I watched this TED Talk expecting to hear what I already knew to be true, that AI is  making more problems than it is solving. We may not see it yet, but enough people have been sounding the alarm bells over the last few months that it should not come as a shock. Fridges loosing food pales in comparison to the point she makes, namely, that we are losing what makes humanity unique, we are loosing our diversity, our creativity, we are losing the reward of risk. AI is flattening the human experience, optimizing it, and is encouraged to do so by its programming.

The problem is compounded when we realize that what Sandra highlights with regard to ice cream, we are doing to people. We are loosing the ability not just to be unique, but to see the uniqueness of others—and to value it. Or, I should say, we are failing to see people as valuable no matter their uniqueness.

This is happening in all sorts of spaces for a host of different reasons. Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew (which I am stoked to see) has raised all sorts of questions and ire in certain circles. Never mind that the Chronicles are not straight allegory (they are a supposal), never mind that they are imaginary (Jesus isn’t actually Aslan), never mind that Greta is adapting a piece of literature you still have access to (and can read whenever you’d like), what the backlash shows is the inability to see something through the eyes of another.

Or, take another hot button issue from the last week, whether or not to livestream an execution. Some take it as axiomatic that capital punishment is sacrosanct. My own perspective is that what the scriptures allow for the state to do does not necessarily imply that it should be done. That doesn’t matter, though, because what I think and what you think can’t be entertained together anymore. The liminal space has been excised by the manifest space—the only room that exists is the one I see because I cannot see another. Morality of capital punishment aside, we fail to take into account what we will see if we witness the execution, what our kids will see, what the world will see. We will see the enemy have its day—death is always the enemy, the last one to be destroyed. True, the one being executed dealt it, and the state is likely justified in its use of death, but that does not mean that such a deterrent, and the witnessing of it, wont serve to further dehumanize us. When we cheer for the death of another we fail to ask why they made the choice that brought them to the gallows in the first place. We fail to see them as a person and reduce them to their crime.

That is no small point, in light of another school shooting where a sixteen year old determined that the best way to deal with their situation was to take children from the arms of their parents. And the fact that we cannot collective see value in the argument that gun access as part of the problem just betrays the reality that we only see through our perspective and have lost the ability to empathize and sympathize with those who think and act differently. It is easier for me to think of the parents because my kids are the same ages as those who aren’t going to be tucked into bed. I’ve never parented a sixteen year old who felt driven to take that action. But I have been a sixteen year old. I know the pain and hurt that comes with not being seen. That in no way justifies the action, and it won’t bring back the children, but we who are left in the wake of yet another shooting should ask why is it we can’t see another way.

I don’t blame AI for this, nor is it simple enough to say “everyone is a sinner.” This is true, everyone is. And sure, if you take away the gun, they’ll find a knife or a rock. Those arguments just shift the blame, they don’t actually deal with the reality we face. What I do blame AI for is expediting our ability to detach from reality. The problem is not that we have problems, the problem is that we fail to see people and their uniqueness as a gift to be received. The problem is we fail to imagine life through their eyes and so see not just what they’ve done or said, but why. Imagine the discussions we could have about rape and consent if we didn’t just retreat to the well fabricated positions we suppose we should have based on what shows up in our news feed.

I know it sounds pollyanna, that it sounds like I’m just encouraging us to grab our guitars and sing kumbaya or some other song that papers over real difference. But, that’s not what I’m advocating for, that’s not what I’m trying to say at all. I’m saying that the easy thing to do is what we are doing now, the detachment, the flattening, the reductionism of people to positions. That’s easy. I’m asking us to do the hard thing, to see people as they are, not as we’d like them to be. To do what takes time and effort and imagination, what takes sympathy and empathy, what takes love. And while there are those outside of the church who have a valid excuse to optimize their interaction with the world, those inside do not. We are not called to the idealization of people and society, we are called to the individual people and societies we live in. Jesus does not die for the optimal, for the ideal, for the perfect positions and ideas we hold, he dies for the people who pull the trigger and for those whose lives won’t be the same because of it, for those who want to livestream the execution and for those who think executions are part of the problem.

Jesus goes into the water to identify with sinners. That doesn’t mean he ever fails to call sin sin, and I’m not advocating we do that. Truth matters, but not as an abstraction, it matters because people matter. What we need to do is learn to see one another again. That starts not with someone else but with me.

But, it can start with me even if there is no reality where I will be able to sympathize and empathize or consider what is going on inside the person. Nor does it mean that such sympathy and empathy means I am affirming the thing about the person that may indeed be wholly problematic. If the goal is flattening the human experience, if the goal is excising the different, if the goal giving up on people no matter how heinous they are, then there is no need for sympathy or empathy. But, if the goal is something else, if the goal is speak the gospel that Christ died for this person and that one, if the goal is to share in our humanity the value that Christ affirmed still existed when he took on human flesh, died, and rose again for people, then we need to relearn how to exercise those muscles. We don’t need to imagine a different world, but we need the ability to use our imaginations to see from someone else’s perspective. Doing so does not automatically affirm that perspective, but it does help us see that very few things in life are as simplistic as our algorithm’s would have us believe.

Love the one in front of you

store clerk, waitress

delivery man

love all the people that you can

& even those you think you can’t

trans barista

grumpy neighbor

learn people’s names and pronouns

& presume their pain is just as areal

as anything you can feel

& when you pass a cyclist

go by wide and slow

we are all in this together

be gentle as you go.

Love the One in Front of you by David Gate

Loving the person you see with your eyes is not simply affirmation, it means being willing to follow in the footsteps of the one who not only called people out for their sin but paid the price for it too.