Welcome to a new series about Cultural Witness!

In this episode Bishop Graham Tomlin and Dr Belle Tindall-Riley join us from the Center for Cultural Witness based in London. Their work is the inspiration for this series, which considers the role and posture of Christianity and the church within society. What do Christians have to offer culture? How does 'cultural witness' relate to apologetics and political theology?

Check out their books here:

Belle Tindall-Riley, The Sacred Ache

Graham Tomlin, Blaise Pascal

In this episode Barney and Austin look back over the series on A.I. and discuss their favorite takeaways, lingering questions, and what exactly it means to confront challenges to the Christian faith with Hope. We also discuss our upcoming series on Cultural Witness.

What does it mean for Christians to have hope in relation to A.I.? Are we putting our hope in the right thing? What are we hoping for? How can we have hope if the situation looks hopeless?

Professor Michael Burdett guides us in answering these questions in this episode. Michael is the author of Eschatology and the Technological Future (Routledge, 2015). He has a background in Christian thinking about technology and the future, and here he applies it to A.I. specifically. We also address questions like:

• What kind of people do we need to be to use A.I. well?

• What kind of people do we need to be to create the right kind of A.I.?

• What vision of human flourishing should drive our production and use of A.I.?

Professor Nicholas Hayes-Mota and Dr Silvianne Aspray guide us through the insights of Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. We discuss questions like:

• Why is the Pope weighing in on A.I.?

• What vision of humanity is A.I. cultivating?

• How do we protect against the illusions of objectivity and of human connection?

• What agency do normal A.I. users have to shape how it affects our world?

• Is A.I. helping us to become the kind of people we were created to be?

Dr Lyndon Drake has two PhDs: one in theology and one in A.I. Now a research fellow at Oxford, he wants to help us think through chatbots in a rigorous and careful way. Let’s be conscious of the pitfalls and dangers, but let’s also explore the opportunities. Christians have been wrestling with what it means to be human for centuries, and producers of A.I. technology can benefit from those insights.

Lyndon is one of the producers of the Oxford Oath on A.I., modeled after the Hippocratic Oath, to guide users and developers in how to use A.I. for the common good of humanity.

In this episode, we’re bringing the thought of Augustine into the conversation with the help of Autumn Ridenour, the author of Restlessness and Belonging: Augustinian Wisdom for the Digital Empire. We explore this concept of a digital empire for thinking about the dangers and possibilities of A.I. and social media in ways that parallel what the Roman Empire was to St Augustine.

Social media helped people communicate with each other. AI does the opposite: people talk to it instead of another living being and become isolated. Human interaction, according to Katherine Schmidt, is one of the big differences between the two most recent technological revolutions, and why she is enthusiastic about the first but concerned about the second.

Katherine Schmidt is Associate Professor and Chair of the Theology and Religious Studies Department at Molloy University. In this interview she tackles some of the big problems with AI, especially for education, before turning to some of the more hopeful opportunities it creates: such as forcing us to educate better and think better about what it means to be human.

Thanks to Jamie Maule for audio editing!

We're excited to have Carmody Grey back on the show to discuss LLMs from the perspective of theology. We talk about the possible threats posed by A.I., the political questions it raises, and its deeper significance for how it is changing us.