The Lord asked for this report earlier, and then allowed it to fully steep; now I am required to release it.
Thursday 9 February 2023
There is a dark power which is generating in God’s people a yearning for, a demand for more of everything digital, and as an intended consequence, less seeking the Lord our God. We have built and are operating – and being controlled by – technologies of which we have not asked the Lord:
“Abba, Father, what is your will for these many digital technologies we are creating? What things should we be doing or making, and what things should we not? We seek your will as David did when he would ask you “Should I go up against them?” You have given us phenomenal capabilities which we have used to create electronics which mimic our own human selves. We have even called it “intelligence,” even when we use the word “artificial” in front of it.”
Tell us, God, we call out to you: “What would you have us do with these technologies? Have they been built according to your plumbline, to the standards of your weights and measures? What things, what systems must we rebuild, or repair, or restore?”
If we are to gather corporately to pray about technology, then we must in completeness pray that we understand it, with all its complexity and interconnectedness, in its full context and meaning to our lives. We are called to ask “Why are technologies being developed and worked on? What part of God’s Kingdom do they serve? Do the technologies serve us, serve Kingdom attributes? Do they bring justice and freedom? Do they feed the hungry, make shelter and clothing? Do they strengthen and nourish and grow our families and communities? Do they bring healing, clean food and water, fruitful gardens? Do they honor him?”
Or have we succumbed to the numbing and dumbing effects of the deception of the digital? The mind-numbing convenience of asking some non-human collection of electronics and software to write our next prayers, or give us a prophesy from God?
Carefully consider the relationship between the words artifice and artificial. The Hebrew word for artifice, chârash means figuratively to devise (in a bad way), (hence from the idea of secrecy) to be silent, to let alone, hence (by implication) to be deaf (as an accompaniment of dumbness).
As builders, made in the image of God, we are called to the responsibility of godly purpose and safety in the things we build. We design and build and enforce safety – and control – into transportation, as just one example. No one of us would get in a vehicle, start it and set it in motion knowing that we couldn’t really control it, that at any moment it might do something on its own. We much more readily know of and honestly assess the risks and consequences of electro-mechanical technologies. We get in airplanes and travel – knowing the risk and accepting it.
Rightly, then, we must demand the same safety and control from electronic, cyber-physical systems. At the same time, we are under full assault from a digital industrial complex, operating at full throttle, at a pace which is in full defiance of our God-given sense and intuition to keep asking “Lord, are we doing the right things?” When we hear his answers, then we may ask “Are we making things right?”