It seems to me that we are touching upon a great many issues within this conversation about AI and its impact upon creation: to name just a few, we run head-on into questions about what exactly is the good life, the use and accumulation of power, economics, politics, faith, what it means to be human, and what our responsibility is to our co-members of creation. Within this brief space, I want to focus upon two things that will be helpful for thinking critically about the degree we embrace this or any other technology: the character of work, and sabbath.
My aim here is not to paint AI as inherently bad or evil. AI may certainly be aimed toward human and other-than-than human well-being. Insofar as it is used with these ends in mind, and the environmental harms incurred in AI generation are mitigated, then perhaps it can be a useful tool for caring well for creation. But these are significant qualifying “IF’s.” Discernment is required, along with willingness to set limits upon its use. However, within the context of an increasingly deregulated, hyper-capitalist economy, animated by the logics of power and profit, with little to no moral or ethical limits set upon either the development or deployment of the technology, not only is AI intentionally designed to play upon elements of human frailty, there appears to be little motivation for building significant resistance to the vagaries of human sin. This is perhaps unsurprising; the central organizing value for the corporate entities generating AI is profit – not the well-being of creation. Yet it reveals significant issues for those who embrace creation as that which belongs to God, and understand themselves as those who are tasked with care for creation.
Context: The State of Creation
Several years ago, while living in Scotland, I had the opportunity to spend time ‘hillwalking’ through regions in and proximate to the Cairngorms. While spending a few days at Glenelg, near the Isle of Skye, I recall feeling a lingering dis-ease as I walked among the hills and along the frigid gray waters, but the cause eluded me.
A month or two later, walking among the hills of the eastern side of the country, the vague dis-ease returned. This time, skirting a small lake rounded with trees and grass land, the cause became clear: the usual voices I listened for while hiking, were silent. No birdsong, no buzzy bug sounds, no mammals of any size skittering through the grass. In the silence, I was experiencing absence; a concrete expression of the reality that the UK has lost forty percent of the diversity of living beings that once existed on that island.[1] I journeyed through ecologies becoming ghost towns. What is worse, is that it took me so long to notice. Creation was groaning; I just had not recognized it.
The Empty Promises of Technology
In 1951, while the stench of burnt human flesh lingered in the world’s consciousness, Abraham Heschel published The Sabbath.[2] The gruesome technological efficiencies of Nazi Germany, and the suffering wrought by American ingenuity in dropping atom bombs upon Japan, left little doubt that these and other technological developments presented a threat:
Technical civilization is the product of labor, of man’s exertion of power for the sake of gain, for the sake of producing goods. It begins when man, dissatisfied with what is available in nature, becomes engaged in a struggle with the forces of nature in order to enhance his safety and to increase his comfort.[3]
Surely, technological developments are frequently a response to basic human needs. Yet Heschel adverts to a problem: technology, most especially in the ‘Capitalocene’ era, is increasingly rooted in the inward curvature of the human heart, propelled by pride, fear and greed. Heschel marvels at the prickly embrace of these technologies. “How proud we are of our victories in the war with nature, proud of the multitude of instruments we have succeeded in inventing, of the abundance of commodities we have been able to produce.”[4] For the people of God, alarm bells ought to be sounding: why are we at war with creation – that which God made, loves, sustains and redeems? One also wonders at the increasing poverty in the face of promised ‘abundance.’ The benefits promised in the production and dispersal of commodities is uneven at best. Moreover, as the loss of biodiversity increases across the globe, why is there an increasing scarcity of what had been abundant within creation? It seems that even as our knowledge of the world increases, we are often furthering its destruction rather than its flourishing.
A Diagnosis
Heschel points to the ultimate unraveling: despite our seeming ‘victory’ over ‘nature’, “our victories have come to resemble defeats. In spite of our triumphs, we have fallen victims to the work of our hands; it is as if the forces we had conquered have conquered us.”[5] And yet, many people continue to rush uncritically into the technological embrace.
Ellen Davis’ discussion of sloth offers insight into our current situation.[6] Far from the listless indolence we might imagine, Davis draws upon Karl Barth, who frames the vice differently. It is a sin of commission; as Davis glosses it in a pithy phrase well-worth remembering, sloth is “foolishly assertive action.”[7] Foolish, for central to sloth is the arrogance of believing “we can authoritatively tell ourselves what is true and good.”[8]
For many of us, fear is also a driving factor; we fear for our jobs, we fear missing out on economic ‘goods,’ we fear being left behind in the seeming gold rush of the A.I. economy. It is not implausible to think that, for instance, fear drove the leaders of the California State University system to jump with both feet onto the AI bandwagon – but with possibly too little regard for the implications for either employees or students. Either way, Barth is clear about the final outcome of sloth: it pulls creation apart at the seams, even as it thinks it is saving itself.[9]
The destructive fruit of sloth is not, then, limited to the individual; it impacts communities by short-circuiting the sense of responsibility that ought to be held for others. The present generation, those who have gone before, and future generations become subservient to the self. As Davis notes, work that does not move beyond self-love, is not extended to enhance the life of the wider community, “cannot free either worker or community from profound anxiety or care.”[10] Nor, for that matter, can it free creation from its groaning.
Paths for Resistance
Contrary to sloth, Davis asserts good work as that which is pursued for the good of the community, for the good of creation, and as motivated and animated by love rather than selfishness. However, wise discernment is necessary for sorting the wheat from the chaff, and, in the case of AI, discerning when it might be beneficial, and when deleterious. More importantly, it necessitates that we discern the voice of creation, becoming those able to recognize both its flourishing as well as its groaning, and then, to respond wisely in care for creation. Here, the practice of sabbath becomes vital.
Two elements carry particular import for this discussion. The first has to do with the ceasing of work. As Jurgen Moltmann frames it, on the sabbath, God’s rest is a ceasing from God’s creative activity, rather than an attempt to flee from creation.[11] Indeed, it is ceasing that enables the second crucial element of sabbath: presence. For it is here, in God’s peaceful presence to creation, in which God enjoys the goodness of creation, recognizing it in all of its beauty and brokenness and groaning, that creation can also, finally, find refuge.[12] Rather than being threatened with non-existence, as Moltmann observes, in God’s rest, “all created beings find their own rest. In the presence of his existence is the blessing of their existence.”[13]
One might see how ceasing from labor, might foster one’s ability to discern creation’s voice, and resist those sloth-inducing patterns of life that render a person vulnerable to the problematic elements of technology. If we are those who are learning to hear, see and discern creation, perceiving both its well-being and its groaning accurately, sabbath rest and presence may help us to align our work, such that it is conditioned by peace rather than exploitive tendencies, seeking creation’s flourishing rather than furthering its demise. In fact, in sabbath rest and peace, the deceptive allure of AI loses its sheen, exposed ultimately as a trinket in view of God and God’s good, wounded creation.
This essay from Leslie Herrmann is based on the closing words she presented at AI & Creation Care: Friends, Foes or Future, a faith & society workshop hosted by NCB this past June in collaboration with the Center for Theology & the Natural Sciences, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA. A recording of the event can be found here.
Leslie Herrmann is a scholar-advocate, holding degrees from Regent College (MA, Th.M), and the University of Aberdeen (Ph.D). Her publications center around theologically informed environmental ethics, and most recently, aim at fostering connections between humans and other-than-human members of creation through a constructive interplay between theology, ethics and aesthetics.
Footnotes:
[1] Josh Davis, “The state of nature: 41 percent of UK species have declined since 1970s” Natural History Museum (October 2019), https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2019/october/the-state-of-nature-41-percent-of-the-uks-species-have-declined.html.
[2] Abraham Heschel, The Sabbath (New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1951): 27.
[3] Heschel, Sabbath, 28.
[4] Heschel, Sabbath, 27.
[5] Heschel, Sabbath, 27.
[6] Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agricultural Reading of the Bible (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 139-154.
[7] Davis, Agriculture, 140.
[8] Karl Barth, in Davis, 140.
[9] Barth, in Davis, Agriculture, 140.
[10] Davis, Agriculture, 142.
[11] I am skimming over the top of Moltmann’s fulsome discussion. See God in Creation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993). I also engage his thinking with reference to implications for specific issues in environmental ethics; see Leslie Herrmann, “The Menace of Non-Being: On Nestle Waters’ Plunder and Jurgen Moltmann’s Sabbath Peace.” In Journal of Religious Ethics 48 no. 2 (2020): 201-221.
[12] Jurgen Moltmann, God in Creation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press), 278.
[13] Moltmann, Creation, 282.