the imagination that's being put forth and there's an elevation a deification that is the kind of deification that we get out of genesis 3.

00:49:10
Speaker 1: Right and would you agree that that's oh sorry i was just gonna clear would you agree that's often implicit yeah i think that's yeah so i with you on the pseudo-theological point. I would revise mine to use that term and then say it's often implicit. I don't think people know they're doing it. They wouldn't identify that they're doing it, but they are doing it. Correct. Thank you for that clarification. Go ahead.

00:49:36
Speaker 2: No, that's kind of where I wanted to go, to say that I don't know that you have the CEOs of a tech company thinking, I am God. Though, you know, I've been surprised before. I read a pretty long-form article on Michael Jordan long after he'd retired by an ESPN reporter that was really, really good. And he drew out that Michael Jordan's codename for his security detail is Yahweh, which That doesn't sound like an accident. It sounds like, at the very least, his security team is trying to say something. And this is a lifelong Michael Jordan fan, by the way, and me. But that's troubling, right? Does Michael know that's what they call him? Presumably he does. There's something less implicit, let's say, in something like that. And I wouldn't put it out of reach to say that a.

00:50:28
Speaker 1: Very.

00:50:29
Speaker 2: a very wealthy person who's in control and has very strong desires to continue the influence that he or she might have, might have such lofty claims about themselves as well. But I also recognize that the presence of that in the Michael Jordan narrative doesn't necessarily mean that the president of Microsoft or Cisco is doing that same sort of thing. And so implicitly, Implicit is probably better if what we mean by that is that even in the case of Michael Jordan, does he really fully get the theological ramifications of the kind of claim being made when that's his codename? Probably not. Actually, I hope probably not. But nevertheless, pseudo-theological claim it is. And pseudo, of course, not meaning quasi or approaching. It's a theological claim that's false.

00:51:31
Speaker 1: I think one of my theories here is that we have what I would call a soft transhumanist philosophy that's becoming more and more pervasive. Transhumanism is this idea that we should use technology to overcome our biological limitations, even the biological limitation of death. And so what you find is sort of an interesting theological moment where the eschatology for transhumanism is post-humanity or post-humans, right? These are things that become something other than human. And so there's, and they are in many ways, they have overcome the biological limitations. And so we could say that they are better than humans. There's an elevation or an escalation sort of aspect to this. I don't think that everyone is a transhumanist, right? In a hard sense, right?

00:52:36
Speaker 2: Most of them probably aren't in a hard sense.

00:52:39
Speaker 1: I would say most, yes, 100%. But I do think that that mentality of there can be progress here. We can overcome this through, you name it, medicine. We can overcome this through whatever the next technology is. I think that is becoming more and more pervasive in our culture. And I think it's because it's often applied narrowly and because we do have evidence, for instance, in medicine, right, that these things are going to work eventually. We've solved a lot of disease problems, and that's a great thing. but that they're going to work eventually, that people sort of hold out hopes like, oh, I've got a problem with my neck right now. It's like, I can't believe they don't have a fake disc that they can just throw back in there and fix it. But they don't. But I would say secretly, I'm sitting back going, probably will at some point, right? And why wouldn't they? And I think that we begin to sort of allow that sort of understanding and philosophy to drive the way we think about a lot of what's going on. But the reality is that as we do these things technologically, there are aspects of our reality we just can't get back. We still have finite resources. We still have a finite world. And so there has to be some cognizance about not only When we talk about data centers, how much water are they using? Where is all this power coming from? What happens to the land underneath? Those are important questions. But on our everyday level, we need to be asking ourselves, where did all the time go? Right? What's happening to, like, why didn't I go outside today? If I become a hermit that's living in my house and just having groceries delivered, You know, like we have to begin thinking about some of those things as well because it isn't trivial. And ultimately, I think we're seeing that progress in one area doesn't necessarily mean human flourishing overall.

00:54:58
Speaker 2: Right.

00:55:01
Speaker 1: And that, I think, is a real crucial aspect of this conversation.

00:55:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, agreed. And maybe the operative idea here is that we're not talking about necessarily even explicit expectations or desires, right? And that's why I want to emphasize with you the implicit element. But it's more the notion that there's stuff baked into the cake. And the cake represents the notion of civility, of maturity, of what we tend to think of We've used this trifecta a lot of what's good and true and beautiful. And the questions that we should be asking is why is that what's true and good and beautiful? Is that what's true and good and beautiful? And maybe even the beginning point is in the middle of all that is the beautiful, right? Because sometimes it's easier to recognize what's just in fact ugly. It may in fact be quite ugly. Once we start to recognize what the building of these data centers might mean for the creatures of the earth that we were not only to share the land with, but according to Genesis 2, to care for. When we start to recognize what it might mean in terms of the loss of good, clean drinking water, and for whom is it a loss, right? Which communities are especially going to be affected by this? And my hint is it's not the gated communities. When we start to consider the effects that it's going to have on the power grid, Again, which power grids are going to be affected? And my guess is it's not the gated communities again. When we begin to think about all these sorts of dynamics and what we've taken for granted within that, and part of that is, why haven't we gone outside today? Why don't we recognize that I cannot live inside? I really can't. There's all this incredible realization that's coming to play even in the medical community today, what people have known for a long time. when you get onto that airplane, a lot of people sit down and fall asleep pretty quickly. The reason for that is because we're entering into a lockbox of carbon dioxide. We have a whole bunch of people piling onto this closed environment in which the engines are not yet running, and so the circulation of clean air from outside is not coming in. We're in an environment that's heavily carbon dioxide. That's why we get tired and fall asleep right i got new windows put on my house in which the company said these are a lot better energy efficiency and sealing the place off the trap you could run into is you don't open the windows and you end up with stale air well the reason of this that stale air matters is because again the fresheners of the air the hepa filters that god made for us are the trees outside but we're cutting down trees we have far less forest reserves than we used to have and that's just decreasing all the time right i think of vancouver island off the coast of bc that's incredibly natural and beautiful and yet a mere 10 percent of its old growth forests remain and this is where we get the majority of oxygen right that wind currents and all that bring to the rest of us these forests never mind rainwater and clean water and how that works through forests and things like all these things are implicated within it And so we've got to be able to ask the question of what is actually lost so that I can have a data center that lets me make a cute birthday card or whatever.

00:58:48
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think just to underscore this point, and then maybe we can close out, but there's this study that was done not too, too long ago. It was called Body Electric. What Body Electric looked at was how much movement do people who are working relatively sedentary jobs like I do. right? I sit in front of a computer an awful lot doing stuff on the computer, writing things, what have you. So how much movement do I actually need in a day? Well, I would have thought, you know, I work out, I go to the gym or whatever, and that would be enough. But what the study shows is that our bodies are not designed to sit in for prolonged periods of time. And so their guidelines and recommendations were five minutes out of every half hour, you're up and moving. Now you don't have to do anything strenuous. Like they talk about just taking a stroll, right? Walking around a little bit. They relax some of those, as I recall them, you know, they do like 10 minutes in an hour or something like that. But the goal is it's pretty frequent and it's frequent throughout the day. It's not just one exercise session for an hour during the whole day. And what they saw was improvements in mood. They saw improvement in various physiological categories. I don't have to regurgitate the whole study here. People can go out and look for body electric. They'll find it. But it's an interesting case, I think, for us that hits home in a very micro level of that the things we've decided with regard to technology and the sorts of jobs we're going to work, that wasn't all technology. I mean, people worked office jobs all the time, right? But I think particularly nowadays where a lot of our lives are structured around devices, that is not how our bodies were intended to be. The easier life gets, the more intentional we're going to have to be about moving our body simply because our body needs to move Whereas in the past, we would have been moving our body because there were tasks that needed to be accomplished that required us to move our bodies. And we've passed sort of into a different age. And I think it's sort of a microcosm, an interesting microcosm of what we see with some of these data centers. That we're assuming that the physical world can sustain these data centers. But I don't know that we're really sure of that. not really sure that we can sit back and say, no, all of creation was designed to have this much energy taken out of it for no real production coming back into creation.

01:01:35
Speaker 2: Right.

01:01:36
Speaker 1: That's key. And that is, I think a really crucial part of this. Like we have to recognize that these things tend not to just stay at one level. Like, oh yeah, my body needs to move, but a data center should be fine. Right. Like, The same logic tends to pull up because we're part of God's creation and God's creation has a design and an order to it. It has certain limitations and it's supposed to function in a very similar way. And so when we ignore those dynamics, we are going to tend, I think, to feel more tension than we need to. There's going to be more friction that creates the sort of heat that could burn us than we really want. And I think it's just crucial for us to think through it in those different ways. So last comments, man, and then we'll, we'll close out this episode.

01:02:29
Speaker 2: No, I think that's a, that's a good ending point.

01:02:30
Speaker 1: I think.

01:02:33
Speaker 2: You've taken what could sound like a very critical tone and you've, you've drawn us back to the stakes, right? That the stakes are personal. The stakes are communal. The stakes are theological. They're cosmic in the sense of the entirety of creation. Um, And in some ways, maybe the closing thing is the stakes are imaginative, right? Maybe our problems are that we have so truncated an idea of what life ought to look like, right? I think about the reality of my kids when I told them that, you know, you guys watch more TV than I'm comfortable with. And they never watched so much that if I compared it to some other households, I'd say, well, it was always less, but I still wasn't comfortable with it. I finally told them, you know, you ask a lot to turn on the TV, and yet when the TV's not on, I watch you guys. And the way that you guys play is so incredibly creative. And it terrifies me to think of that creativity lost because now you're just sitting there and watching fill-in-the-blank show. Of course, occasionally we'll turn on the TV, but how about we exercise that muscle, right? And I wonder if there's an atrophy. That we see our lives so tied to some of these things that are technological that we've atrophied the muscle of going outside and just taking enjoyment, walking among the trees, sticking our hands in the soil in the garden, or even things that are the result of lower levels of technology, right? Hopping on that bike and taking a ride. And in some ways, the continued atrophy is what's at stake, every bit as much as for my son and the calculator. atrophy of the mind and the ability to do complex things not because he'll one day need to know how to do like i've never i haven't used calculus since college and that's okay but i think it was important to learn to do it and to exercise the mind in ways to develop thought patterns that have actually been productive for me right i don't think without developing those things then that going on and doing doctoral work in theology could have happened right or whatever so the ability to have problem-solving capacities is actually at stake as well within all of this, the imaginative capacity to be able to do things and to see things in different ways and to problem-solve, to take the can of Coca-Cola and instead of seeing it as a drink that gives us diabetes, to see it as something that can help prevent corrosion or take away corrosion on a battery terminal in a car, right? That's an imaginative use of things that gets truncated in the process.

01:05:14
Speaker 1: Yeah. Agreed. No, that's a good ending, man. And hopefully, folks, you'll kind of understand how this relates into politics. I think a lot of politicians are weighing in on data centers. But more importantly, there is a local aspect to what we need to do as we're evaluating technologies. And a lot of that's going to be left up to our own discernment. I'm not anti-AI. I don't think Ashish is either. I use AI a good bit. Even in the production of this podcast, our transcripts are created via AI. A lot of the website I manage has an AI component to it. I'm not afraid of AI and I'm not anti-AI, but I do think that there are implications. I think we need to have a judicious use of it if we're going to move into the future in a way that respects God's creation, that allows us to conform more closely to the image of Christ. And if we keep those things in mind, I think there's a whole range of activities that we can engage in that will involve technology, but there's a whole range of activities that we won't be able to engage in. And, uh, and I think that's up to moment to moment individual discernments. It's not an anti-technology stance a hundred percent, but it's a call to, for us to be digitally discerning as we move into the future. So I'll leave it there. Um, Thanks for the conversation, Ashish. Thanks, everybody, for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care. Just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.