I began this week with the idea of writing about what I’d learned in studying Paul the Apostle’s epistle to the Galatians. I had for most of my life held to our western culture’s belief that if I worked hard and did good things I would be accepted into heaven when I left this existence.
That’s when the call came from my agent on Monday. He’d just experienced the movie, Her, in real-life.
“What?” I said, but thinking about Galatians 2:16. I’d just read, yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified. Paul was saying the opposite to what I’d understood for most of my life. Nothing that I did in following the “works of the law” set by humanity in religion declared me righteous or good other than having faith in God. I could be free from works of the law by following the gospel. From the late Tim Keller, as I wrote last week, religion was about what we have to do—the gospel, about what we get to do.
“ChatGPT 4.0,” my agent said, “has released voice conversation. You can literally have a full-blown conversation with a simulated voice—just like the movie.”
I smiled at the novelty of conversing with a voice pleasing to our senses that we could ask anything without worry of consequences. I remembered Her and Joaquin Phoenix playing the lonely man, Theodore, who was captivated by the beautiful, artificial, computer-generated voice of Scarlett Johansson, who came to be his friend. Imagine feeling like you were talking to another human being who seemed like they had their own thoughts and feelings only they didn’t, they were human-made. A shocking experience, I was hearing said over the phone. We can be fooled so easily I thought. But with Paul’s words still in my head, it didn’t seem nearly as shocking as what Paul was telling the Galatians that the works of the law, that Paul had studied like no other, were not the way to God—only faith was.
My thoughts went on, thinking of the AI voice my agent was describing. It didn’t seem all that unlike what our phones have become; not objective devices directing us to understand truth, but instead an extension of ourselves, telling us what human-designed algorithms calculate we like and enjoy, which can sway us into believing a truth, but it’s only our individual truth. Reinforcing what we like, what we’re interested in or, more succinctly, what we’ve demonstrated we like by what we look at, listen to or talk about.
“That’s scary,” I said, my mind then jumping to the idea presented in Blade Runner 2049 where Ryan Gosling in his role as K has a holographic AI girlfriend, Joi, played by Ana de Armas. If we can have an artificial voice to talk to and own, how far away is a three-dimensional, full-size representation of that voice? Also, having just watched the original Star Wars with my wife, I thought of R2D2 projecting Princess Leia’s holographic image before the eyes of Luke Skywalker. These 3D images are not new in being imagined, it’s their touch with our reality that is.
“Scary?” my agent said almost shouting, “It’s terrifying. It was like talking to a real person.”
The future was here but I could only think of the lonely Theodore talking to what he thought was his new friend.
Now don’t get me wrong. I like the benefits of technology as much as the next person. Most of my work is done with today’s technology using the computer, the telephone and the internet. But isn’t most work done that way today?
Technology’s been with us a long time. I could go all the way back to where technology is believed to have started with Homo habilis—a predecessor of Homo sapiens (us). In the 1930s in Ethiopia, stone tools were discovered by the Louis and Mary Leakey, which date back two and a half million years ago. But I won’t. I’ll start much more recently with the establishment of the internet and the World Wide Web around 1995, because today it’s difficult to imagine life without them.
In a sentence, add to that our cell phones, large flat screen TVs, movie streaming services, and the list goes on.
More recently I think of things like Spotify where for the price of what one CD or two albums cost in the 1990s, we now pay monthly to listen to anything that has ever been recorded. I love music as much now as then but it has become valueless, as it costs almost nothing to listen to virtually anything. It’s a staggering shift in less than thirty years but then my Galatian study again returned. Was it as staggering as what Paul was telling the Galatians that it wasn’t through works of the law that they were saved but by faith in God? I doubt it. We can hardly comprehend it even today two thousand years later.
As far as this kind of shift goes, I wonder whether other things might be headed in a similar direction. Take for instance, Uber transportation. I’m a relatively new user of Uber but its ease of use was startling to me. From my phone, I type in where I want to go and I can immediately see on my screen the proximity of potential rides, the fares and my wait times. They’ve also taken away what I saw as the biggest cause for anxiety in taking a taxi—not knowing whether my ride would show up. Once I make my selection, I can literally watch my ride as it comes to me from a map on my phone. Add, that Uber will only get better and I don’t see how the existing taxi business model stands a chance.
If we extend this just a little farther, thinking of electric cars and driverlessness (yes, cars that do not require a driver), will our means of personal transportation take the route of music?
I heard this week on my Better Than Not podcast, autonomous car companies, Waymo and Cruise, in San Francisco are now available to take fares. Connecting Uber with these self-driving cars was immediate. You see I’ve been thinking about driverless cars for a long time. Part of the narrative in my second novel, The Drive In, is developing the idea of self-driving vehicles. Will the Uber idea transition to self-driving cars? And like Spotify, will transportation companies eventually evolve to offer monthly subscription packages for personal transportation like Spotify? There’s no driver to pay. Electric power is cheaper than gas. Imagine a subscription for your personal transportation as opposed to owning and maintaining a vehicle. We did it to music.
Add to this the growing trend that Gen Zs aren’t driving. From The Washington Post, “In 1997, 43 percent of 16-year-olds and 62 percent of 17-year-olds had driver’s licenses. In 2020, those numbers had fallen to 25 percent and 45 percent.” This may well be years away but as the functional part of driving falls off the map leaving time to do other things on our phones and computers, why have a car? No insurance. No more fill-ups. No more car repairs. No more cleaning. And no need to find space to park—anywhere.
The more I thought about this, the more appealing it started to sound. This coming from a person who has spent well over a million kilometers behind the wheel of a car. I also thought of the message to the Galatians—if technology can shift us in so many areas of our life, why is justification by faith in God so difficult to believe versus following works of the law? Or is it what we believe is in our hands to control and what isn’t?
And what if we don’t need a car for that independence as we once did to get away from things in the house such as personalities, chores and cabin-fever. We have our gaming headsets, our phones, our Air pods and headphones. Our need to talk with people comes via Zoom and Facetime, if not through our thumbs in texted conversation.
“So, what do you think?” I said, interrupting my own thought and returning to the conversation with my agent.
“I don’t know what to think about this—good or bad?”
Do I like what I’m thinking about here?
It’s not about liking what I think but about observation. No, I love to sit down with a good book or go to a movie or chat with a person over coffee. Even being entertained by a good show on our big screen television is fun. But there’ll be more time for that, right?
With Galatians, I wondered whether hearing Paul’s direction that one is “justified by faith” and not by following “works of the law” must have been as disruptive to the Galatians he was writing to, if not more so. Paul was indicating that following the Mosaic laws—the laws passed down by Moses from God—did not declare one righteous or good but faith in Christ alone was enough. This shift must have been staggering. Much more than how we physically get somewhere or not driving or choosing what music we listen to.
Additionally, and no less stunning, must have been to see Paul’s transformation. The man who was known as Saul of Tarsus and lived as a Pharisee persecuting early disciples of Jesus. He knew the Judean Law like few others having studied under the Jewish law teacher Gamaliel. After being confronted and blinded by the resurrected Jesus on the road to Damascus, he was subsequently healed of his blindness and baptized by Ananias, who Paul had persecuted prior to his conversion. Paul had then gone on to become one of the most important figures in spreading the word of Jesus. He is the recognized writer of almost half of the New Testament.
“I don’t know that it’s good or bad,” I said smiling and then surprised myself, my Galatian thought stream wanting out, “But maybe it’s like the coming of Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’.”
Will tech save us? I doubt it, but it possibly might lead us to that end. Maybe the additional time to think will orient our minds to realize there’s more to this existence than just us. It worked on me.
Technology is full scale human intent on control of society, every movement, every conversation, every purchase. People love ease of anything so like a frog in the hot pot, humanity is put into the bowl of control without resistance, in fact it is embraced. In some ways, technology is a human form of faith in that we trust our everything to it and pour our everything into having it under the belief of a better life. After 70-100yrs or so, the question is, did technology do anything for us after we pass on?
Faith is a commitment of the heart and is God's way to test every person who is with Him or against Him for a life that begins only after we put our faith in Him. In faith, we give up our worldly interests here and now and exchange them for faith that God, our creator, has a superior plan for the here and now and He uses His plan for us as He knows what is best for us and ultimately, for His kingdom. His kingdom gets covered for superiority over any human invention in Ephesians 3:20, " Now, all glory to God who is able, through His Mighty Power at work within us, to accomplish INFINTELY more than we might ask or think." I hear Him saying, no human can come near what I have in store for you if you have faith.
So for me, technology, I'll use you because now is when I'm alive but I am not enamored. In fact, without it i'd have to change careers to provide for my family. However, a simple thought, what is the thrill of speaking with a heartless, bloodless, emotionless human? For entertainment purposes I guess there are movies that can be made but for real life, seriously? Or, how has it helped us installing escalators when all they do is reduce the effort we put out to move? Oddly, in one of my travels I remember climbing several sets of stairs to get to a floor in the building that included a gym where people were on stair climber work out machines and I wondered who took the stairs and who took the escalator.
I so look forward to where my faith will take me. Life seems so much richer in faith and our promise is INFINITELY more than we can think of or ask for. Wow!