Author: John Stonestreet
On Monday, a group of nearly 200 artificial intelligence researchers and more than a dozen Nobel laureates in economics issued a short but pointed warning. In a statement of less than 100 words entitled, “We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy,” the group warned how the promising new technology could disrupt the economy and disenfranchise workers. The statement consisted of three points:
Among the notable signatories are economist Paul Krugman, executives from the AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI, tech investors, former government officials, and scholars from institutions such as Stanford, Cambridge, Columbia, Harvard, and MIT.
The group is right to be concerned about how AI will impact work. According to a report from December, of the over 1 million U.S. jobs that were cut in 2025, AI was “responsible” for over 50,000. More job loss will, of course, create additional incentive for politicians and states to intervene in the job market. As one of the statement’s organizers put it in what was both a grand understatement of reality and gross overstatement of confidence,
“AI capabilities are advancing far faster than our understanding of the economic implications . . . We must act now to guide AI to complement humans rather than simply imitate them—and to generate prosperity for the many, not just the few.”
Thankfully, the statement itself seemed to admit far more uncertainty.
“AI may become . . .”
“It could bring risks … as well as opportunities …”
What is far more uncertain is what, if anything, “economists, policymakers, and technology leaders” could do even if they were able to fully “understand the economics of transformative AI.” Is it even possible, especially for those who are part of much larger corporate or governmental entities who carry their own economic realities, to imagine the right “incentives, guardrails, and institutions”? Is it plausible to believe that we will truly be able to “steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society?”
But to do nothing, even if cynicism is justified, is still to do nothing. And, as these signatories and the statement recognize, too much is at stake to do that. Even more, any potential shifts in employment and the economy are downstream from much larger concerns. In addition to concerns that are specific to the ethics of artificial intelligence, are what might be called “pre-existing conditions” that inflict and hamper the Western world, specifically the crisis of meaning and what Carl Trueman has called “the desecration of humanity.”
To borrow a framework from T.S. Eliot, we will not be able to truly know what we should and should not do with a particularly powerful technology unless we know what that technology is for. In his 1951 address to the faculty of the University of Chicago about the purpose of education, Eliot said, “If we see a new and mysterious machine, I think that the first question is, ‘What is the machine for?’ and afterward we ask, ‘How does it do it?’” In other words, purpose should precede function.
Eliot went on to say that it’s only possible to grasp the purpose of something in view of the purpose of humanity. So, our ethics are downstream from an understanding of what it means to be human, what we are for. Only with some kind of grasp on who we are can we know whether a technology is serving us or substituting for us. Only in view of the created exceptionalism of the image of God can we draw a line between a technology that restores and one that replaces. Christians, who have been given an understanding of who we are and what we are for, must join this conversation sooner than later.
On Thursday August 7, the Colson Center will host “Staying Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” the 8th annual Great Lakes Symposium on Christian Worldview. Joining me for this essential conversation will be Abdu Murray, author of the new book Fake ID: How A.I. and Identity Ideology are Collapsing Reality, and speaker and former host of the Microsoft Research Podcast Gretchen Huizinga, a member of the Oxford Collaboration on Theology and Artificial Intelligence. We will also hear from the eminent author and apologist John Lennox via video.
Either join us in person in Bay Harbor, Michigan or sign up to host the livestream. Churches and groups are welcome. Attendance is free but registration is required. Go to colsoncenter.org/livestream to register.