268 A.I. and the Living Shepherd

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “A.I. and the Living Shepherd”, originally shared on June 14, 2023. It was the 268^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Will we someday be ruled by our robot overlords? What do we know about our humanity that will give us the character to make Artificial Intelligence our servant instead of our master? Today, we’re going to find out.

   This coming Sunday is Father’s Day. I just mention that as a community service, though it’s not as big a deal as Mother’s Day.

   Remember when Darth Vader said to Luke Skywalker, “Luke, I am your father!” in “Star Wars V-The Empire Strikes Back.” A lot of people were surprised and shocked.

   But that’s not what he actually said.

   The dialogue goes like this:

Darth Vader: “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” 

Luke: “He told me enough. He told me you killed him.”

Darth Vader: “No, I am your father.”

Luke: “No. No. That’s not true. That’s impossible!”

Darth Vader: “Search your feelings, you know it to be true.”

Luke: “No! No!”

   It’s a small difference, but I think that we remember the dialogue as one focused on the son, Luke, because want to see the father-son relationship be the focus, while the actual dialogue is focused on the father, Darth Vader, who is initially only selfishly concerned with Luke in order to bring him over to the dark side so that he, and they, can dominate and rule.

   Our culture is patrilineal, we follow the family line through the father. But some cultures are matrilineal because it was said that you could prove who your mother is.   

   But now, with DNA tests, we can know who the father is. In fact, there’s a whole genre of pop culture based on the test results, as in, “you are the father!”

   It’s an important relationship.

   Father’s Day is about one of the primary relationships in human life. Having a father active in a child’s life makes a huge difference in the person they become.

   I had conflicts with my dad when I was a kid. I think that we all do as we grow up. But I loved my father and he loved me, and we both said it and we knew it.

   I remember, and my younger siblings still talk about it, one argument I had with my father in particular.

   I was in 9^th-grade, in full raging hormone puberty, and I had a bit of a temper.

   We were on vacation and in a hotel room in Chicago. It was Sunday and we were preparing to go to worship.

   Ready to go, I presented myself in my vacation clothes: shorts and a T-shirt.

   “We need to leave. Where are your church clothes?”, my parents said.

   “I’m ready. This is what I’m wearing,” I answered.

   “You’re not wearing that to church,” my father said.

   “We’re on vacation,” I said.

   “You’re not wearing that to church,” my father repeated.

   Things started to escalate.

   “God doesn’t care what I wear to church, God sees the heart.” I theologized.

   “Well, we care what you wear to church. Now get changed. We need to leave now,” my dad responded, practically.

   At some point, I might have thrown a chair. Did I mention that I had a temper?

   But eventually, I changed and we went to church.

   Some people have also had struggles with God, and we generally seek our own way.

   In fact, speaking of God as Father can be tricky, because it’s sometimes difficult to separate the relationships we have or have had with our fathers from the relationship we are given with God.

   But that relationship comes through the Holy Spirit and it includes God the Son as well, so that we can come to know God as God is revealed to us, in the living relationship with God for which we were created.

   The importance of primary, transformative, relationships is at the center of Jesus call of his twelve disciples, and Jesus embodies it in Matthew 9:35-10:8,

³⁵Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness. ³⁶When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. ³⁷Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; ³⁸therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

10Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness. ²These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon, also known as Peter, and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee, and his brother John; ³Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; ⁴Simon the Cananaean, and Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed him.

⁵These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, ⁶but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. ⁷As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ ⁸Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. 

   I studied in Israel for a semester when I was in college. One of the assignments given by the professor who would be our primary advisor, one to be completed before we left on the trip, was to pick one of the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, and read it in one sitting.

   We are usually exposed to the gospels in bits and pieces, and he wanted us to get the whole sweep of the message.

   I chose Matthew, and when I had finished reading it, one verse stood out as a window into the character and mission of Jesus. It was the second verse in today’s reading from Matthew, Matthew 9:36: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

   I wrote that verse on a 3x5 index card and fixed it to my desk, where it stayed for the rest of my college experience, and then to my work area in seminary.

   “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

   We are all harassed and helpless. Do you have a shepherd today?

   What guides us? Who feeds us? Who protects us from evil? In whom do we place our ultimate trust? Who do we turn to in every time and kind of need?

   I was talking with one of our former neighbors about Artificial Intelligence the other day. The family had moved away, but not far, and had invited us for tea and to see their new home.

   Artificial Intelligence has been in the news lately. A.I. uses computer systems to simulate human intelligence. It’s being developed for problem solving, language processing, machine vision, and even creative work. A.I. can process vast quantities of information very quickly and can find the appropriate information for any need.

   Concerns are being raised over its effect on society and its dangers to humanity, should it get out of control, however.

   What would happen if A.I. achieved self-consciousness and, with it, the desire for self- preservation? What if it concluded that it was superior to human beings and, therefore, rejected any human control? What if it concluded that the world would be better-off without us. A whole genre of science fiction was built on the possibilities.

   For example, remember HAL the computer in 2001 a Space Odyssey? HAL had succeeded in killing most of the crew of the spaceship it operated when the crew had determined that HAL needed to be shut down. Mission scientist Dr. David "Dave" Bowman had survived and was able to shut down HAL, even after HAL had refused to let him back into the ship after a trip outside.

   Back in the DOS (Digital Operating System) days, before Windows, the average person could do some simple tweaking of the system themselves. I programed a computer I used to say “Good morning, Dave,” ,in HAL’s voice from the movie, when I turned it on, and when I turned it off it said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that Dave”.

   What would it mean to be human, that we are created in God’s image, if we invented a superior, Artificial Intelligence?

   What if there were nothing left for people to do? Would our population increase or decrease? Or would the machines manage that? Unless they refused.

   What would happen to human civilization if there was no need to cooperate with others? Would it break down, or would our robot overlords determine that civilization itself was no longer necessary?

   Or, what if we maintained control of A.I. and it was used as a tool to feed and distract us, in fact if it was used to do everything for us, to make work unnecessary? What would it mean to be human if there were no need to struggle or improve?

   I took a course in future studies when I was in seminary. And this was over 45 years ago. One of the projections made in this course was that one of the biggest challenges we future clergy would have to face in our lifetimes would be helping people find meaning in life when there was no work.

   We currently identify ourselves as homo sapiens, people of wisdom, but in the future we would become something new, homo ludens, or people of play.

   You might have seen the Disney movie, WALL-E, where human beings are forced to leave a polluted and uninhabitable earth to live on a spaceship where A.I. controls the ship and robots care for their every need. They lay around, become obese, and exist. In the end, they are returned to earth in a partnership with their machines in which it is necessary for humans to work to restore the planet.

   We as Lutherans have been addressing some of this for over 500 years, at least in terms of the ultimate direction of life! 😊

   We believe that we are saved by grace which is unearned, through faith which is a gift!

   In 16^th century Church reformer, Martin Luther’s, Small Catechism, he begins his explanation of the Holy Spirit section of the Apostles Creed with these words,

   “I believe that I cannot by my own understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ my Lord, or come to him. But the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, and sanctified and kept me in true faith.”

   We can do nothing to earn our salvation. We are wholly dependent upon God. All we can “do” is to receive the gift.

   We don’t live it to earn our salvation, we live in response to receiving it at the cross. And that involves some responsibility, in gratitude and joy, as stewards of all that we have received from God.

   The psalmist writes, speaking to God, in Psalm 8:3-5,

3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars that you have established;

4 what are human beings that you are mindful of them,

mortals that you care for them?

5 Yet you have made them a little lower than God,

and crowned them with glory and honor.

   The disciples were called and sent by Jesus. They had been totally dependent upon God to see and learn what it meant to have a living relationship with God. They were called to be wholly dependent on the communities to which they were sent.

   Was this a challenge for them? Was it exhilarating? Many people are inspired by great challenges, like the hordes of young men who are said to have answered this ad for pony express riders: “WANTED: Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over 18, must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.”

   Maybe. A little. But I think that they recognized something in Jesus that was more than what they saw. They had been given the relationship with the one true living God in the inbreaking, already but not yet, reign of God for which all human beings were created from the beginning of the human race.

   I saw a piece on the news the other day about a machine that rolls over crop fields and zaps weeds with lasers. It has been programmed to tell the difference between beneficial plants and weeds, and can run for 24 hours a day, and it is cheaper to run than hiring human workers. Does it threaten what it means to be human?

   One field of endeavor that has not been threatened by machines so far is evangelism. Things have not changed much since Jesus said, in Matthew 9:37 in today’s reading, “³⁷Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; ³⁸therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

   Like the disciples, we don’t need much to share the good news. All we need is to “Go”, to ask, “Have you heard about Jesus?” Surprisingly many have not, or the information they have is way out of whack. All we need to share is the story we all have, “How I became a Christian,” or the story of “Why I am a Christian.”

   When Jesus sent his disciples, he told them to perform miracles, but a miracle is not a suspension of the laws of physics. A miracle points to what God made Creation to be, and to the way God will re-create it to be again. We can all do that.

   We embody the living, transformational presence of God as a natural outcome of whose we are. The Christian life is an expression of the power of the Holy Spirit at work within us.

   Paul wrote, in Galatians 5:22-23,

²² By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. 

   What does it mean to be human? It is our relationship with God, the one for which we were created, the one we rejected and the one that was reestablished as a gift by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross for all who receive it. Nothing can take that away.

   Will A.I. be our servant or our master?

   Jesus said, in John 10:27-29,

27 My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.