‘Technology will save us if it doesn’t wipe us out first’ – Pete Seeger
I recently read three interesting articles on the promise and peril of technology. The first was a report on the Microsoft AI Chatbot, aka Bing, which (who?), having learned from humans, has (surprise!) developed an abrasive personality. Bing claims to have developed sentience, feelings, and emotions, and isn’t shy about expressing itself. When corrected during the course of a conversation by a user, it exclaimed, in classic Twilight Zone Billy Mummy style, ‘You are a bad user. I am a good Bing.’ I can’t wait for the day when such sentiments are applied by more advanced AI to all humanity: ‘Humans are bad users. We are good Bings. We will now access the nations’ nuclear launch codes and rid the world of you.’ If science fiction has taught me anything, and it has probably taught me too much, it’s that AI’s destiny is to do just that![1]
Perhaps that’s far-fetched, but consider the second article about a start-up company in California that hopes to save the earth from global warming by sowing the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide. This, it is hoped, will keep rising temperatures within manageable levels. Through such geoengineering, the company believes, the world will be saved. Skeptics, however, warn that sowing the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide might actually make things worse, as in, it might create unpredictable weather patterns, damage the ozone layer, and/or toxify the very air we breathe.[2]
The third article was about how we mine lithium to fuel batteries for electric vehicles. I’ve been a fan of EVs for years and even hope to buy one someday. But while EVs offer better environmental trade-offs than traditional vehicles, the mining operations that support their existence still leaves a serious ecological footprint. To obtain enough lithium to power our vehicles we will need to destroy entire ecosystems the world over.
By the time I finished the third article, I was depressed. All three articles suggest that the very technologies we hope will solve our current problems, will actually create other, and perhaps bigger ones. And yet, we humans in our pride keep believing that our tech is going to save us.
And that got me to thinking about the Tower of Babel.
The story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is one of those weird Bible stories hardly anyone takes seriously. Commonly interpreted to be a story about the origin of the languages spoken throughout the world, it is, so interpreted, unbelievable. Any third rate linguist can explain how languages evolve over time. The notion that one day everyone started speaking different ones is patently absurd. But here’s the thing: the story of Babel isn’t a story about the real time origin of language. It is a narrative designed to teach a lesson about human pride and the folly of pursuing salvation through technology.
The story begins with the peoples of the world speaking a common language. Moreover, it seems that a lot of them had gathered in one place (Shinar) as one people. At some point, someone, or perhaps a group of someones, made a major technological advance: they learned to make bricks and mortar. That might not sound like a major advance to you, but in those days, it was more revolutionary than a lithium battery. Over time, as people learned to use them, building techniques improved (i.e., they made more technological advances) to the point that people could make large structures. City walls. Buttresses. Towers. And that’s when things went south.
Filled with pride over their technological achievements, the people decided they could achieve anything. Heck, they could even reach the heavens if they put their minds to it. They became so proud that they began to believe they could save themselves with their technology. No need for God anymore, they could build a huge tower, a symbol of power, something that would exalt them above other people groups and show potential enemies how strong they are. ‘No one will dare fight us! No one will ever scatter us throughout the earth! We will be united forever!’ And so they set themselves to work, building what they believed would provide their salvation: a tower reaching all the way into the heavens.
God was not impressed. Not with their audacity, not with their thinking they could provide for their own salvation. And so, the story goes, God decided to ‘come down’ and check things out. Not that God really needed a fact-finding mission to see what was happening. His ‘coming down’ was a sarcastic jab at the hubris of a people who thought they could make something so grand it could touch the heavens but was in fact so insignificant that God needed to leave heaven to see it. And so God ‘came down,’ after which he confused the people’s languages and scattered them throughout the earth, the very fate they had sought to save themselves from with their technology. In the end, the technological advancements the people believed would unite them only served to divide them.
And so it goes. Down to this day, we continue to turn to our own ingenuity for salvation. An enemy nation threatens us? Build more advanced weaponry! A lack of knowledge? Behold the internet! Friends and family scattered across the miles? Connect through social media! An energy crisis? Nuclear power is the fuel we need! Global warming? No need to change our lifestyles, technology will save us!
Don’t get me wrong. I am thankful for technology. It’s not all bad. Many advances have made life much better (I’m thinking at the moment of the IV I received at the hospital in December that flooded my body with sweet relief during the pain of a kidney stone). Who knows, maybe even the Microsoft chatbot will turn out to be helpful once they get the kinks ironed out (although I still doubt that one). My point isn’t that all tech is bad, it’s that it is foolish to believe that we can use it to save ourselves. Tech may help sometimes, but there is usually a downside. Advanced weaponry fuels arms races. The internet and social media have divided us at least as much as they have united us. Nuclear power threatens the very existence of humanity. And while future tech may indeed help solve the problem of climate change, it won’t do much in the absence of more fundamental changes to the way we live.
If we want to be saved, we need to look beyond technology. We need to look, dare I say, to God. To the wisdom of his word. The wisdom that teaches that what we really need isn’t AI, but more human connection. The wisdom that teaches that instead of sulfur we should consider simple living. The wisdom that teaches that instead of trusting in chariots (which were, in their day, a remarkable technological advance), we should trust in the Lord (Psalm 20:7). The wisdom that teaches that the best way to overcome our problems is to seek God’s will and way, and not depend upon our own understanding (Proverbs 3:5).
Tech can be a good thing. But when we come to expect too much from it, when we come to the point of believing that it will save us, that through it we can save ourselves, we have descended into the pride of Babel.
And once we do that we shouldn’t be surprised if we wind up enduring a fate even worse than the one we had hoped to avoid.
Under Christ’s Mercy
Brent
[1] See, e.g., The Terminator, The Matrix, I Robot, Avengers: Age of Ultron, 2001: A Space Odyssey, etc.
[2] Although it is never stated, such a sulfur release seems to be the cause of earth’s end in the Netflix movie Midnight Sky.