On this episode of The Disciple-Making Parent Podcast, we talk with Tim Challies about how Christian families can think clearly about technology in a world where screens, social media, and now AI are everywhere. We look at the real numbers shaping teen life, the risks that often stay hidden until it is too late, and three common responses to new tools: enthusiastic embrace, strict separation, and disciplined discernment.
We also explore a distinctly Christian framework for technology. We are image-bearers called to create and use tools for good, while recognizing how sin twists every technology toward harm and idolatry. Finally, we consider what is coming next, including AI, augmented reality, and transhumanism, and how we can choose practices that help our families use technology to love God and serve others.
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Managing Your Households Well
Want to lead your family (and your home) with wisdom in a distracted age? Managing Your Households Well: How Family Leadership Trains You for Church Leadership is a practical resource for church leaders and aspiring leaders—showing how faithful, steady care at home shapes the kind of character needed for lasting ministry leadership.
Free Disciple-Making Parent Audiobook
You can also get the Disciple-Making Parent audiobook free. Visit thedisciplemakingparent.com, sign up for the weekly newsletter, and we’ll send you the full audiobook—because we want to help parents and grandparents raise kids who love Jesus and learn to make disciples in everyday life.
Resources From This Podcast
Suffering and Our Savior– Podcast with Tim Challies
Personal Accounts of God’s Goodness in Suffering– Podcast with Tim Challies
Finding Comfort in Suffering: Personal Q&A on Grief & God’s Goodness– Podcast with Tim Challies
challies.com – Tim Challies’ blog
The Next Story: Faith, Friends, Family, and the Digital World, by Tim Challies
Podcast Transcript
Chap Bettis: I’m Chap Bettis and you’re listening to The Disciple-Making Parent, where we seek to equip parents and churches to pass the gospel to their children. “Ubiquitous.” Do you know that SAT word? Ubiquitous. It means present everywhere, constantly encountered. Cell phones and technology are ubiquitous, and that’s what this next podcast is about. Hi, my name is Chap Bettis, and I’m the author of The Disciple-Making Parent, and with this podcast, we start a new series.
When Tim Challies came to speak at our church in Providence, we had him conduct two small conferences. On Friday night he spoke on suffering, and you can find those uploaded here at The Disciple Making ParentPodcast numbers 124, 125, and 126. Well, with this podcast, we’re going to listen to the material he presented on Saturday morning. In his first talk, Tim will help us think about attitudes we can have about technology, and then you’ll hear him help us think theologically about the challenges and temptations of technology. I think you’re going to be challenged by someone who uses technology all the time, and he has thought deeply about it.
Well, Tim Challies is a well-known blogger who has blogged daily at challies.com for over 20 years. He’s posted over 15,000 posts. He’s a well-known author of numerous books, including those on technology. He’s married to Aileen, and they have three children: Nick, who’s in heaven, Abby, and Michaela. He serves as a pastor at Grace Fellowship Church in Toronto, Canada.
Well, before we start, I want to remind you of our newest resource, Managing Your Households Well. It’s for church leaders and those aspiring to be leaders. You know, part of leading well is protecting our children from the deception of technology, but there’s so much more of towards managing our household well, and I help us think through that in the resources. So you can find it wherever Christian books are sold, and I would encourage you to consider studying it as a leadership team. The book title again is Managing Your Households Well: How Family Leadership Trains You for Church Leadership. And of course, the second resource that we always highlight is that we give away the audiobook for The Disciple-Making Parent absolutely free. You can just visit our website, thedisciplemakingparent.com. Sign up for our weekly newsletter, and we’re going to give you the whole audiobook for free because we’re on a mission to equip parents and grandparents to raise children who love the Lord. But they’re not only disciples, but they’re disciple-makers, taking the gospel to the world and standing as salt and light in our own country. So head on over to thedisciplemakingparent.com for your free audiobook. But for now, let’s think about deep thinking about helping our family with technology.
Tim Challies: Thanks for being here this morning. I’ve been looking forward to speaking about this. There’s something interesting- I find it interesting anyways- about speaking about this subject of the intersection of Christians and technology. I wrote a book about this many years ago. I was asked to speak about it quite often, did a lot of travel, a lot of speaking on the subject. And then for a few years it just stopped. Nobody asked me to speak on the subject anymore. And then recently I’ve just been inundated with requests again, and here’s my guess as to what happened.
I first wrote about it back in the day when iPhones were fairly new and people were just learning how to live with one of these little glowing rectangles in our pocket all the time. And then things eased off a little, but then there was this rise of social media, and especially our children getting involved in social media. And people started thinking about, Well, how do we live well? How do Christians live well now, not only with a glowing rectangle, but with a glowing rectangle that’s really changing our kids, that’s really impacting them in deep ways? And then I think we sort of adjusted to that world. But recently, AI has come along, and we’re realizing this might be the next thing that really impacts our lives in a profound way. We’re still trying to figure it out, but it does seem like this could be one of those other technologies that deeply impacts our lives, deeply impacts our church, family, school, et cetera. And so that is my best guess as to why there’s suddenly this resurgence of interest in just helping Christians think well about technology.
And so what I want to help you do a little bit today is navigate the digital wilderness. Really, what I mean is I want to help you understand life in this world, this digital world, this Facebook, email, cell phone, TikTok, internet, AI kind of world, but very specifically talk about what it means to live as a Christian in this world. How to live in the way Jesus told us to live in a world that is so very different. In the last 2,000 years, the world has changed again and again. It’s been transformed repeatedly, and often those transformations have been ushered in by new technologies. And in our day, we’re living on the cusp of what is clearly a new transformation, a digital transformation, and it’s one that is affecting each one of us individually, but then certainly impacting our churches, our families, education, and so on.
We might think our churches have largely been unimpacted by it, but you just think about the fact… Do you remember when your church started thinking about, “We should probably have a website”? Well, that was a whole new thing, right? Putting out those first bland, ugly websites. But we did it, and it was the right thing to do. I think churches all take it for granted now, that a sermon ought to be put out on the internet. We just in our members’ meeting last week had members saying, “We ought to stream our services to the world so other people can benefit by our services.” Things start as a “Maybe we should,” but pretty quickly they become, “We must.” There’s sort of this moral “oughtness” attached to it. I think about projecting lyrics on the screen, something else that people never would have thought of just a few years ago, but now it’s considered as normal as anything. So from individuals all the way to churches, governments, everything in between has been massively impacted.
Let me start with some numbers. I think numbers can just help us set our context a little bit. I want to look at some numbers that have been rising over the last few years. The first number is 8:38. That’s eight hours and thirty-eight minutes. Want to guess what that is? That refers to screen time for younger teens. That’s eight hours and thirty-eight minutes per day that young teens are spending in front of a screen. It rises to about nine hours for older teens.
So think about this. Maybe go back sixty, seventy years. Screen time would have been zero hours and zero minutes. Here we are, not that much longer when measured against the scope of human history. Young teens are now spending, on average, eight hours thirty-eight minutes in front of a screen. I’m not saying that’s good. I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m just saying it’s something, the kind of thing we should be thinking about.
Here’s another number: 7,347 and also rising. That’s the number of text messages and notifications per month for your average teenager today. Which means for the average teen, 7,347 times a month their phone is beeping or buzzing or otherwise trying to get their attention. We wonder why it’s maybe harder these days to maintain our attention, to really fix our attention on a task or on a book or on a sermon. Well, here we have it: 7,347 notifications on average, which would mean half of them are getting more than this per month. That’s nearly 250 or so per day that your phone is beeping, buzzing, or otherwise getting your attention.
One hour 52 minutes is the average amount of TikTok per day for teen users. I think you could rightly suggest that TikTok is the most successful algorithm ever devised. And not too many years ago, and even when I began thinking and speaking about technology, that number also would’ve been zero hours and zero minutes. TikTok didn’t exist. And in very short order it went from not existing to taking up nearly two hours a day of a teenager’s time. Again, this isn’t the time to pass moral judgment on that. And you’re free to do that, but it’s just factually, isn’t it interesting that we went from zero to almost two hours a day in very short order?
Here’s a number that’s been falling. 11: that is the average age of first exposure to pornography on the internet. That’s been falling steadily through the years. It’s hard to know exactly what the right number is, but it’s somewhere between 12, 11, 10 is when the average child now is exposed to pornography through the internet. Last year in the United States, I believe there were something like 32 million reports of online enticement or reports of child sexual abuse material on the internet, et cetera. Clearly an extremely, extremely serious and growing matter
So when we think about some numbers like this, we realize this world is changing. Clearly things are not the way they were when I was growing up, when many of you were growing up. Our children are growing up in a very different world, in a very different context. I think about grandchildren now, my grandson, and Lord willing, future grandchildren will be growing up in a very different world even than the one their parents grew up in. The pace of change is accelerating all the time. So how are we as Christians to think about new developments, even as we think about AI? The latest and greatest. How are we as Christians to think about something like this?
I’d say, broadly speaking, there’s three different ways Christians respond to new technologies. The first being enthusiastic embrace, which to me is just the unthinking acceptance of anything new that comes along. And so you assume then that if it’s newer, it must be better. You maybe have an intrinsic trust in humanity that as we create new technologies, these will be better than the old technologies. They’ll help us be more fully human, or they’ll give us abilities we didn’t have before, and so we enthusiastically embrace these things.
Another option on the opposite side would be strict separation, maybe be the Amish approach or something like that, where you see a new technology, and your immediate assumption is it must be worse than the old technology. If it’s new it must be bad, and so you deliberately separate yourself from what’s new. Parents might do this when they think about their children and cell phones or something. Just, “No, until you move out of this house, you may not have one of those.” That would be strict separation, versus the enthusiastic embrace, which might be giving a very young child a cellphone and just assuming they’ll be okay and they’ll use that thing well.
What I’d want to advocate is something more like disciplined discernment, which is where you’re using your well-trained Christian mind to think about these things. You’re doing your best to accept what’s virtuous, to reject what’s dangerous. I really believe this is what parents need to be doing. You need to disciple your children in how to use these things, right? They’re not going to live in some other world of your imagining. They’re going to live in this world, which means they’re not going to be able to avoid most of these tools. They’ll have to use them. They’ll have to know how to use them virtuously. And so it falls to you as a parent, whether you like it or not, to train your children in using these things well, and it falls to you as an individual to learn how to use these things well, to be disciplined in your own discernment of how we can use these technologies to carry out God’s will for this world and how we can avoid using them in ways that would detract from that. And we can have confidence this is possible because God has told us not to be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewal of our mind.
This is our lifelong battle, to have our minds transformed by the Word of God. Which means that as we think about humanity using these new technologies, I’d like to think that Christians would be marked in some way, that they’d be using these things differently. They’d be using these things better than unbelievers because we’d be applying a sanctified, Spirit-filled mind to these things. I fear that’s not necessarily the case, but theoretically at least, we should be thinking better because we have God helping us think well about these things.
Just one little thing to point out is that there is right now in society what we call the digital divide, which is to say there are some people alive right now who remember a world before the internet and before the mobile phone and before social media. Right? Some of us were born into that world, and remarkably, we managed. We could get from place to place without a phone giving us directions. We’d have a map propped up on the steering wheel, but we could get there. There was a lot we could do. We could communicate with others without sending them text messages. But for younger people today, especially those born in the ’90s and beyond, this is the only world they’ve ever known. And the world we’re born into is what we take as the most normal world, right? The functional view of technology for many people is anything that was invented after I was born, right? That’s what we regard as technology. Everything before we were born is just the world as it always has been. So right now, there are people who think about this world very differently. I’ve been so interested to see my grandson, who’s just over a year old, how intuitive it is for him. He can get on a phone and know what to do, and his little fingers just know how to swipe and tap and interact with a screen. it’s remarkable. So that’s the only… This is the world he’s growing up in. I grew up, and many of you grew up, in a different world, so we need to understand there are people who think very differently about the world right now. I think that’s just helpful for us to, to admit and own.
There’s just two big lessons I think it’ll be helpful for us to think about today, and then I’ll start talking about some specific technologies, but two big lessons for us to think about. The first one is this, that there’s a distinctly Christian way to think about technology. Or to say it another way, the Bible tells us what we ought to believe about technology. I’ll explain this to you. We’ll begin at the beginning. In Genesis 1, God said, “Let us make man in our image according to our likeness,” which means we are made in the image of God. What does it mean that we’re made in the image of God? Well, it means we’re made in God’s image socially. We’re made for fellowship with one another. We’re very social beings. You think about most of these new technologies, what are they used for? Most of them are used to communicate, right? Those 7,000 text messages, notifications a month, those are our kids interacting with one another, socializing with one another. Most of these new technologies are to increase our ability to socialize. We’re social beings made in God’s image as a social God, a God who’s always existed in fellowship as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We’re made in God’s image morally, which means we’re able to choose right from wrong. We’re able to consider what God says and choose we will do that or we will not do that. We’re moral beings. We’re also created in God’s image mentally. We’re able to reason. We’re able to use our minds to think, to consider, to ponder, to reason.
Put it all together, we are created in the image of a creative God. That’s what Chap said earlier. God has given us his creative desire, his creative ability. He’s bestowed that upon us as beings made in his image. Animals don’t create or invent. They operate out of instinct. But we can do both. We can ponder the big problems in this world, we can ponder the tools that are available to us, or we can ponder the, the non-existence of tools and, and create those things, and we can solve problems. We’re created in the image of a creative God. So God created us in his image, and then he gave us a job description. “God blessed them. God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over every living thing that moves on the earth.'” This is a two-part job description. First, it’s procreation. Be fruitful and multiply. So God tells humanity, “Populate the earth. Build families, churches, schools, governments, cities.” And he also tells us to exercise dominion, to subdue the earth. That means we’re to harness the natural world, right? God’s given us all these amazing tools or building blocks within this world. We’re to harness those things. We’re to plant crops and build bridges and design computers and compose music. All this is the marching orders God gave us. He created us in his image, and he gave us this great mandate.
Well, in order to fulfill the mandate God gives us, we need technology. This isn’t just something we can do. This is something we must do, which means on some level, technology is good. Technology is a way we act out of the image of God. It’s important to note technology isn’t only cell phones and computers and ChatGPT. Technology is the wheel. It’s writing. It’s the book. God created two people naked and alone in a garden, and he gave them this mandate that required spreading out over the entire earth, right? So humanity could not obey God’s mandate without technology. If you were to spread out from where they began to all the earth, they would need to invent bridges to cross rivers. They would need to invent boats to cross oceans. They needed to invent. And then God’s given us this mandate to, of course, spread out over the Earth. He’s given us the mandate to take His gospel throughout the Earth, and to do that as well, we need technology.
And so what is technology? Technology is this creative activity then of using tools to shape God’s creation for practical purposes. It’s a creative activity acting out of the creative image of a creative God. We use tools. What are we doing? We’re shaping what God has given us in this world for practical purposes. I mean, really, technology is making stuff that makes our lives better, or even better, making stuff that makes other people’s lives better, makes them safer, makes them more comfortable, that allows us to carry out our God-given mandate.
Okay, so consolidate for a minute here. God made us as creative beings. He gave us this great job description and essentially said, “You’ll need to be creative. You’ll need to invent and create technology in order to carry this thing out.” So we might conclude then that technology only ever makes our lives better, right? We’re acting out of this God-given instinct or ability. We’re doing what God told us to do, so technology should only ever make our lives better, right? Well, obviously not. Why not? Because sin broke everything. Sin is this intruder into this world, and it broke everything, and technology did not escape. Technology, too, is subject to the fall. When humanity fell, technology too, in a sense, fell. And so now we live in this world where technology can be used for good, very good purposes. Technology can be used for evil, extremely evil purposes. And often, the very same technology can be used for very good purposes and used for very evil purposes. And so we have this choice often before us day by day. How will we use these things? Will we use these things right now to bless and help others, or will we use it to, to curse them, to harm them?
All right, I want to add one more spiritual dimension to this, which is that we are all worshipers, right? We all worship something. God created us as worshipers. And because technology is so closely tied to our comfort and our survival, it’s exactly the kind of thing that we can elevate to the status of an idol. We can give it too much prominence in our lives. I’ll show you how this happens. We’re all worshipers at heart, but because we’re fallen, we’re all idolaters at heart. We will worship the wrong thing. Left to ourselves, we will never truly worship God. We will always worship something that exists in this world instead. So Romans 1, “Professing to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man. They exchanged the truth of God for the lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” So left to ourselves, we will always serve something that’s been created rather than serving the Creator. So we’ll all chase idols, in other words.
I love how Matt Papa says this, a musician, writer. He says, “An idol, simply put, is anything that is more important to you than God, anything that has outweighed God in your life, anything that you love, trust, or obey more than God, anything that has replaced God as essential to your happiness.” Now, it may be different for each one of us. Each one of us may have different gods that we pursue then, something we believe is essential to our happiness. If I don’t have this, I can’t be happy. Until I get that, I can’t be truly content. We tend to think we’re too sophisticated for idols, stumps of wood or a carved image. We’re too sophisticated for that. But as Tim Keller said, “Everything can be, and everything has been, an idol.” Or as Calvin said, “We gather that man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.” Our hearts are idol factories. So everything can be, and everything has been, an idol, and that includes technology. And so sometimes technology itself is what we functionally worship. We don’t bow down to it, but we worship it in the sense of that we find our hope in technology.
I’m going to give you an example, and I think this will help this make sense, a way that we can put our ultimate hope in technology. So I’m going to put a long quote on the screen, and I’m going to read it really quickly. Don’t worry about the detail too much. I’ll break it down for you. But this was from a journal a long time ago, sort of at the dawn of the computer era. Here’s somebody pondering what this technology might mean. So he says,
“Understanding the mind and brain will enable the creation of a new species of intelligent machine systems that can generate economic wealth on a scale hitherto unimaginable. Within a half century, intelligent machines might create the wealth needed to provide food, clothing, shelter, education, medical care, a clean environment, and physical and financial security for the entire world population. Intelligent machines may eventually generate the production capacity to support universal prosperity and financial security for all human beings. Thus, the engineering of mind is much more than the pursuit of scientific curiosity. It’s more even than a monumental technological challenge. It’s an opportunity to eradicate poverty and usher in a golden age for all humankind.”
Think back to the dawn of the computer and ask, Well, did that actually come true?” Here’s his long quote. I’ll just break down what he talked about here. Universal prosperity, and financial security, and the eradication of poverty, and the ushering in of a golden age for all humanity. Does that sound like something? Does that remind you of something? That sounds an awful lot like heaven, doesn’t it? But how are we going to achieve this heaven? How will we get to this golden age of where everybody gets along, and everybody’s wealthy, and war ceases? Will it be because Christ returns? Will it because Christ returns and ushers in his kingdom? No, no, no. No, we’ll get there through technology, right? If we just invent the right things, if we just apply our human ingenuity to the right technologies, then eventually we’ll lead to this age where all of our problems cease, and we enter into this utopia. And again, I ask you, the dawn of the computer, did this prove true? Or did it bring us some very good things and some utterly miserable things? Was it used for very good purposes, but also extremely, extremely terrible purposes? Of course.
So some people truly do have their hope in technology, and I think we’re seeing even more of that today. You think about somebody like Elon Musk and just the kind of promises he makes if we just invent these things. Or the dawn of AI, right? Think of how many jobs will be taken. I just read last week an article about how soon none of us will have to work, and we’ll all be happy because AI will do all of our jobs for us as it starts reaching beyond knowledge and starts getting applied to robotics, so now they can actually do physical jobs for us. You won’t have a job, and you’ll love it because you can just… I don’t know what you’ll do, honestly, but you’ll do something, and you’ll be happy about it because technology will have ushered in this golden age of lethargy or something. So some people, their god is technology, and they think if we just invent the right things, then humanity will finally be content.
But that may not be it for you. We’re Christians here, so probably that’s not your god. But how about this? What do you love in your worst moments? What do you love more than you love God? When you’re not finding your contentment in Christ, what is it that promises contentment? What promises joy? And then how does technology help or hinder you in those moments? What does technology do for you in those moments? So just think about it. Is your idol pleasure or lust? Well, how will you use that good technology of the computer and the good technology of the internet when you might go online and look at things you shouldn’t be looking at? Or for money, this one’s extremely on the rise today. You want money, right? That’s your idol. You want to be wealthy. And so what will you do with that good technology of a computer, the good technology of the internet? You might go out to one of the gazillion sports betting sites or other prediction market sites or whatever they are, and you’ll put down your money and risk losing your money. Our technology is very willing to serve our gods. If we’re Christians, it’s there to serve us, to help us carry out the Great Commission, to help us grow in godliness. It’s a tool that will be very useful. But if we’re pursuing other gods, it will be equally available to us to help us to pursue them. We use technology to further the power of our idols. So no wonder then that we love our technology, right? It gives us what we want. It enhances the power of idols in our lives.
Of course, the opposite is true. If we’re really drawn to God, we’re in our best moments, then we use technology to further our God-given mission. So that’s the first lesson i just want us to think about is God gave us technology. There’s a Christian way to think about technology. Christians should be thinking about these things in a way that’s different than non-Christians. And just one other lesson: There’s always risk in opportunity. Every technology brings risk and opportunity. It always brings something good to our lives, or else we wouldn’t invent it in the first place, but it always brings something bad as well. So sometimes it’s very easy to see. You think about nuclear fission. It can power a city, it can blow up a city. You can create a nuclear reactor to serve people; you can create a nuclear bomb to destroy people. It’s pretty easy to see sometimes how that technology can be used. But sometimes it’s harder to see how it’s being used for good and used for ill. You’re just using this thing. You went to the store, you bought it, you’re using it, and it’s just quietly changing you in ways you can’t really see. I mean, you might know it’s changing you, but you can’t quite put your finger on how. The good and the bad are just coming out through the natural use of that thing.
I think we can find an analogy in the dawn of television. Television had some real benefits. It, it gave us shared experiences as a culture that we hadn’t had before. Just think about the Challenger disaster or 9/11, some of those things where we were glued to the TV, and it allowed it to be a corporate experience that wouldn’t have been possible before. It also moved information in helpful ways. There were real benefits in having access to information through television. But at the same time, television really disrupted community. Prior to television, people tended to be entertained outside their houses, but after television, people tended to be entertained inside their houses. And then as televisions got smaller and cheaper and more available, no longer was the family being entertained, but individuals were being entertained. Everyone had their own television. And so it really destroyed or disrupted community. And of course, it also changed morals, right? We wouldn’t be where we’re at as a society in terms of the acceptance of homosexuality and transgenderism, et cetera, if television hadn’t first made us laugh at it, made us accept it, right? A show like Will & Grace was brilliant, getting people to understand homosexuality as harmless and funny. And once you laugh at something, it’s hard to take it morally seriously.
And so every technology brings benefits and drawbacks, but here’s the trick. We tend to believe our technologies are primarily beneficial. We’re good at seeing the opportunity, but we’re very poor at seeing the risk. So when you got your first mobile phone, did you imagine that you’d be checking your email at the dinner table? Or did you imagine that you’d be checking your text messages in church? Did you imagine that many churches actually demand that you keep your phone with you and keep it on so you can receive text messages when your child needs their diaper changed or needs you to come and comfort them? Did you imagine you’d be incapable of standing in line at the grocery store without staring at your phone? Did you imagine you and your family would be sitting around and every single one of you would be looking at your phone? I just read an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about seniors and how frustrated young people are growing with their parents and grandparents, that they’re adopting these technologies, and they’re trying to talk to their parents, but mom’s playing Angry Birds. . . It spread from the young to the elderly. People signed up for Facebook never imagining that they would meet an old flame from high school, and for a time, Facebook was being cited in a substantial number of divorce cases. People saw the benefits. They didn’t see the drawbacks.
Why is that? Well, the benefits are apparent, but the risks are hidden. The benefits are written on the box. They’re in the commercials. We’re sold on the benefits, but nobody gives us the warning. It’s not like the pill commercials where they tell you, “Here’s the benefit,” and then this long disclaimer about all the terrible things it’s going to do to you. We’re sold only on the benefits of these things. As an example, just in the 1980s, the personal computer finally got small enough and affordable enough that families could have them. Many of you would remember your first computer in your home. And so there was this kind of societal messaging, “Your family needs a computer. These things are the future. Your kids are going to need it. Go out and get one.” So all our parents ran out, and they bought a computer, and they brought it into the home, and they gave it to their kids, and they said, “Figure this thing out. It’s the future.” And then in the ’90s, the internet came along, and suddenly this was the future, and everyone said, “You’ve got to get your kids on the internet.” So parents ran out, and they got an AOL account or whatever it was, and they hooked it up to the computer, and they gave it to their kids, and they said, “Figure this thing out. It’s the future.” And an entire generation of young men got hooked on internet pornography.
Now, I don’t know if we can go back to those days, but I think you could find many people back in the ’90s and early 2000s who were saying, “Look at the benefits that will come. Just look at all the good that will come.” But now we look back, and we say, “If you take all the 16-year-old boys in the world, and you give them all screens and internet connection, what is absolutely, inevitably, 100% going to happen?” We know now. I don’t think there were any prophets back then saying, “Hang on a second. This could go really, really wrong.” And indeed it did. And we didn’t really learn much, because Instagram came along, and everybody gave it to their daughters, and we got an entire generation that was prone to self-loathing. There was a massive rise of eating disorders and other really difficult issues. And now we have AI coming out, and it is going to do some brilliant things for us, and it’s going to do some terrible things to us. And I hope we’re starting to learn the lesson that we really do need to bring disciplined discernment to our use of AI. We have to look very carefully for what it may take from us even as it gives something good to us. There’s always risk, and there’s always opportunity. That’s true of any technology.
I’ll leave off soon, but I do want to answer the question of what’s next, because people always wonder, What’s coming next? We know the iPhone, we’ve sort of adjusted to that. We’re still not totally comfortable with it, but there’s no going back. We’re not getting rid of these things anytime soon. Internet, not getting rid of it. Social media, it’s here. We’re stuck with it for the time being, like it or not. So what’s coming now? Well, obviously, AI is the thing right now. You can’t go anywhere without hearing about AI. You can’t read anything without hearing about the promises of AI. There’s so much opportunity there, just the convenience of it, the usefulness of it, the power of it. But of course, there’s risks too. There’s the ideological nature of AI, right? Nothing is morally neutral. There’s the untrustworthiness of it. Just today I was watching yet another story of lawyers going and citing case law that AI just made up. People are going into formal settings like that and saying, “Here’s case law. Rule in my way.” And it was just completely fabricated by AI. AI fosters deception and laziness, and I think one of the things that it offers that other technologies didn’t is that it mimics the functioning of a human being. And so it’s easy, then, to use AI to do something that you claim credit for. Your cellphone didn’t do that. Your lawnmower didn’t do that. Lots of technologies haven’t given you quite that ability, but AI does. And so there’s a huge temptation to be deceptive with it.
I spent a few weeks doing a deep dive as much as I could into the use of AI and was blown away by its capabilities. It’s not nearly as scary as I thought it might be, but in some senses it’s more scary than I thought it would be because it’s so capable, and it can do so many things so well, and yet it’s still got these incredible issues. Like, it will just fabricate things. It’ll just lie to you. It’ll just make stuff up. It’s baffling. And I’m afraid of it because I could see how I could go down that rabbit hole and be deceptive in its use. Another big thing that’s coming is augmented reality. You’ve heard of virtual reality, which is kind of transporting yourself to a different world. Augmented reality is more like what Apple’s trying to do with its Vision Pro device or what other companies are doing… Essentially, think of putting on glasses that stand between you and the world. And as these things get miniaturized, as they get more capable, just imagine a screen on those glasses. As you’re interacting with the world, it’s constantly giving you information. Maybe you go into church, and there’s that person you haven’t seen for a while, and you’re desperately trying to remember their name, but somewhere on your screen, you see their name, and now you can go right up to them and pretend that you never forgot. That kind of capability. Or you’re navigating somewhere, and that is right on your glasses. Instead of using your phone, it’s right in your eyes. That’s augmented reality.
There are going to be some great arguments to embrace it and accept it- the convenience of it, the information it can give you. But there’s risks too. I mean, how much more of our reality do we want Apple and Google mediating? How much do we really want them standing between us and our entire experience of the world? There are going to be some huge drawbacks as well.
And then the third final one I would say is transhumanism, which is increasingly essentially hybridizing humans and digital technology. Our technologies are now external to us, right? If I break my phone, I can’t use it right now, or I can put my phone away, not use it. It’s external to me. But there’s greater emphasis now toward internalizing computing. So you’ve heard about implants and other things. Some of them can do remarkable things. You might have heard about people who were essentially paralyzed, had a chip implanted, and it gave them back some function that they had lost. And so it’ll be sold to us in that way, probably helping people with disabilities. But how long will it take before we’re all sold on the enhanced capabilities it can give us? And it might be like a lot of other things. Once a bunch of people have it, and they may be performing in ways beyond the rest of us, there will be this temptation then we need to go that way too just to keep up.
If we’re concerned about putting Google on our glasses and interpreting the world, how much more putting Google right in our bodies? It sounds kind of crazy, but this is happening now, and just as there’s hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on AI, there’s billions and billions being spent on this technology as well. So through it all, we’ll need to keep exercising that disciplined discernment, taking these things to the Lord, thinking with well-trained Christian minds, probably being a little slower to adopt. If somebody’s going to bear the risk of these things and find out what the greatest downsides are, we probably shouldn’t be among them. Exercising disciplined discernment and knowing that whether we eat, well, eat or drink, whatever we do, even the way we interact with our technologies day by day, we can and must do it all to the glory of God.
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