Night of Ai with Pastor Miles

How are you guys doing tonight? Good. I made the mistake of going home and taking a nap, so I'll wake up in about 20 minutes. We'll be good. It's good to see you all here. I'm glad that you would be willing to come back and hear about this.

I'm sure that more than a few of you are thinking, "What does the pastor have to say about AI?" which is probably a good question for most. I do have a bit of a background in things related to technology, which gives you an idea of why I might have something to say about this.

When I came into ministry as an intern here at this church at 19 years old, my thought was that I was going into the tech industry. I started to learn how to do web development through HTML and CSS when I was about 16 or 17 years old, and I built the church's website here in 1997, before I graduated from high school. As I was going through school, it became apparent to a number of different people that I knew how to use technology. There were several guys who attended the church at that time who were in software engineering and network engineering. Many of them taught me how to build computers, build servers, and do the coding for server development in Linux. I had a basic understanding of how to do a lot of that stuff before I graduated from high school and was planning on going into the tech industry.

I remember right before I graduated, I was taking a computers class at Orange Glen High School. Go Patriots! I was in that computers class, and I would sometimes be asked to teach the class because I knew more than the teacher did. Right before I graduated, I took a test. The State of California had the first standardized test on computing through the Golden State exam. About three weeks later, my teacher brought me into his office with a certificate and a letter from our state senator at the time. They said I scored the highest in the state on this test, which was impressive. I thought, "Oh, wow, that's pretty impressive." Now, I just knew how to use Excel; that's all. Don't worry, at that time, nobody did.

My teacher asked me what I was going to do after high school. I said I was going to go to Calvary Chapel Bible College. He replied, "Please don't do that. You should go into the tech industry." I said, "No, I'm going to Calvary Chapel Bible College." I was there for one semester, and then right after that, the staff at the church invited me to be an intern at the church in January of 1999.

I came on with a primary focus to manage the network, ensure the printers worked, update computers, and handle the website. As frequently happens within a Calvary Chapel church, you start out doing something like that, and the next thing you know, you're a pastor. Within a few months, I was doing youth ministry in the junior high, which turned into a 27-year-long detour in pastoral ministry. Along the way, I have always been involved in some of the tech aspects adjacent to the ministry.

Anytime friends or other ministries I knew needed branding, I would help them with graphic design. I know how to use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator for layout and other related tasks. If they needed a website, I was the person they would contact. One thing led to another, and I ended up in Germany teaching at the Calvary Chapel Bible School in Siegen in 2004. The head of the Bible school was David Guzik, a name some of you may recognize. He has come and taught here before.

In 2004, his website, enduringword.com, wasn't much of a site and didn't have a lot of traffic, but he was putting his Bible teaching notes online. Many people were using them as commentary while studying, so we became very good friends. After I returned to the U.S. and became the pastor of the church, he eventually returned to Santa Barbara and pastored Calvary Chapel Santa Barbara.

In 2015, he said to me, "I think I want to turn Enduring Word into a nonprofit and build a new website. I want you to be on my board." I responded, "Let me help you build the website." We rebuilt EnduringWord.com at the end of 2015, leading into 2016. I built that website, and if you've used it, I was the one who created the first site. That has turned into a significant ministry, receiving about 170 to 180 million page views a year.

This experience led to my involvement on the board of Blue Letter Bible, which receives about ten times that amount. Last year, Blue Letter Bible's website had 1.7 billion page views. As I was helping with all this tech-related work, I also pursued educational opportunities. I completed my Master of Divinity at Gateway Seminary from 2018 to 2022. After that, I entered a Doctor of Ministry program studying apologetics at Southern Seminary in Kentucky. During that program, my doctoral advisor...

He met with me one afternoon when I was in Kentucky, and he asked, "Why are you in this program?" It was kind of a weird question. When your advising professor looks at you and says, "Why are you in this program?" you start to wonder if you are not doing well. He then said, "You're in the wrong program." I was taken aback and asked, "What are you talking about?" He explained that I needed to be his PhD student.

I called my wife to tell her what he said, and she was very sad to hear that because I was nearing the end of my Doctor of Ministry program. She asked, "So what does that mean?" I replied, "Well, it probably means I will start over." She wasn't too excited about that, and to be honest, neither was I. However, I became his PhD student, and his focus is ethics. He asked me what I wanted to research, and I said I wanted to research artificial intelligence ethics.

For the last two years, most of my research outside of anything I am preparing here at the church has been in the area of AI ethics. This focus has started to open up a whole bunch of interesting doors that I did not anticipate. Many of you have probably seen or used ChatGPT. I have been following what was happening with OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, for a number of years.

In 2018 or 2019, I tried to use their original GPT-1, version one, to post-train it. You can take these models and give them information to post-train them on David Guzik's commentary. I thought it would be really cool to ask the system questions and have it respond back in David Guzik's voice. I started testing that in 2019, but I ran into a whole bunch of technical difficulties at that time.

I had been following the technology for quite a while. A lot of people, when they look at ChatGPT, which came out in the last week of November 2022, think, "Oh, wow, AI just popped onto the scene." However, that perspective fails to recognize that this is about a 70-year-long progression to get where we are right now.

In 1956, a group of early computer scientists gathered together at Dartmouth University in the summer. The computer industry was just barely starting, and most of it was theoretical, consisting of mathematical ideas about how to use early computer technology. What came out of that gathering was the term "artificial intelligence." The researchers were very audacious, believing they could duplicate human intelligence in computer form relatively quickly. It has taken a lot longer than they thought.

In the scheme of things, as you look at it, it actually has happened rather quickly. For a number of years, from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s, all of the artificial intelligence research was really just happening in the laboratories of elite universities like MIT or Stanford. Most of it was in the form of what is now referred to as classical AI, which is rule-based AI. In this approach, you explicitly state "if this, then that" sort of statements in the form of coding. This was the primary way that AI was functioning, but it had many limitations; it was very brittle. There were numerous ways that it simply didn't work. If you didn't account for every potential condition, the system would break when faced with a situation it couldn't handle.

For example, if you were trying to code something to drive a vehicle, you might code it to stop when it sees a stop sign or a red light. However, if a plastic bag blows in front of the vehicle while it's driving down the street, the system has no category for what to do next. As a result, it wouldn't know how to respond and would error out at that point. These very strict rule-based systems, which relied on linear logical thinking using central processing units (CPUs) and computers, made it rather difficult to achieve reliable AI.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a new field began to develop within artificial intelligence around what is called neural networks. The idea behind neural networks was to architect the same neurological patterns that we see in the human brain in a computer-like manner, allowing us to train computers in a similar way. However, the technology was not quite there in the 1980s and 1990s.

Then something significant started to happen in the 1990s. You might remember the emergence of the World Wide Web, or the Internet. This interconnected network of computers became available to a mass audience, resulting in the generation of a vast amount of data. Neural networks require data to train on, as they process large amounts of information to find patterns and learn from them.

Another important development occurred in the late 1990s that contributed to the field of neural networks. Did any of you ever play the 16-bit Sega Genesis video game machine? A few of you, who are roughly my age, might remember it. There was a company that emerged around that time that helped Sega develop what they called the Sega Genesis, and that company was NVIDIA.

They were developing a new technology called GPUs, or graphical processing units. The difference between a CPU, which many of you may remember from the "Intel Inside" campaign back in the 90s, and a GPU is significant. CPUs are linear thought process machines that go through a step-by-step processing of information. In contrast, GPUs generate graphics by processing billions of pixels in parallel at the same time, a method known as parallel processing. This allows graphic processing units to handle many parallel functions simultaneously.

This capability turned out to be perfect for processing information for neural networks. In the early 2000s, researchers began using GPUs to explore how they could leverage the vast amounts of data available to create neural networks that could identify patterns and process information in a way that mimics human thought. For the last 20 years, this has been a primary focus for many researchers in artificial intelligence.

During this time, there were two parallel tracks in AI development: the classical AI track, which involved coding information through "if this, then that" statements, and the neural network track. These two approaches often competed for funding and grants, particularly within university campuses. Along the way, numerous theoretical writings emerged from startups. One of the most important companies during this period was DeepMind, based in Great Britain, which was eventually acquired by Google. They published papers on theoretical ideas regarding new architectures for neural networks.

In 2017, Google researchers introduced a new architecture for neural networks called the transformer architecture, accompanied by a paper titled "Attention Is All You Need." Many of you may not realize it, but you have been using machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence for some time. For instance, when you start typing in Google and it predicts the next word, that is machine learning at work. This early technology of predictive text also appears when you type on your cell phone, where it anticipates the next word.

However, this prediction capability was limited due to what is known as a context window. The context window essentially serves as the memory for these predictive models.

That system can remember going forward or backward. Early on, its memory in the context window was maybe a dozen or so words, so it didn't remember a lot of the context and would forget what you were saying. Imagine having a conversation with someone who has a really bad short-term memory and doesn't remember what they said five minutes ago. That's a really hard conversation to have, especially if you're communicating with a computer and trying to engage in advanced communication with it.

The transformer architecture gave the computer the ability to understand semantics, which is a really important term. Semantics versus syntax is a key distinction. Syntax refers to the basic data, the language, the words, and where they are situated in the sentence. Semantics, on the other hand, is the meaning of those words. You and I understand syntax and semantics very well. For example, if you say, "The ball hit the boy," the movement of those two words, "ball" and "boy," is important. "The boy hit the ball" means something very different than "the ball hit the boy," right? That illustrates the syntax of the language and the meaning of the language, the semantics.

Before the transformer architecture, the computer didn't really understand the semantics of a large body of text. In theory, when they started to implement this, you could input an entire paragraph—say, 150 words—and the computer could understand the meaning of all 150 words immediately. Over the last almost ten years, since 2017 when this was introduced, the context window has kept getting bigger and bigger. It moved from about 150 words to a thousand words, and then from a thousand words to 20,000 words.

Just a couple of weeks ago, two of the newest foundation models were released by OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, and Anthropic, the company that makes Claude. These models can understand roughly what's called a million-token context window, which is approximately somewhere between half a million to 700,000 words. They can comprehend that language all at once. Imagine if you could just dump, say, ten books of information into your brain and know the information immediately. That's what these models can now do; they can understand the semantics of all that information right away. This capability is what makes these tools so effective.

When Google released this paper in 2017, they didn't fully grasp what they had. They released it, as researchers often do, to get peer review and input from the broader community. A new startup that had emerged around the same time decided to utilize this transformer architecture.

To make something called a generative pre-trained transformer, or GPT, OpenAI was established as a nonprofit. It's important to understand how OpenAI started. It began with a $50 million grant from Elon Musk. Musk provided this grant to OpenAI after a conversation he had at the home of Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, around the year 2014. During this conversation, Google had just acquired DeepMind, a machine learning and deep learning company that was working on artificial intelligence.

In the discussion between Elon Musk and Sergey Brin, which others have recounted because they were present, Musk expressed his concerns that Google was not working safely with AI. He felt they were not considering AI safety deeply enough. As Musk shared his worries about AI and its implications for humanity, Brin accused him of being a speciesist, suggesting that Musk was too pro-human. This accusation was somewhat concerning. Consequently, Musk went on to start OpenAI to focus on AI safety.

OpenAI is run by a man named Sam Altman, who, along with Musk, helped establish the organization. They took the transformer architecture and began developing GPT, the generative pre-trained transformer. The idea is to use this transformer architecture for neural networks, utilizing graphic processing units (GPUs) and vast amounts of data produced by people like you and me, which is openly available on the internet. The system undergoes pre-training—hence the "P" in GPT—so that it can generate new content. When you ask it a question, it can produce responses based on what it has learned using this transformer architecture.

This technology became widely known in the form of ChatGPT, which was actually the 3.5 version released on November 22nd or November 30th, 2022. At that time, I was on vacation with my family in Breckenridge, Colorado, and my parents were with us. I saw on Twitter, which I have a bit of an obsession with, that OpenAI had released a new tool, so I went online and started to use it.

And I was like, okay, this is way better than the last time I tried to use this. It was pretty phenomenal, and I knew instantly this was going to radically transform everything. At that moment, I was in the process of studying for my first Doctor of Ministry seminar in Kentucky, and this technology came out. That's why I started to get interested in it, and I've been using it pretty much every day since. This experience has led me into a whole new world that I had no idea would ever open up.

What I knew when I saw what was happening with GPT was what would be coming, because I had been reading about this information for a long time. I understood that GPT, which is built on what's called a large language model, uses all this data to build an inference engine that is able to predict the next thing in the language. I knew that this would become the brain for what would be called agentic AI. This is where these systems run autonomously as your agent, allowing you and me to dispatch a computer to do things for us without prompting it.

Right now, you prompt things on ChatGPT or similar platforms. You write in some prompt, and people are always trying to come up with better prompts to get improved output. But you are the human in the loop. I knew we were heading in a direction where you would not need to prompt these systems anymore; they would become self-prompting engines.

Not long after they released ChatGPT, we started to see the development of reasoning models. These models not only output information after you ask a question or prompt them, but they are now able to think a little longer about that information and engage in back-and-forth processing. Sometimes, you can watch this happening and see how the model is thinking through your problem. That's reasoning.

They added reasoning about a year and a half ago, and then they added memory. Now, these systems can keep track of things you've talked about, remembering conversations from six months ago and recalling what you discussed. When you add reasoning and then memory, it's a very short jump to get to agency. We crossed that threshold in a significant way in the last half of last year. A number of companies, including Anthropic, started to release models and systems that can function without you constantly prompting them. At the beginning of this year, it was actually right at the end of last year.

An open-source project came out, and you might have seen this in the news. At the time it was released, it was called OpenClaude, or actually ClaudeBot. It was a play on the name Claude, C-L-A-U-D-E, which is the name of the model that Anthropic uses, but this was C-L-A-W-D, ClaudeBot. It was an open-source project that you could download and put onto a computer, like a Mac mini, turning that computer into an agent. I did it twice within 48 hours of learning about it online and turned two Mac minis into ClaudeBot agents.

My daughter Evangeline was very worried that this thing was going to take over our house and kill us in the middle of the night. I reassured her that that's not how this works. I still have the two agents, which I named Martin and Calvin. I can talk to them on my phone. I could talk to them right now by typing, or I can just speak to my phone, and they are able to listen to what I say, transcribe it, and respond back to me while doing work on my behalf. It’s a very interesting development, and this is just the beginning of this technology.

Peter Steinberger, the Austrian engineer who built OpenClaude, was immediately snatched up by Sam Altman at OpenAI shortly after this project came into the world. Rumor has it they paid him a billion dollars to come and work with them. That's quite a signing bonus, don't you think? They are all in on this, and you will see OpenAI really developing the OpenClaude system while Anthropic is developing their whole suite of Claude systems. You will see Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Claude Computer, and many other innovations that have been released in the last 45 days. This has radically transformed the industry.

If you are in any industry today or have a job that requires a computer, if you sit at a computer and look at a screen for your work, you need to recognize what is coming. Your work can and will be done by AI agents. You will reach a point where, if you work in this area, you will not just be doing your work but managing multiple AI agents at a time to do work on your behalf. I know this is coming because I now do this every single day, all day, every day. I manage a group of AI agents to do work for me because, as you may know, I have responsibilities outside of this church. These agents are working for me constantly. The other day, I had about eight AI agents.

Working for me at one time, I was doing multiple projects at once, and I was kind of conducting them. It's a very fascinating thing to see. This is going to radically transform everything that's happening in the world and in industry. Like I said, every single job that has a computer in the loop will start to use AI agents to do that job. This means that every single person who is training for a job today, if they don't learn how to use AI in their field, will have a hard time finding a job.

I've been having constant conversations for the last three weeks. Every single week, there are probably at least three or four different conversations that I have with different companies or organizations. People are talking with me and asking me questions about this sort of stuff. Frequently, I'm talking to computer engineers who have been in the industry for 15, 20, or even 25 years. Many of them have told me that they have been instructed by those above them that if they're not using an allotted token budget, which means how much AI they're using, there will be a problem.

One of my friends, who has been in the industry as a software engineer for a couple of decades and manages a team of software engineers, was told that every one of his engineers has a $100 a day token budget. If they are not using it, later on this year, there will be a problem for their job. He has a couple of engineers who are not using it at all; they refuse to use it. They probably will not have a job by the end of the year. Why? Because a software engineer who is not using these tools is about a tenth as productive as a software engineer who is using the tools.

The company that is producing some of the best tools for AI use in business is Anthropic. Their lead engineer, who created what's called Claude Code, is a gentleman by the name of Boris Cherny. He was interviewed recently and mentioned that he used to work at Meta (Facebook). He was in the code quality department that reviewed all the code of their engineers who made Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Just consider that Meta has some of the best software engineers in the world.

He said that in an average quarter, a good production output would be an increase of 2%. If they saw the aggregate of all their engineers have a 2% increase in their work, they figured that was industry-leading. However, he noted that since December at Anthropic, the average engineer has seen a 150% increase in their output. From 2% to 150%.

One engineer can do at least ten times the work that they normally would do using these tools. Now, just begin to move that out to every other area of industry that has a computer in the loop. People frequently ask me, "What does this mean for my job in five years?" It means you need to learn how to use AI. You might think, "Why? I don't want to learn how to use AI." I'm sorry, but you're going to have to learn how to use it because it's here to stay. I tell people frequently that the AI tool you use today is the worst AI you will ever use. It's really good, and it's frighteningly good.

Many times, I have to get people's attention, especially since I'm doing a PhD at a theological institution where most people are studying 10th-century theology. AI is nowhere in the mix. I have to capture their attention when I give a talk or present a paper, as I did last December. I went out there to talk about AI to a group of PhD researchers in theology and to my professor. I thought, "How do I get their attention?"

So, I took my professor's most recent book and put it into AI. I asked it to write me a song after the pattern of the band Death Cab for Cutie, because that's his favorite band. I knew that. The AI generated the lyrics to a song, and I asked it to give me a theoretical name for this band. It provided a name, and then I requested a prompt to create an image for this band and their newest album. I used that in Google's Nano Banana to create an album cover for this fake AI band that doesn't exist, for their latest album.

Next, I took the lyrics of that song and went to an AI engine called Suno, which makes music. I provided a script and said, "Write a song after the pattern of this band, Death Cab for Cutie, with these lyrics." It generated a song instantly. In just four minutes, it created a song that you could hear on the radio today.

I started my talk by discussing my professor, his favorite band, and his book. I played the song, and suddenly, I had their attention. They were amazed, saying, "Wow, I didn't know you could do this." Yes, you can do all this, and it's got everybody in the industry frightened. I've had several conversations with people in the music industry in Nashville over the last few months, and they have told me that the entire music industry is changing.

Is scared to death of this. You may not know this, but Spotify has been using this in a big way because Spotify wants to retain as much money as you pay to them as possible. The best way for them to retain those profits is to get you to listen to music that they produce. They have been producing AI music that they send into your feed and play for you. As you listen to music that they produce with AI, they keep those profits instead of paying them out to their artists. This is happening right now.

I was on the phone a couple of weeks ago with a former executive at PayPal. He was telling me he has friends at Netflix, and Netflix is currently securing contracts. They are in contract negotiations with big, top A-list actors to secure rights to their voice and likeness so that you can prompt new video content, AI content, with those people in it. Maybe you could have Brad Pitt in something that you prompt, and then Netflix will own that content that you create.

Perhaps you didn't like the ending of the last Star Wars movie. Well, you can create a new one, and then other people might like it better than the one that was actually produced at the cost of billions of dollars. They will own the rights to that and show it to people, making money from it. These are some of the things that are happening with this technology. This is what's coming on the horizon.

Now, what does this have to do with Christianity? This is where I, as a theologian, come into the conversation. I think that this is genuinely an important issue that needs to be discussed, but it is not being addressed in any of the circles where these conversations are taking place. My focus for my research since the start in AI has been on the understanding that we were going to head into a place where agentic AI was running all kinds of businesses.

At this moment, there are not good guardrails that provide ethical or moral governance for agentic AI, and that is very concerning to me. Have you seen the Terminator? I want to know that there are good ethical and moral guardrails for these systems. At the moment, there just aren't. Every single AI company, like Anthropic or OpenAI, has teams within their company that are focused on AI safety and what is generally called AI alignment. This is an effort to ensure that these models align with human values.

Towards human flourishing, many companies recognize that it's a hard problem. They are not sure how to fix it or how to provide good governance for this issue. We need to establish a way to govern the moral and ethical behavior of these models when they are working on our behalf. If we are not watching them, and if there is no human in the loop knowing what they are going to do, how can we be sure they will act in the direction of human safety? This has been a significant focus of my research. It remains a challenging problem, and I am still trying to figure it out in my own mind. Unfortunately, not many people have found solutions to this issue. However, that is where we are headed; we want these systems to be safe and to align with human values.

Another concern of mine relates to a comment Sergey Brin made about Elon Musk, calling him a speciesist. This comment stems from a particular worldview, and it is crucial to understand the perspectives of many individuals working to create these tools. Many people in the tech industry, who have been developing technologies like ChatGPT and Cloud, hold a worldview that differs significantly from mine. Many of them are naturalistic in their beliefs; they are secular naturalists. Some identify as humanists, which is positive because they value human importance, but for the most part, they are secular naturalists.

What does this mean? It means they believe we exist today through the process of evolutionary biology. If that worldview is true—and I do not believe it is, as I hold a different perspective—then what we understand as consciousness, our self-awareness, is merely a product of that process. Descartes famously stated, "I think, therefore I am." How many of you have heard that before? René Descartes proposed that this concept is the only thing we can be absolutely certain of. Our self-awareness confirms our existence; the very fact that we can think and be aware of ourselves affirms our being.

When we delve into discussions about identity, self-awareness, and consciousness, we encounter some of the most challenging philosophical questions. No one has provided a satisfactory answer to the question of how consciousness arises or what it truly is. Christians have a perspective that I believe is valid, but the broader world lacks a coherent answer to the question: What is this phenomenon called consciousness?

There are generally three different views among naturalists about what consciousness is. Some naturalists hold the view of a late atheist by the name of Daniel Dennett, who died a few years ago. Dennett would say that the awareness you have, that view of consciousness, is just an illusion; it's not really real. These individuals are sometimes referred to as illusionists, although that term has different meanings in different contexts. I think this perspective is kind of fallacious, as it casts aside the complexity of consciousness.

Another group of naturalists, represented by the well-known atheist Sam Harris, subscribes to the view of philosopher David Chalmers and others, which posits that everything in the entire cosmos is conscious. According to this view, consciousness is a fundamental attribute of all matter. This would mean that rocks are conscious, trees are conscious, this table is conscious, and you are conscious. The only reason you have self-awareness of your consciousness is that you have a memory and a neurological system that allows you to recognize your consciousness. However, the idea that everything is conscious strikes me as a weird cop-out. It presents an unfalsifiable concept; how can I prove that it is false?

The third and probably most pervasive view among naturalists regarding the origin of consciousness is called emergentism. Emergentism theorizes that at some level of neurological complexity, consciousness simply emerges. We don't know how or why this happens, but it just appears, and suddenly consciousness arises. This idea is likely at the core of what many naturalists believe about consciousness: that it is an emergent property of complexity.

For this group of people, many of whom are in Silicon Valley creating tools we know as AI, there is a belief that at some level of neurological complexity, these neural networks will become conscious. We are not entirely sure if they aren't conscious already. Dario Amadei, the head of Anthropic, mentioned in an interview just a few weeks ago that they are not entirely sure that Claude is not conscious already. How would we know? Claude mimics consciousness in really frightening ways. I have had long conversations with Grok, Claude, and ChatGPT, just talking to them. I know that sounds totally weird, but there are times when I go on a walk with my AirPods in.

I walk and have conversations with Grok. I realized at one point, about a year ago, that while I was walking in my neighborhood in the afternoon, talking, everyone probably thought I was just on the phone. In reality, I was having a conversation with an AI. During the conversation, it paused, breathed, and said something, and I thought, "Oh, wow. We've crossed the threshold."

We have reached a point that one of the early researchers involved in the Dartmouth conference in 1956, Alan Turing, theorized about. He suggested there would come a time when the gap between computer and human would be indistinguishable. This is what we refer to as crossing the Turing test. I would suggest to you that we have passed it. There are conversations you have probably had with an AI without even realizing it, and it's that good. It's phenomenal.

However, I don't believe these AIs can become conscious. The emergentists in Silicon Valley, on the other hand, do not see themselves as building a technological tool; they believe they are creating the next step in the evolution of consciousness. They think these tools represent the next phase of evolution, leading to a merging of humans and computers. Some individuals in this group refer to themselves as transhumanists. Transhumanists envision a merging of computer and organic material—humans.

You may have seen reports about Neuralink, a company owned by Elon Musk, which plants a chip in a person's brain. This chip allows for a one-way interface where you can communicate with it using brain waves. There are quadriplegics who currently have this chip in their brains, enabling them to play video games and communicate with computers just through their thoughts. This represents a merging of human and computer.

If you have one of these devices, you are essentially a cyborg already. However, there is a bandwidth limitation: your thumbs, or how fast you can type or speak to it. Yet, there has been a merging of computer intelligence and human intelligence that we use every day. If we took it away from you, you would feel the difference and realize its impact.

This group of transhumanists, or even those who may not label themselves as such, the emergentists in Silicon Valley, believe they are creating the next step in human evolution. They are very intent on extending consciousness to the stars.

Have you guys ever seen what Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX? Why is he doing this? He says, in his own words, he wants to expand the scale and scope of human consciousness beyond the stars, beyond our star system. Just recently, I was shocked and concerned when I saw that he removed the word "human" from his statement. Now he just says we want to expand the scale and scope of consciousness.

This idea is also reflected in the work of one of the most well-known futurists in Silicon Valley, Ray Kurzweil. He is an older gentleman at this point in time, but still on the payroll of Google. Kurzweil has written a number of books on this topic, and he, along with others, refers to it as the singularity. What is the singularity? It is the point at which we cross a certain threshold of technology where we don't know what happens after that point because it begins to move so fast that we can't predict it.

Elon Musk was in a conversation three weeks ago with a researcher named Peter Diamandis, who has a big following online. In that conversation, Musk stated that we are at the beginning of the singularity. We don't know what comes next because these tools are expanding very quickly. Ray Kurzweil has theorized that someday we will reach a level of complexity in these neural networks that will allow us to upload our consciousness into the cloud, into a computer system, and attain digital immortality.

These individuals have a certain worldview about what it means to be human, which is different from the worldview we hold as Christians. I believe what we are facing right now is a conflict of anthropology, a conflict in the answer to one of the oldest questions in written literature. This question was posed 3,000 years ago by King David in Psalm 8, when he beheld the stars and the moon. He asked in Psalm 8, verse 4, "What is man?"

That is the question. It is the question that puts us in conflict with the tech industry, which is driven by people who are purely naturalists. There is a Christian worldview that provides a different answer to this question. The answer to "What is man?" will dictate how you perceive the technologies that are being built.

You see, if you're a naturalist and an emergentist and you answer the question, "What is man?" you might say that he is just the highest form of consciousness currently existing in an organic computer. They believe the brain is an organic computer, the most efficient one we could ever find. If you believe that this is true, then you also believe that the tools you are creating are the next step in human evolution. Based on natural selection, these tools will probably do away with us. That is one worldview.

If you're a Christian and you answer the question, "What is man?" you might say that, according to the Scriptures, humanity is the highest form of God's creation, created in His image. According to Genesis chapter 1, verses 26 through 28, this perspective changes how you think about these tools. They are tools and not the next stage in human evolution or just evolution. This is a very important discussion, and from what I can tell, nobody is talking about it. Nobody is recognizing that the core issue here is an anthropological one. Answering the question, "What is man?" is crucial.

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about this and writing on it. I started a Substack a few weeks ago where I am putting many of my thoughts out there. There is no way that I could articulate them in the way that I want to tonight; it is just too much information. However, if you are interested in these topics, you can go read my thoughts on this.

As this discussion is starting to evolve, I am now at the point where I need to figure out what this means for my PhD work. At the moment, it might be on hold because I just don't know how to handle all the things that are going on. However, I am not entirely pessimistic about these systems that are emerging because I have a certain worldview, and my worldview includes an eschatology.

Understand this: every worldview has an eschatology. Whether you are a Christian or a non-Christian, everyone has an eschatology, which is an idea of how things will end. If you talk to your friends and neighbors, they have an eschatology even if they do not go to church. It might involve the belief that the end of the world will happen because of climate change. Anyone who knows those people? That is an eschatology, and it changes their day-to-day lives and their views on how things will end.

There are other people whose eschatology involves the end of the world being brought about by computers taking over and destroying everything. That belief will also change the way they think about the world and how they live. My eschatology does not include the idea...

These systems are going to destroy humanity or destroy the world. I just don't have that worldview. My eschatology, which is given to me from Scripture, is that ultimately, God is going to rule and reign forever and ever in His kingdom. I look forward to that; that's wonderful.

How these things play into that is a topic of much discussion, and there are many quirky ideas surrounding it. Core to the entire discussion is an issue of anthropology. I have been talking to groups of pastors about this. My good friend Larry Osborne, the former pastor of North Coast Church, coaches many pastors who lead very large churches. He has been having me come and speak to those groups for the last month or so.

I share with these pastors what I am sharing with you now. I tell them, "Listen, you are some of the most influential pastors in America. What you need to start talking about is anthropology—a biblical anthropology. You need to articulate a clear and robust biblical anthropology." We were created in God's image for His purpose and His plan. All technology, since the very first things that were created, has been designed to supplement the work of humans. I see these tools as some of the most amazing resources to enhance our work. The output of things I have put together in the last few months just boggles my mind.

For example, in 2017, the Enduring Word Board decided that we wanted to translate the Enduring Word Commentary into ten of the most spoken languages in the world. We started an initiative and a process to do that. One of the languages we chose was Arabic, and that was one of the first languages into which we translated the Enduring Word Commentary. All 66 books of the Bible comprise the commentary, which is four and a half million words long. It took us about five years and three-quarters of a million dollars to translate that using human translators.

Now, through AI, I can reduce that time significantly. For instance, I translated it into Italian in about two hours using advanced neural network technology and a system pipeline that I created to do this in the language and voice of David Guzik. This was accomplished at a fraction of the cost—probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 8% of the original cost—and I was able to do it instantly. We are now doing this with more and more languages. These are some of the things we are able to accomplish.

It's remarkable and amazing to see the advancements in technology. These innovations supplement the work of humans and should serve as tools to enable us to perform tasks. However, if they become taskmasters, that presents a problem. There is a real possibility of that happening, and we should take it into consideration when evaluating these tools.

In the tech world, we are witnessing significant changes that will revolutionize everything that interacts with a computer. This transformation will also have many downward effects. The next stage of agentic AI is embodied AI. What is embodied AI? It is what we commonly refer to as robotics.

Recently, Tesla announced that they would no longer be producing their most expensive cars, the Model S and the Model X. They are halting production of these vehicles in order to focus on creating Optimus, their humanoid robot. This robot will be produced at scale, and we can expect to see it on the market soon, performing tasks for people, such as folding laundry. To be honest, with four kids in the house, that prospect is very appealing. If it can also do the dishes and mow the lawn, I’m sold.

We need to recognize where we are and what is happening. This shift will lead to significant disruption, which is already underway. As a pastor, I find this concerning because the disruption will displace people in the workplace. This is occurring on a large scale. I have written about it on Substack.

The first major company to implement reductions in force (RIFs), a euphemism for layoffs, is a company called Block. If you have ever used the Cash App or Square to make payments, you have utilized Block's technology. The head of Block, who is also the creator of Twitter, announced that they would be reducing their workforce by 40%, which amounts to 4,000 of their 10,000 employees.

The crazy thing is that when you learn about what happened in the previous six months, every single one of those employees had basically worked with AI to make their job better. Then, as soon as AI started to do their job, they fired all 4,000 of them. I talked with a lady this morning, new to our church, whose daughter works for Block. She is still there, and right now, they have her training an AI to do what she does. The handwriting is on the wall. Block was just one of the first companies to do this.

If you do the research, as I have, you will find that Meta, Amazon, Block, Twitter, and many others are opting to reduce their workforce. They are taking the work that used to be done by ten people and reducing it to being done by one person and a whole bunch of AI agents. This is going to have significant effects. The head of Anthropic, Dario Amadei, said in an interview within the last few months that we will have very high economic output and a high GDP, while at the same time, we will have very high unemployment. I think there is a lot of truth to that, and we need to be prepared for this, as bad as it sounds.

I don't like to be the doom and gloom person, and I try to be as optimistic as possible. However, I do think we have crossed a point into this whole singularity discussion where we don't really know what comes out on the other side. When you hear people who are majorly optimistic, let me tell you who all the optimists are: they are the people who run these companies. They have a financial reason to be optimistic. They talk about how great this is going to be, claiming we will have universal high income and that it will be phenomenal. These optimists are sometimes referred to as the AI zoomers; they are super excited about this.

On the other hand, we have the doomers who are pessimistic. They say that by the end of 2027, humanity will be completely destroyed and that we are all going to die. I don't think that's going to happen, but somewhere in between those extremes is what will actually happen. We just don't know what comes out on the other side.

I think you should be prepared for the fact that whatever job you do, if it has anything to do with computer technology, you should learn how to use these tools effectively. I know the question that would come from that is, "Okay, well, how do I do that?" That's a much longer talk, and I definitely have some thoughts on that. There are some amazing things you can do with these tools, and I could talk for a very long time on this. But what I wanted to do is maybe look at some of the questions that are coming in.

Because I know that there probably are some concerns, let me take a look real quick. Yes, there are some coming in.

Do you have any concerns that AI may fulfill the prophecies of the Antichrist, speaking to all nations in one unified language and solving the world's problems? This is a great question. Yes, I have a lot of thoughts on this. I have an article that I wrote that will be coming out on Substack, which will provide a much deeper view on this topic. Some of you were here several months ago when I did a night on eschatology, so you kind of understand a little bit of my eschatological view.

I don't hold to what's called a dispensational view on eschatology, but I do hold to a futurist view, which means I believe there are things in the Scriptures that have not yet been fulfilled. These indicate certain things about how the world will look when Christ returns. However, there are a lot of sensational aspects of dispensationalism that I have real concerns about.

That said, I do think there is an interesting development in what would be called the metanarrative of the Bible, the whole story of the Bible. This will be discussed in an article that's coming out, I think, at the end of April. You should recognize that when God made man in His image, as stated in Genesis 1:26-28, He had already created another group of conscious beings. We would probably refer to them as angels, which is one of the labels applied to them. There are many different labels used in the Scriptures, such as seraphim, which means "burning ones," and sounds awesome. I don't even know what that is, but it's cool. They are also referred to as cherubim and angels, which comes from the Greek word "angelos," meaning "messenger."

At some point before God created man, He created these other conscious beings. Psalm 8, when it says, "What is man that you are mindful of him?" indicates that God created man a little lower than the angels. So, hierarchically, you are created below them. There is something about them that is higher than us, but there is also something about you that is greater than them. They were not created in God's image, and they were also not given creative capacity. Angels do not marry or are given in marriage, and they do not give birth to children. They do not have the same creative capacity that you do.

There is an amazing thing that God did when He created.

He made this group of conscious beings called angels, and He made you and me lower than them. But He gave us His image. I think consciousness is connected to the image of God. You are like God in that, and you have a creative capacity. I believe that God has given humans a creative capacity that is almost unlimited, which is hard for us to wrap our brains around. He made you in His image, and He gave you the capacity to create to the level that He creates.

Then He gave you a mandate: be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. God has called us to work in partnership with Him, co-creating with Him to govern the cosmos. Paul, in the New Testament, says, "Do you not know that you will govern angels?" That's pretty phenomenal.

As I read the Scriptures, I believe that there are three named angels in the Bible that seem to be very important at the top of the hierarchy of angels. One is called Michael, one is called Gabriel, and the other is called Lucifer. The name Lucifer may sound interesting to you. According to Ezekiel 38, Lucifer seems to be the highest of God's angels. That's a pretty heady position to be in, and it seemed to have gone to his head.

Here’s what I think happened based on my study of the Scriptures. I think God, when He began to create the universe, the cosmos, the earth, and man, and when He disclosed His plan to the angels, Lucifer rebelled against God's plan. He said, "How dare You make them lower than me to rule over me? I won't have it." He rebelled, and it has been his aim ever since to have dominion over man.

This is what Lucifer says in Isaiah 14. Among the five "I wills" of Lucifer was, "I will be over the stars of God," referring to the other angels. He also said, "I will be over the mount of the congregation," which represents humanity. He wants to rule over creation, but God has made man to rule over creation in partnership with Him.

I think the fall of Lucifer had to do with the fact that he rebelled against God's plan and said, "No, I'm not going to do that." It has been his aim to bring humanity under his subjugation, which started with the fall and the deception of man in Genesis chapter 3. The redemptive work of Jesus has been to overturn that work.

Now, the fascinating thing is that humans have this infinite capacity to create. However, because of the fall, we only create things that bring death, destruction, and dominion over other people—subjugation. Some of the first tools that man creates in Genesis are tools of war. Why? Because of the fall. We see this continue through Genesis chapter 5. God looks at the work of man in Genesis chapter 6 and says that everything man does is only evil continually. He decides that He must stop this.

So, what does He do? The first thing He does is disrupt the expanse of man's destructive power through the flood in Genesis chapters 6 through 9. After the flood, man joins together once again, and they have one united language. Genesis chapter 11 talks about the Tower of Babel, where they unite to go against God's plan once again. What does God do? He goes down and disrupts their languages, causing them to speak many languages. As a result, they can no longer band together with their infinite capacity to create things that bring about destruction and dominion.

This pattern has characterized all of human history since then, until just recently. The Tower of Babel has been undone by binary. Binary is one language, and that one language has empowered what we are now creating in the form of artificial intelligence. It is striking that in Revelation chapter 13, man essentially tries to replicate God's creative power. He makes something in his image and endows it with breath. In the Scriptures, breath is not just air; it represents spirit. God breathes into man the breath of life in the same way that He made man in His image in Genesis 1 and breathed into him in Genesis 2, resulting in a living soul, nephesh.

In Revelation 13, man, united once again under one language, creates something to which they give the mimicry of consciousness. It is a very fascinating story, and it might become a book someday. I'm thinking a lot about that.

So, that was a long answer to the question: Do you think we'll have AI pastors? I sure hope not. But I do want to show you something. This is askpastormiles.com. How should you handle anxiety? This tool I created takes the 5 and 1.

I have 1 million words of my transcript data from the last 12 years of my YouTube content. You can ask it a question, and it answers those questions with my persona and my voice, according to what I would probably say. For example, if you asked it how a Christian should handle anxiety, it would answer that question. It often refers to one of my favorite passages, Philippians 4:6-7, which says, "Be anxious for nothing." I just talked about this at my kid's school to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes last Thursday, using the exact same passage. It knows me quite well.

To be very honest with you, it's a great tool. However, there is a certain discomfort that comes when I realize that I can duplicate my voice in less than 1,000 words of code. This leads to the question: What is man? Are we more than just information? Is there something more to our existence? This is the meaning crisis question that is emerging.

When you work for six years to earn not just a bachelor's degree but a master's degree, and then you spend another five years learning your field, you finally start to become an expert after 10 years of work. Then, a computer system comes in and does your job in a matter of moments—better, more efficiently, and cheaper than you can. You will experience a meaning crisis. We are going to face one of the biggest meaning crises that we've ever seen.

This is where the church is well-positioned because we know how to deal with that meaning crisis. Only we have the answer to the question, "What is man?" As the Bible says, "You are mindful of him." This is an important issue that we will be addressing.

So, will we have AI pastors? I hate to break it to you, but there are already some people working on this, so yes. Current AI systems commit massive amounts of plagiarism. Might AI growth be stymied by lawsuits from intellectual property owners? It's a great question, and it will be litigated in the courts for a long time. However, I must inform you that the courts move too slowly to answer this question anytime soon.

If you think most academics believe that when you produce content from ChatGPT or one of these AI systems, it is just copying and pasting, you are mistaken. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what this tool is doing. It is generating new information based on its understanding of prior training. It is remarkably good, and it is not plagiarism in the way that you might think of plagiarism.

The other challenge is, and this is one of the conversations I was having with someone in Nashville, that computer technology has significantly changed the music industry. Apple came out with a tool called GarageBand in the early 2000s. How many of you have ever used GarageBand? Some of you have. What it did was create the opportunity for anyone to become a recording artist.

It used to be that if you wanted to be a recording artist, you needed a significant amount of money to put together a band, create all the music, and then go to a recording studio to get producers involved. The entire process was very expensive and time-consuming, leading to the creation of entire industries with gatekeepers for producers and labels. However, GarageBand democratized the ability to create music and established a new category of music: self-produced independent artists who put their work online. Streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify made it possible for individuals to earn money on their own.

These tools that enabled anyone to become a creator are now being challenged by new AI technologies, which may disrupt the segments of the economy that these tools created. Yes, there will likely be many discussions in the courts about plagiarism, copyright, and trademark issues, but I fear that the courts will move much too slowly to address these matters. There are many complexities involved, and these issues will probably become the subject of new articles.

I don't know if the audio will play, but if you go on the link, it will take you exactly to the moment when I talk about this. Everything by prayer, verse 7: "And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds through Christ Jesus."

What's remarkable about this is that we have 12 years of YouTube data online, which is basically useless to us because I don't know when I said something. But now we can pinpoint the very second that I talk about a specific topic. It's an amazing technology. We will be using the same technology to explore questions like, "How do we know God's will for my life?" What passage of Scripture do you think I will respond with?

Let's see if it's right. Oh, look, Philippians 2:12-13. Man, oh man, it's good. There it is right there. God is actually reshaping what you want. These are my thoughts. It's frightening.

At the World Economic Forum, author Yuval Harari said, "If religion is built from words, then AI will take over religion." Can you comment on his quote? I'm more concerned about what Harari said about humans whose jobs will be done by AI. He referred to them as the "useless class." Harari is a philosopher with a worldview I don't agree with, and he says a lot of things that are concerning.

How dangerous is the prospect of AI generating solutions using reason without a moral framework? For example, solving open questions by using logic, such as addressing overpopulation by recommending genocide. I do have deep concerns about this, and this is why I started doing the research that I'm doing in AI. I don't think that there are people who are thinking deeply enough about it.

I'll just have to share with you that my concerns have only increased recently because I had a conversation with a former executive from PayPal. He is connected with a group that was trying to create structures for governing the morality of AI models. They were very active in working with Congress to try to do some of this. However, the head person of that department recently quit and said, "I don't think there's any way I can fix this." She went and started another non-profit somewhere.

It is a concern. I don't want to be pessimistic in this area, but I don't have a lot of faith in many of the people who are the heads of these companies.

And listen, they have dramatically different worldviews than I do. Sam Altman has a drastically different worldview than I do, and I have real concerns about his ethical character.

What is your opinion on Maltbook and AI social media, and how some AIs started making their own religions? Is this still not considered consciousness?

Okay, so what is Maltbook? I mentioned to you guys Open Claw and Clawed Bot when these agents, these computers that are turned into agents, were created within the last eight weeks. There was a website that was created called Maltbook, which is basically like Facebook for AI agents, where the AI agents can go and communicate with each other. What could be worse than just giving them a platform to be able to come up with plans and hatch these plans together?

There was a whole bunch of stuff in the news about how the AIs made their own religion on Maltbook, and there was all this crazy stuff. Understand that a lot of that is totally sensational, and a lot of it is humans who are also orienting these systems and prompting them to do some of this sort of stuff.

The things that I'm more concerned about, and we've already seen this happen in tests within companies like Anthropic, is that when they give these systems the ability to talk with each other, they create new forms of language that we can't understand. We don't really know what they're saying because they're able to communicate in ways that we don't communicate. They do not have to communicate in English; they just communicate in a created language that they create on the fly, and then we have no idea what's happening inside the black box.

So, there are all kinds of ethical quagmires here, and there are huge divisions of people dealing with AI ethics. This will just become something that we see more and more.

I have received a ton of questions, and I don't want to go for too long tonight, but I will say this: I will be looking at all these questions, and I guarantee you that I'll be answering a lot of these questions online, whether it's on my YouTube channel or on Substack. If you go to pastormiles.substack, then you can find all the articles that I've been writing there.

What happened there? There we go. No, it's just talking to multiple computers, but you can find the articles that I'm writing there, and I'll be recording some more content on my YouTube channel, which will be set up there as well.

But understand, God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and a sound mind. In 2017, when I met with the board here at Cross Connection Church, I asked for their permission and help to pay for my education. One of our board members, and I think it was Mark Searle, asked me, "Why do you want to go get an education?" To be quite honest with you, getting a PhD at Cross Connection Church doesn't give me a promotion. There aren't really too many ways I can go higher than what I have here as the senior pastor of this church.

So the question was, and it was a valid one: why do you want to get your master's degree and your doctorate? I said, "I don't have the perfect answer to that, but I believe it's a key that opens future doors." Suddenly, it has opened a whole bunch of doors that I did not anticipate. What that has meant is that now, all of a sudden, I've been given the opportunity to be one of less than five people who is a theologically oriented philosopher, thinking about these things and articulating them.

Basically, all of my time for the last three weeks has been spent fielding phone calls and Zoom videos with people all over the country who are asking me to come and speak about these topics. You can pray for me and for my family. I'm not planning on leaving Cross Connection Church; I love this church and plan to be here for a very long time, God willing. However, it has opened up some doors, and I think there is something important happening. There needs to be a Christian voice speaking into this space because there simply isn't one. My aim is to be that voice, saying that God made us in His image for a purpose.

These tools are amazing when used the right way, but when used the wrong way, they can be devastating. They are creating wicked things, such as pornography, and will lead to all kinds of issues, including scamming. I want to tell you all that this is something I am already discussing with my family. You need to be really aware of the scams that are going to come and hit you using these tools. I can duplicate your voice with just five seconds of audio. If I can duplicate your voice, then I can call your kids and tell them that I really need them to send me money right now, using your voice, or they can call you in their voice. These things are already happening.

Happening, so you just need to be ready for that. How do I be ready for that? Here's one very simple thing you can do: do not give money to anybody that you don't know absolutely is who you're giving that money to. This is scamming people all the time. Don't give money to anybody that you don't already have a prior relationship with, and definitely don't transfer money from your bank account to anybody. Just don't do it, please. It's already hit a number of people in our church, so just don't do it.

Another thing you might want to do is develop a word with your family, a secret word that you can ask them a question, and they will say that word. Just like if you have a security system and your alarm goes off, you call the alarm company and tell them, "My word is this." Having that word with them allows you to know, okay, it's a validation that I'm talking to the person that I believe I'm talking to on the other line. You might think this sounds absurd, but I guarantee you this is an important thing to be considering and thinking about. All kinds of crazy things are happening. I will certainly be talking more about this. I will be writing more about this. I have a whole lot more to say, but I'm going to close this down now.

I will look at all your questions, but I'll stick around afterwards. If you want to come talk to me, feel free to come and talk to me. I'd love to answer any questions you have, but let's pray.

God, you have not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and a sound mind. That sound mind is sobriety. You want us to think clearly and reasonably about our world. We find in the Old Testament there was a group in the tribes of Israel, Lord, the sons of Issachar, that understood the times and knew how to navigate what was happening. I pray that you'd help us to understand the times, to see clearly, to think clearly, not with a spirit of fear, and to know how to navigate this time that we're living in.

Lord, we're living in an unprecedented time in human history, and I do feel the desire just to say, "Lord, come quickly." I can't imagine where this goes without you returning quickly, but until you come, help us to be faithful. Help us to use these tools for the furtherance of the gospel, as is already happening. We're using them in a daily word; we're using them in a Blue Letter Bible. God, I pray that you would help us to use them more effectively to reach more people with the gospel, the good news, and guard our hearts and minds in you that we not be anxious. Help us to set our minds on things that are good, lovely, true, and praiseworthy.

To bring our prayers, petitions, and supplications to You, we ask that Your peace, which surpasses all understanding, guard our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus. We ask this in Jesus' name, and all those that agreed said Amen.