By Stephen Driscoll

I can’t say that I am an early adopter of new technologies, or that I’ve ever been. I would still prefer to be using Windows 97. I avoided mobile phones, then smartphones, till almost everyone had one. When I was a kid, we didn’t get a microwave or colour TV until well into the 1980s.

And that goes for AI: true to form I haven’t given it a lot of thought up till now. I admit it. I am a bit scared. It sounds frankly terrifying. I am skeptical about the prognostications of the tech enthusiasts about the nirvana that is just over the horizon. But I am also nervous at the thought of having to change the way I think and work all over again; and, as a person definitely past 50, of being left behind in the way my parents’ generation have been.

Stephen Driscoll’s book Made in Our Image doesn’t give me any false hope here. In this fresh and very well-researched book, Driscoll pretty much says that AI is every bit as amazing and dangerous as we imagine – and possibly even more so. It’s difficult to even conceive of what may come via the medium of AI and how our lives might change because of it. If we are to look at the past, technology has irrevocably changed the human experience again and again. There is no doubt that AI will do the same in our time.

And that’s where Driscoll leads us in some incisive theological reflection. The threat/possibility posed by AI is that we will have to relearn what it is to be human. The Bible compares us to the angels and to the animals, but now we will have to distinguish ourselves from the machines. What is it to have consciousness? What is a person? And who is it that we turn out to be? AI is a result of our great giftedness as creatures. We are exceptional. And yet it bears the imprint of its creators, too. There is no question that AI will provide us with greater opportunities to do evil to one another. Christians should remain canaries in the coal mine when it comes to the technological utopianism of our times.

The real achievement of Driscoll’s book is its description of hope. He is not naïve or ill-informed about AI. He does not dismiss its claims or fall under its sway. But he shows us how we might keep our nerve through the gospel, even as things change radically – as no doubt they will.

As I said already, Made in Our Image is wonderfully researched. What makes it a delight to read is that Driscoll’s breadth of reading is so evident. He is deep in the traditions of thought and in the contemporary scene. He writes with a good deal of wit. Even though I am not a particular technophile, his explanations of AI were zippy – in the way that Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson made me interested in cars because he was passionate and also clear.

It is rare to have a piece of popular-level theology address something as pressing and complex as AI and do it without insulting the intelligence of the reader. In this engaging book, Driscoll manages this and more.

Michael P Jensen