I think that I have the brain capacity to understand a lot of things, because I am interested in them. I, for instance, have been a medical assistant, an IT help desk support person, a web developer, a cook, and a writer. AI has extended my reach because if there’s anything I want to know, I just ask. I am not a fan of generative AI in which it writes things for me, but I have no problem asking it for 200 words on any topic so I can get a good idea of what something is all about before I start publishing. The great thing is that AI can be wrong, and Microsoft Copilot will pull up references so you can do your own fact checking.
But at its most basic core function, AI’s ability is in collaboration. You don’t get anything out of AI if you don’t put anything into it. The results will look ersatz, as if you were the one that pretended to be human. AI can easily take the soul out of your work or creative project, and I don’t think that businesses are ready for it.
We need to be in an age of vulnerability with leadership, and an ersatz work product isn’t going to get us there. I want more searching for knowledge across the board. I want more curiosity as a society, and other cultures are doing it far better than the US. We’re even different culturally across states, with some areas having many more PhDs and JDs and MDs than others.
Washington is also a curious and sometimes soulless place that could do with more leadership like Raphael Warnock’s. He does not use his preacher status to lord his Christianity over us, but to influence his vote for the working class. He’s an example of who Jesus might actually be in modern times, a social justice warrior for things like voting rights, universal health care, etc.
In terms of mixing religion and politics, the conservative arm of the church is nowhere near the historical Jesus’s message. Jesus did not come here to comfort the distressed as much as he came here to distress the comfortable. Over time this message has been lost, and it is time to reclaim it. Too many unhoused and working poor people feel the pinch of income disparity and not being able to go to the doctor when they want.
It all stems from a lack of curiosity in their own faith, because what their preachers tell them is good enough. You won’t find Biblical literalists reading Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, because they are not interested enough in the teachings of Jesus to swallow more than what they hear on Sunday…. But their faith is so much richer when you take Jesus’s words at face value. Launching war off an itinerant preacher is the strangest transformation in history. I didn’t write that line, but I believe it with all my heart.
AI is fantastic at Biblical exegesis because it already has access to the texts I would use without me buying them all (to be fair, my collection of William Barclay is quite large). It makes me faster when I can just ask AI to look up a scripture and a cross reference. Illustrations come to me easier when I’m reading pericopes in small doses, exploring what was going on historically at the time.
Geographic location is also very important to Biblical criticism, because especially In the Beginning there are tons of land grabs that affect how people see God.
As Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury once said, “in the Bible, there is no argument for or against God. There are only people’s reflections of God.” The God of the Old Testament is vengeful because we as a society were vengeful. The God of the New Testament is full of promise, because society advanced.
But theology is only one subject on which I like to go down a rabbit hole. I’m researching for a neurodivergent cookbook, and of course AI can present me with one-pagers on all the cooks I’d like to include in “why we do everything.” It is also quick for recipes, because I don’t use them but some people do.
I am the kind of person that reads cookbooks like a novel, learning techniques and blending recipes from whatever I have on hand. The ancients guide me in seasoning, and I would like to believe there are black people in my history somewhere, because I do not have a white person’s sense of spice. Judging by my translucent skin color, I doubt it, but there’s always hope.
Actually, I’m lucky that my skin is a little bit olive, because it stops me from burning to a crisp in the summer. I actually have the ability to tan, and I used it quite liberally in Texas, where September rarely cools from August heat. My left arm is particularly dark from spending all that time driving with the sun beating through the driver’s window.
I used AI to give me several one-pagers on my car and its tech functions.
But the most important thing that AI can teach you is AI.
You can ask it all the questions you need in order to feel comfortable with it….. Like, “what are your capabilities?” “What kind of hardware does it take to run you if I were to download your data structures?” “Who invented you?” “When did you go live or when were you “born?”
Now that Microsoft has introduced voice chat, this goes even faster. My digital assistant sounds like a surfer, and I can use it on my iPhone or my Android. What is best is keeping the window open like a phone call, so when I think of something I need to research I can just say it into the mike and keep typing.
As you can see, I have used none of AI’s generative capabilities. I think of my own brainstorms, but writing those ideas into Copilot allows Copilot to enhance whatever I want to do naturally, coming up with ideas that fit the scope of my project. I’m not sure that I could write without AI these days, because I’m not using it as a platform that does my work for me. It is at best a kind and caring Google search.
So get curious. Ask the books for information. You have at your fingertips a tool for getting smarter, and I can’t think of a better time in history to use it.
Stories That Are All True 