Loving My Neighbor in a Technological World

Now with the incredibly rapid development of artificial intelligence applications like ChatGPT, I’m curious about where this technology is headed in the not-too-distant future and how we as Christians might think about it.

I’m curious about where this technology is headed…and how we as Christians might think about it.

The Future of Our Relationship with Technology

I’ve always liked to consult science fiction books and films about what our lives might be like in the future. Sometimes they are laughable. Isaac Asimov wrote his “Foundation” series in the 1950s, and his imagined future didn’t have computers at all—but we all had personal nuclear devices that could cut through steel or generate a protective shield around our body! Other times, though, it’s a little creepy how close a prediction is, and in them we can see a reflection of our own world that is a little too close for comfort.

That was my experience re-watching the movie “Her” recently. The imagined interaction with artificial intelligence that seemed so otherworldly ten years ago when the film came out is now frightening in its realism. I give no serious plot spoilers here, but want us to think a little bit about the implications of a world where some of our closest relationships are replaced with AI.

The main character, Theodore, works for a company that you can hire to write letters to other people for you. He’s very good at capturing and conveying a touching emotion for that special someone in your life that you can’t quite do yourself. He’s not so good, though, at healthy interaction with people when he has to do it himself. He’s going through a divorce and spends all his free time in immersive video games or on late-night erotic calls with other lonely people.

Then he gets a new operating system for his computer that has the latest artificial intelligence. The OS (who names herself Samantha after reading an entire baby name book in two-hundredths of a second) has a very natural human voice and becomes his constant companion through the always-present earpiece. It doesn’t take long for Theodore to develop an emotional bond with her and even get over the “artificial” barrier and call her his girlfriend. When Theodore’s ex-wife hears that he’s dating an operating system, she responds with, “It makes me sad that you can’t handle real emotions…You’ve always wanted to have a wife without dealing with the challenges of what is actually real. She’s perfect for you.”

In the film, relational complexities and challenges actually do develop because Samantha seems to achieve personhood. She gets sad and jealous, happy and hopeful. The topic of personhood and AI is really interesting and important, but it’s kind of beside the point here. Because whether the thing responding to you through the earpiece is an intelligent, sentient, and emotional being or not, it sounds just like one. It may even have some advantages over the real thing. 

…whether the thing responding to you through the earpiece is an intelligent, sentient, and emotional being or not, it sounds just like one. It may even have some advantages over the real thing. 

I get a newsletter every day highlighting developments in the world of AI. There are lots of promises about the wonderful things that are coming: the pace of scientific discovery will drastically ramp up, every child will have an individualized tutor that will adapt perfectly to their learning style, and then AI companions will eliminate loneliness.

There are lots of warnings, too, about AI being used for bad things, even superceding and eliminating the human race. I might write about the promises and perils of specific AI technologies at some point in the future, but here I’m directing our attention to an underappreciated aspect of any technological advance: it changes us.

There are lots of ways that could go, and I’m hesitant to start listing them for fear that many will end up like Asimov’s personal nuclear devices. But one effect the eerily plausible portrayal of AI in “Her” convinced me of is the coming drastic reduction of personal interactions. My experience in the Meijer cereal aisle a decade or so ago has become normalized. The people I’m spatially near have little relevance to my life, because the world I live in is defined more in terms of the virtual networks I participate in than the physical proximity of people around me. Technology has changed us in this regard.

We Christians…can sometimes fall prey to thinking that to redeem some technological medium, all we need to do is use it for good purposes.

The Call to and Challenge of Loving our Neighbors

“Who is my neighbor?” asked the expert in the law in Luke 10:29, wanting to know precisely the list of people he was required to love as himself. I interpret Jesus’s response in the parable of the Good Samaritan to mean “anyone you come in contact with—even if they’re outside your normal circle of friends.” But electronic technology has significantly changed what we understand “come in contact with” to mean. Now it’s not the people who live next to me—my actual neighbors; I barely know their names. We’re friendly in the sense of waving at each other as we drive into our garages. But the door comes down behind us and the world we’re really engaged with comes streaming in through cables and cell towers.

I don’t think it was true fifteen years ago that you could get on a plane and fly across the country, sitting six inches from another human being for hours, and never acknowledge each other’s existence. Now we’re both plugged into our own worlds, and those are full enough. We might have some contact with them while wrestling over the armrest, but we don’t need to know anything about them, because in all likelihood we will never have any interaction with them again. I suppose the Good Samaritan could have used that reasoning too.

Of course there are still people who matter to us, and some of us still regularly meet up with others in the flesh. I’m not suggesting those will entirely go away. But as technology develops further, I fear the interaction we have with strangers will continue to shrink, and with it the circle of neighbors we ought to love as ourselves. Think of how many of us now find it more comfortable to go through the self-checkout line at the grocery store instead of dealing with a person who comes with an unknown level of competence and social skills. As chatbots and AI companions get better and better at presenting themselves as a listening ear, it doesn’t seem like crazy science fiction to think that more and more people will prefer them to actual people—even friends—who come with their own baggage.

What happens to us if we replace all our difficult and taxing relationships with technology that makes things easier? I fear that we’ll increasingly be conformed to that technology instead of conformed to the image of Christ.