Recently I co-led a boundary training for pastors on the topic of responsible AI use. As expected, the people in the room had varying levels of knowledge of the technology. Some were already using AI any way they could. Others had varying challenges even accessing the Zoom room we were in. Still others were anti-AI justice stalwarts who noted the health risks (such as cognitive atrophy), the harms to poorer communities (including potential increases in utility costs), the lack of regulation and education, and the climate injustice of those water guzzling data centers. I count myself among the last group, but I had to admit my own AI use—both known and unknown. Most of us are already using AI in our search bars or on our phones. The technology has become so stealthlike, working in the background of the apps on our devices, that many of us don’t realize how much we are coming to depend upon it.
I’m an ordained clergyperson, not an expert on AI. My part in the boundary training focused less on what the technology is or how to use it and more on checking in with our ethics and our integrity as we confront an increasingly augmented reality that feels inevitable. The technology is new, overwhelming, and scaling at an unprecedented pace, but every advent of new technology has required us to rethink how humanity can live and work with it. To prepare for the training, I turned to some of my favorite spiritual thinkers. As a Thomas Merton scholar, I became especially fascinated by the Trappist monk’s writings from the 1960s on technology.
Merton was concerned with the impact of nuclear weapons, computers, mass media, industrial agriculture, and other modern-day tools on human thriving and the spiritual life: “Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation,” Merton writes. He considered that while the use of machines is helpful, “there can be a deadening of spirit and of sensibility, a blunting of perception, a loss of awareness, a lowering of tone, a general fatigue and lassitude, a proneness to unrest and guilt which we might be less likely to suffer if we simply went out and worked with our hands in the woods or in the fields.”
