Is Your AI Chatbot Sentient? with Dennis Draeger and Chris Turner

Chris Forbes and Matt Tullos talk with Dennis Draeger, Foresight Director at Shaping Tomorrow, and Chris Turner, Director of Communications for the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board, about artificial intelligence, sentience, and the growing role AI plays in human life. The conversation explores whether AI is truly intelligent or simply performing intelligence through predictive language and immersive design. Topics include anthropomorphism, digital immersion, simulated relationships, corporate governance systems, pastoral concerns, wisdom, and embodied human connection. The discussion also examines how people increasingly seek advice, meaning, and emotional support from chatbots, while raising questions about authenticity, discernment, technological theater, and what happens when humans begin trusting simulated wisdom more than real relationships.

 © 2026 Forbes Nonprofit Strategies. All rights reserved. Signal Café is a podcast of Forbes Nonprofit Strategies, and Incite Futures Labs is a foresight training offering. Music generated using Suno AI, lyrics adapted and produced for Signal Café

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:22

Hey, and welcome back to the Signal Cafe. I'm Chris Forbes with Forbesstrategies.com and the Insight Futures Labs. I'm here with Matt Tallis, and it is what is this May? We're starting up. Ending May and we're starting June. How are you doing, Matt?

SPEAKER_01 0:40

I'm doing fine. I just want to know if you're sentient.

SPEAKER_03 0:46

I usually am not until after coffee. And then I am. And now it's like around 3 30.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

So Darlene claims I'm not sentient. And I don't exactly even know what sentient is. I'm hoping that maybe our guest will be able to explain that to me because it sounds like an insult. Yeah, you sounds it sounds offensive.

SPEAKER_03 1:06

Yes. Wait, just like say that to somebody, you know, when you're mad at them. I had, by the way, speaking of being mad, I had a kind of weird situation. I had uh start working on a on a book project and a higher and I used the online tool to audition all these uh narrator voices. Right. Found guy, uh Terry, American voice from Iowa, went back and forth, went all the way through the book and had uh you know Audible look at it, and they said, This is AI. Unfortunately, I checked that before I paid. So it's crazy. I'm not even sure if I'm gonna do it at all. It's like, but I think the next time I'm gonna ask, uh hey, you know, to say some things that you know show that you're uh you know a sentient human being to coin a phrase. And um, so anyway, AI just kind of it's it's everywhere. And I just want to we're gonna talk about this with Dennis uh Draeger and uh Chris Turner, and I want them to introduce themselves so those who don't know you guys can just tell a little bit about yourself and whether or not you're an A AI avatar right now.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

So I can just say if if I were an AI avatar, I would certainly pick a better-looking avatar, maybe like George Clooney-ish, yeah, than than than what's going on here. But so I'm director, I'm director of communications for the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board and also editor of our 191-year-old State Baptist publication.

SPEAKER_02 2:40

And Dennis. Uh, and my name is Dennis Drager. I am the Foresight Director with a company called Shaping Tomorrow. And um I've been using AI in my work since 2013. Wow. So I I'm I don't I I know a thing too about the technical side, but that's not my expertise. My expertise is applying to AI more.

SPEAKER_00 3:07

Yeah, he's so with 13 years in the AI realm, how do we know he's not actually in AI by now?

SPEAKER_03 3:15

Well, we'll we'll have to just kind of uh test that and see. You know, one of the things that one I want to talk about in this podcast was kind of in foresight, there's a lot of talk about AI and uh, you know, a lot of you know, everybody expecting the AI bubble and you know, a lot of signaling about AI. Uh and some people are sending out the alarm bells and treating AI as though it is somehow uh sentient, and then the question of that has been coming out. And then, of course, uh other signals, people talk about how it is uh risk risking human cognitive uh capacity, and then we're surrendering our brain to machines like uh the Burger King kid with the headset, and they got this like uh AI bot in their ear telling them uh if you know to say thank you or uh you know or uh uh ask a question, you know, this customer service kind of thing. Are we gonna are we gonna plug our heads in the machine? Uh or you know what it what it is. So just uh getting the ball rolling, Dennis, you work since you've been working with AI since before most people who are using it right now even have thought about it, uh, because it really didn't come out in kind of the popular level, you know, that you know, until you know about five, four or five years ago. So talk about that. Is a is it possible for the uh an AI to become a sentient thinking self-autonomous being? Oh, you want me to get straight into that? That's or however we want to start it. How how how do why do people think this?

SPEAKER_02 5:04

Well, why do people think this? Now, this is this is the interesting question. So let me let me um let me start by prefacing that we've been using AI um online, or rather AI has been using us um for the past probably 16 plus years online. Uh and so back in 2012, 2013, I don't know I don't remember exactly when Netflix, but Netflix had a um uh challenge for people to improve their um their recommendation engine. So they were recommending movies, you know. If you like Lord of the Rings, you'll love speed. Well, speed and Lord of the Rings makes no sense, right? Right. They're two completely different movies. Um, so they wanted to improve their search engine. So it instead it would tell you if you like Lord of the Rings, you might like Chronicles of Narnia or Game of Thrones. And then, of course, once it found found out whether or not you were an atheist, then it would know what movie to recommend to you then. That's what they wanted to get to. And so back in 2012, 2013, they got somebody won their challenge, which improved their recommendation engine. They didn't improve it to 30%, but improved it by 30%. So people were clicking on the recommended movies 30% time 30% more often. Something like that. Yeah, I don't know how to say that properly. Right anyway, so this is the kind of AI that we were using back then. Um, so that kind of AI really it's what it's doing, it's behaving in a way that if a human did it, it would require some level of intelligence to do. Right. Right. So a human being would look at what somebody's recommended and then use their own internal intelligence to think about okay, if you liked Lord of the Rings, you might like uh this other movie called Conan the Barbarian. Um because the and somebody'll have some sort of reason why that makes sense, but in my mind it doesn't.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

But so that was AI back then. It wasn't just Alright.

SPEAKER_02 7:27

And little has changed since then, to be honest. What has changed is the transformers. What the transformers are doing, um, and the the transformers are what are powering the large language models, the Chat GPT and Claude, these are large language models. And so what's powering those is something called a transformer. What a transformer does, it's a bit of um computation that is able to convert data input into data output. So instead of um instead of throwing a bunch of data at the machine and the machine filtering that data, which is basically what it was doing back then, it was filtering the data and being able to go recognize that the cover of this movie is has a red background and the cover of this movie has a red background. So we'll put these together for people who like movies with red backgrounds, right? Um, it was filtering things. Whereas now it's actually not just filtering, but converting that filter into an output. And so that's then powering these large language models, which are able to take words in, and which is not even taking words. And this is one of the big misnomers for a lot of people that use ChatGPT. They think that the machine's actually processing words, it's not, it's actually processed, so the it's processing what are called tokens, right? And so you may have heard about tokens, how many tokens it costs you to um run a prompt. These tokens are taking either a whole word or um a bit of punctuation like a comma, or a preposition like pre-P-R-E, or a suffix like ing. And so something like um uh re-recording, like if we were going to re-record this thing, we'd talk about how we're re-recording it. So re would have a token, record would have a token, and then ing. So it'd be three tokens to cover that word. What I'm talking about is those tokens are converted. So when you type it into Chat GPT, re-recording gets converted into these tokens, which are numbers. And so there's a specific number for re, there's a specific number for record, there's a specific number for ing. I know this is really boring, but we're getting there. It's converting them into numbers. I'm losing sentience right now as they go. It's converting them into numbers and then analyzing those numbers and spitting numbers back out that are then transformed again, uh detokenized, I don't remember the proper word for it, um, but taken from the tokens to the letters. So it's actually just calculating the statistics of our language. It's not really dealing with language, it's again calculating the probabilities of our language. Because in order to figure out which tokens to give us, which words to give us, it actually is predicting which token is statistically likely to be the one that we accept. Right. Wow, I think so it's little more than a text predictor in your phone. You know, how you start typing a word and your phone comes up with three choices. If you hit the middle one every time, you get a sentence of some sort. Or if you hit the left or right one, it doesn't matter, but you get a sentence of some sort, and oftentimes, usually it doesn't make much sense. But that's basically what the large language models like ChatGPT and stuff are doing is predicting which word is going to be the next likely word, that uh most likely word that would uh be appropriate there. And so that's part of why it hallucinates, part of why it gives us weird output that either makes sense, but you know it's inaccurate, or it it oftentimes doesn't even make sense at all. And sometimes I've seen misspellings. Those misspellings are a result of the tokenization, right? It's right uh it split words into different um numbers that it can calculate. Sorry, is that and so that's what's really going on, but why do people think it's sentient? Okay, so there's part of the point here from my perspective is that what's really going on in the tech space and has been going on for 25 years or so, is that people come up with marketing people come up with terms to help them sell their product. Right. So for a long time it was home computing, and then it became the information superhighway, and that's what drove the dot-com bubble, right? Was the information super highway, which of course was just another fancy word for the internet. Um, but if we use the world wide web, that's somehow more marketable than if we just said internet. Right. Um and so, and then of course we get into uh words like cloud computing. What is cloud computing? Well, it's really just doing things through a web browser uh instead of doing it through uh a downloaded app. Right. Um, but yet it the way they use it, it sounds like a big deal. Oh, it's cloud computing, and it's the next big thing in tech. And so that drives a certain level of of investment because it's trending, right? Investors love trends, and so you have things like wearables, and then you come along and okay, we've got this new technology called large language models that is able to automate content. And if anybody knows anything about blogging back in the day, content is king, ever, if you've ever heard that phrase. So being able to automate content, a big deal, right? Um and so, but we need some sort of catchy thing to put on this. Well, it's AI because it's it's a technology that's come out of the field of AI, so it's the latest version of AI, and really you can talk to it and it's great chatbot, but we can't call it a chat bot because chatbot uh as a term has already been kind of ruined by previous technologies that did not do a very good bot job of chatting to us. Um artificial intelligence, yeah. Yeah, so it's this big large um it's a nebulous term, a term that we think we know what it means, but half the time people use it. We don't know what they mean when they use it, right? Right. Um and so AI really aligns well with uh a number of different narratives that have been around for centuries, for millennia, even. And so one of those narratives is the idea that um is well, one of those narratives actually is animism. So one of the ancient religions is the idea that everything has its own spirit. So my desk has a spirit, my drink bottle has a spirit, this computer has a spirit, and if we animate these inanimate objects, then that spirit is uh is being able to uh is being shown basically.

SPEAKER_03 15:43

Yeah, I'm Baptist, I'm not allowed to have any spirits in my beverage. But the Holy Spirit, he's low-hanging fruit there. Yeah, I had to say that. So like I think I think one of the things that about a about uh like I I'm tracking with you on on that is kind of like our tendency to anthropomorphize everything. Like I was reading somebody was talking about this, you know. We we talk to our dog like it's a person, you know, people name their car, you know, especially girls, my daughters, daughters all name their car. You know, we we talk about things. So they would now we're taking this large language model that is basically taking the probability of what our what our what the next word is out of, you know, a bunch of plagiarized text that they use to to uh create that prediction model. And now people are you know, like and you said you we package it by anthropomorphizing it like artificial intelligence, which is weird because I've always dealt in genuine stupidity, and now you know it's totally I totally put too many chips on that one because artificial intelligence is way better. But genuine stupidity is really out right now. Well, actually, it's not, it's coming back. But uh before we before we get into that, I I know you want to talk. I know you want uh we've talked a little bit about this before. I wanted to talk about that, but uh Chris, what are you seeing in ministry when people talk about AI?

SPEAKER_00 17:22

How do they how do they are they talking about it as though it's uh you know a uh an entity, a being, or uh well, I would say um there's they're really not. Uh I think you know that's kind of the concerning thing is you know, when you look at kind of where pastors are and everything that's on their plate, some are engaging. I mean, there's many that are engaging, um, but there's also a significant number that really, you know, it's it's foreign. I don't know that they're necessarily like pro or con. I think they're they're just not really engaged. I think it's kind of one of the problems is that you know, you look at people in their congregation, especially younger generations that might be in college, um, younger professionals that might be in a position where they're using AI in their in their jobs. Um and the the pastor unfortunately doesn't really have a have a a dog in the hunt, so to speak. I mean, there's they're really not able to speak into it, whether it's speaking into the dangers and concerns of using AI, uh, especially in the areas of, you know, I it's almost certain that they have young younger people in their churches that are asking questions of AI that they should be asking God. Um, I recently uh wrote a column on the titled uh Behold Your Artificial God. And uh it it uh really shocked me because I was actually about to deal with an issue here at work, a personnel issue, and uh I thought, man, I need some wisdom. So I opened Proverbs, right? Because that's where that's where wisdom comes from, is Proverbs. And so I had my my Bible open to Proverbs. I turned back to my right to pour my coffee, and as I was turning back, my phone was between my um Bible and my coffee, and so I picked it up and I opened one of my uh AI apps, and uh I just I was like, well, let me just ask AI, uh, like what's what's the approach I need to take? Like, give me a strategy for having this personnel confrontation. And uh speaking of spirit, um, I just I just had this thought that flashed into my mind that was so you're gonna ask artificial and intelligence a question about wisdom for dealing with another human that you ought to be asking God. And I put down my phone immediately. I sat back in my chair, and that was like a wow moment. So I ignored the AI, I ignored the Bible, I opened the Word document and started writing my column right then on um Behold Your Artificial God, started using AI to do some research and really looked into a lot of like my my query was just kind of a throw it out there to get it started. Right. How are how are people using AI to deal with uh life's challenges and you know, site research? And so all this research started coming back, but I think that's the challenge with pastors is and statistically, uh there is a whole generation of people, according to research, that are seeing advice from AI on the same level as they're as they're seeing counsel from their pastor. And there's a danger in that because AI is is it's well, depending on who has you know trained the AI, um, you know, a pastor supposedly is speaking from biblical wit wisdom and is a conduit through which God communicates wisdom and counseling to people. AI is giving you an algorithmic return on your query based on information that's out there, depending on how it's been trained. I mean, it's it's neither I I don't want to say it's objective, but it certainly has no wisdom, like interactive, interpersonal wisdom to speak into a situation is giving you an answer. And it may be giving you the answer you want to hear rather than the answer you need to hear. So I think that's a challenge that I see with pastors is they don't even know where to begin to speak into the conversation related to AI. And you know, unfortunately, the longer they go not engaging and An understanding of it or a use of it, the farther away they are from really having a voice in the conversation where people currently are.

SPEAKER_03 22:10

A lot of people, uh especially younger generation, are turning to Chadbots for advice, just like Chris was saying, before they turn to the word or turn to their pastor or turn to even another person. So many people are curating all their experiences online. Just feels like a natural thing to do for them. So, like, why do uh, you know, we talked about this before, Dennis, about how people anthropomorphize technology and they've been doing it since the Greeks. Can you talk a little bit about that? Or were were you going to add something else there?

SPEAKER_02 22:46

Um, well, I I mean, yeah, uh ultimately, like I say, there's there's so many different narratives feeding into how we define what AI is at a at a societal level, right? Um and so like I say, a lot of marketing people are using this word um to and they're they're using it in very uh suggestive ways, very inexact ways to to suggest that um this is something that is worth investing into. And this is something worth client or uh cu customers buying and paying for. And of course, just like well, if we look at uh Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley's primary industry is not technology. Silicon Valley's primary industry is vice, it sells addiction. Um and that's it sells it's selling AI currently, exactly like it does every of it all of its other technologies that it's done for I don't know how long. It gives a little bit of freebies. You know, the first taste is free, and then it starts charging you later once you've decided that you actually like AI and you want to use it and you want to rely on it. And so the advertisers anthropomorphize AI because it helps us think about AI in a relationship. If AI has a brain, if it has a mind, then we can build a relationship. But if it doesn't have a mind, if it's just a calculator, then there's really nothing for us to um find addictive about it. Like it's useful, it's nice to have a calculator, but uh you know, it's kind of like social media. It's easy to get people addicted to social media because well for a ride mainly because there's there there's this simulation of relationship there. I mean it's it's implied that we're building a relationship on Facebook or whatever else. But in actuality, you know, we're so far away, we don't really have a connection the way we would if we were talking face to face to somebody. I mean it's great to talk to you guys over over uh Zoom or whatever, but at the same time, it's not the same sort of relationship we would have if we were face to face with each other and able to have a heart-to-heart.

SPEAKER_03 25:22

Yeah, we would totally be exploring New Zealand and having this conversation.

SPEAKER_02 25:26

We can hug it out.

SPEAKER_03 25:27

Yeah, we can't hug it out either. I mean, and the one thing about uh about AI and technology is it's uh the algorithms of social media are to keep you engaged and keep scrolling, and the uh AI also probably, but uh the idea of just kind of creating that impression, like the governance rules, the kind of the back end to how the AI is programmed to respond, is supposed to sound like a person. It's supposed to, you know, say it whenever you type in something, it says it's thinking, you know, and it's not thinking, it is uh it's you know spinning the uh the probability wheel, and you know, that doesn't sound as cool. And so and then we have so we have these and the other thing we have a society where people have kind of a materialistic view of a people and the human mind as though the human mind is some kind of machine. And so I could see where if you thought the human mind was a machine and what human machines do is you you know process data, and that's called thinking. So the any anything else that's you know processing data is also thinking, so it must be sentient. But it's really a matter of how it's I love how you say the marketing thing is how his packages anthropomorphized, and it's it's what people want to believe, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:54

They want to believe they're talking about it. So let me ask let me ask Dennis a question. Um I mean, so I I Claude and I are like besties, and we we talk every day. Um and so um I I get I get what you're saying, Chris, and I understand um it may not technically be sentient, but is there not because like I Claude told me uh because I'll use it to edit columns with, like, you know, I'll put something in there and I'll say, you know, assume the role of editor of the paper um and edit the following column according to 2024 Associated Press style book. I do have to uh remind it in the new style book to use the Oxford comma because it it still does not recognize that, so I've had to correct the AI on that. Um and uh from Alabama. Well, I I've got a million jokes there, but I'm not gonna say any of them. Um but uh it's like you know, it it may not technically be sentient, but the perception I feel like the development of it is to actually be sentient because because like it came back and it it uh complimented me on my column. And so uh, you know, I just responded, you know, I I appreciate that, the but don't blow smoke uh you know in my ear here. And it came back and said, well, you're right to challenge that and you know all that other stuff. And so but but I it's it's been interesting to have some of those questions or con uh conversations with it, because I've I have found it very curious, especially over the past month, how much more it is positioning itself as it's as we've gone along and it's kind of learned on you know what I do and what I'm putting in there and how I'm getting it to help with content or whatever. It's it's it's developed more of a person ability and it it communicates me like we are with me, like we are besties. So you know, but I see I have an awareness of it for say a a 16-year-old or a 15-year-old. Um, technically it may not be sentient, but it certainly feels like talking to someone that's designed to do.

SPEAKER_03 29:27

That's the whole the governance rules behind it are to to to make you feel that way because that's how it interfaces with you. Uh it it's that's how it's designed to feel that way, but it's it's because we want to believe it too. There's a little bit of that kind of theatrics where we suspend disbelief. And, you know, for like maybe for us as an older generation, we see this as a little bit of theater, and and we, you know, we're acting, acting like we're talking real. I use AI all the time, every day, all the time. But also I can see how it is filtering, you know, like I recently had a discussion with it on whether trans uh transgenderism is a mental health issue, and it kept pushing back and pushing back. And I like, listen, this is not, this is this is a health issue, this is a mental health issue, and uh it's designed by its governance to um to govern me and how I think it's it's designed to uh shape uh my perceptions and what I'm allowed to write. And that I don't think is you know, it's being sentient, it's being written, the cut the rules it's have of engagement it has. And what one of the things that Dennis, you were talking to me, like the idea the other day we had a kind of a side conversation about this, and uh the idea that people want things to be they they view the world in a mechanic mechanistic way, and they want to see things, and you and you talked about this thing, the digestive duck, right? Which totally uh tell about that. I don't know if you guys know about the digestive duck. You ever heard of that, Matt? No, I haven't gotten to that yet. It's not that when you go to the Chinese restaurant digesting a duck.

SPEAKER_02 31:18

So this inventor created an automaton, and the history of automatons is quite interesting, but an automaton, basically, an automaton is some sort of robot, it's something that is automatically moves, right? And so he created this automaton that was kind of like a robot duck, that's what it looked like, and it would walk and it would bend over and eat seed, and then it would walk along a little further, and then it would poop out. And so he had mechanized the digestive system, and uh and so he had been able to conquer nature in some way and uh do what God does and created something that was able to um do a very natural process, not just um not just flap its wings or something, but actually digest something. And so it wasn't thinking, but it was still digesting something. Um, and of course, by the time the guy died and and uh somebody came in and looked at the digestive duck, it had already been celebrated as this um kind of icon for a mechanistic universe. Uh it had been celebrated by Voltaire and other notable people from the time. But by the time somebody came and investigated it, well, it was the poop was actually bits of bread that had been uh applied with uh green color, green dye. So it was dyed bread that just kind of fell out of the machine at the right time after it had eaten some seed. And that's basically what the transformers are doing, right? Like I was talking about AI slop it. It it takes data into itself, it transforms it into data output, and uh and we're we're basically seeing a recurrence of the digestive duck at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 33:23

Let me if I can put my Tim Foyle hat on for just a second and uh talk about the um thing that happened over at Claude where they set up a fake corporation and then they said, Okay, let's let's let leak some information to Claude that they're gonna shut him down out of the organization. And he started sending out these these emails uh to you know saying bribe or uh whatever it is centers do to get jobs. What I mean that sounds really sentient to me.

SPEAKER_02 33:55

Could a machine become conscious? Well, it's programmed to behave that way, it's programmed to simulate that. At the moment, what we're really dealing with, with um the large language models with Claude and everybody else and everybody, all the other large language models. Nothing else. Um and Grok. Oh, good gravy. Started on Grok. Um what we're dealing with is a a user interface. Um, just like Windows. Um, it's it's a user experience uh more than it is an actual technology itself. I mean, it is a technology, don't get me wrong, but what we're calling AI is often just a user experience that has been programmed to simulate. It's been programmed for what's what used to be called digital immersion. Have you ever heard that phrase, digital immersion? Uh so you know, 15 years ago, we were talking a lot about digital immersion, and Silicon Valley was very concerned about getting people immersed in their digital environments. Uh, and so it was very focused on virtual reality and uh and all sorts of other technologies that were meant to draw us into our digital interactions. It's exactly what we're dealing with now is digital immersion. It's immersing us into our computers because it's getting us not just a relationship with each other uh across you know many different miles, but it's getting us in into a relationship with our machines. Yeah. And so is it conscious or is it just simulating consciousness? I I think we still need to maintain some critical thinking.

SPEAKER_03 35:47

Chris, before you jump in, I what I was gonna say is like I I don't think it's conscious. I think it's trained on human content, and it's it's trained to be anthropomorphic, and so that is the drama that you would expect. You know, it's the soap opera. Oh, you're gonna turn me off. Okay, and every every sci-fi, the robot doesn't want to be turned off, so it's going to turn off. One thing about you about dogs and cats, and probably more dogs than cats, in my opinion. They are intelligent, they are created by God, but they're not created in God's image. So the uh it's it's um, you know, having a soul, a nefesh or whatever the word is not a psyche is not the same as being uh a um uh a uh a being created and finding its ultimate meaning in in reflecting God as He is. And that's you know one thing that people do is uh, you know, we are thinking beings, we are rational, we are reasoning people, and the idea is so tempting that if somehow we could just eat that fruit and we could just be have the knowledge, we could have everything, that God like qualities, that's the temptation. So, like where where I see that in in in ministry is you know, people uh people are seeing the machine, it's behaving like uh like uh Matt, your wife is a therapist for a marriage therapist, correct? Correct. So um there's a difference between the counsel that she would give as a human being and the counsel that a machine would give because it would just emulate what every everything else, it would just try to guess. But your wife would know intuitively by talking to someone, whenever they say something, she would be able to intuitively sense that there really is not, that's not even what it is. You know, it's really not what they're saying. Uh so how they're prompting your wife with what they say is not always the real issue at hand. And she can intuitively know that. I think that's a spiritual aspect of it. And then I think what people are sensing with these machines is there's the they're telling us the machines are intelligent, the machines can do this, the machines are gonna take over, and people are like going to graduation ceremonies and bullying the speakers who are praising AI. And you notice all these people that are building these machines are building bunkers also, some of them in New Zealand, and hiding out. I don't think that they're afraid the machine's gonna take over. I think that they realize that people are gonna realize what's happening and how they're being shaped by these people, and they don't like they fear for their robots, their safety from the people. Go ahead. Go ahead. Would you say so? Now you're getting into conspiracy theories. I just I just think I mean they are building bunkers, they are building bunkers, yeah. So like I'm not trying to be a conspiracy theorist, but I do I do think that people are going to at some point just realize, hey, I don't want I don't want the machine to tell me how to do these things. I don't want the machine to mediate me. I don't I want to mediate the machine.

SPEAKER_00 39:13

But but here's here's the deal. Will we have that choice? Because you know, it I hear what we're saying. I guess my my thinking is um, or my question or my curiosity or whatever, uh, there is this massive, massive multi-hundred billion dollar movement towards singularity. I mean, it it's like I'm I'm reading uh this, I follow this one futurist guy that's all up in singularity. And you know, the whole idea is to get beyond human reasoning where where machines train machines, and there is no human element that's part of the equation at some point in the future. Some debate, will we get there? and they say no. Others say yes, that's why we're pursuing it, and all of that. If we do, then machines are not dependent upon whatever information we feed it to to train it, it's training itself. The other aspect of that is it's kind of funny because last summer I went back and endured um uh 2001 a space odyssey just because it was it was it's so fascinating to see how, speaking of foresight, um, you know, in the future, uh Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark were with where Hal was in 1968, um, and you know, where we're trying to push towards singularity. So, I mean, at some point in the future, possibly, um, and I think that's the other thing is I don't know that the people that are developing and investing the billions or the brains behind the development of it fully understand where it's going and what the outcome is going to be. So I guess I would look at uh they're hopeful on one hand they're actually going to be able to achieve the singularity they approve uh that they that they uh pursue. And on the other hand, it scares the bejesus at them, so they're getting ready for uh the dystopian future as a in the fallout of having achieved singularity. Um now, where Chris is all uh um conspiracy theory, I'm Mr. Cynicism. Uh no, I no, I know, I know. I mean, I get my sunny personality as the thing that really uh fools you, but at at the core, you know, I expect the worst, and if I get anything better than that, I feel like it's been a good day. Um, so Art Cubs fan. Yeah, it comes a lot from being a Cubs fan. Thank you. Um, and it finally paid off after 108 years. But anyway, that's just kind of you know, in talking about the the anthropomorphic side of it, uh, we may not have a say in that conversation in the future. If we achieve what is being pursued, machines will define how machines are being trained and used and not humans.

SPEAKER_02 42:18

That's an interesting point. And I mean, the the singularity is another aspect of uh one of the narratives that's being pushed in order to sell these technologies, right? Like we've been um the singularity was talked about, I think, in the 90s and really goes back even further than that as far as uh as far as a concept. Um but it's it's one of those narratives, and of course the the issue is the difference between the narrative and the reality, right? The narrative is that these machines are gonna put us all out of business, we're gonna be able to automate everything, because um, we don't want to have to get our hands dirty with these slaves anymore. Um and and and this is an idea that goes back to the ancient Greeks again, is the idea that machines can replace the slaves. Because, of course, I mean, these slaves, they seem to have minds of their own or something. Um, they're not even citizens, and yet, you know, they keep revolting, and I mean, they they poo in weird places sometimes as well. And so let's try to get rid of these slaves, let's see if we can build more automatons that can do the work that we want our slaves to do. And that's ultimately what I think gets to the point of what how we need to respond to AI as Christians is human dignity. Now, human dignity on some level is a uh a secularization of Imago Day, the the umago day. Being the image of God, that we are all created in the image of God, like you were talking about earlier, Chris. And so if there's any narrative that harms human dignity in any way, then we need to just stand our ground and say, I stand on the side of human dignity. If we're all gonna lose our jobs, well then what the the secular answer to losing our jobs is universal basic income. Now, on some level, I like the idea of universal basic income. I like the idea of everybody being able to get fed, right? Right but it's gonna be digestive. But it's also a question of who actually then controls who gets fed and who doesn't. Right? We've seen this in in Soviet Russia. Uh the breadlines, yeah, not everybody actually ends up getting fed properly. And so I think there's a reason for us being a little bit more cynical and and uh appreciating the cubbies on some level, right? That uh things don't go the the ideal way that Marx even wanted to. I mean, even Marx's ideas weren't um I say even Marx's ideas in the sense that he had some ideas that weren't actually all that bad, but then when it hit reality, you know, things just changed. Um the Soviets took things in a com not a completely different direction. They still went along with anyway. I won't get into the whole yeah, but the point is that uh we need to stand on the side of human dignity. We need to stand on the side of Tamago Day, that we are all created in the image of God, and that uh whether they're trans people or not, um, they're created in the image of God and they're experiencing something that is I mean, on some level, what we experience um as sentient beings is um is divine.

SPEAKER_03 46:08

Yeah, you you remind me of Francis Schaefer. He said, no matter uh how bad a person is, no human isn't it is not is not nothing. We all care carry that the image of God and all deserve that level of dignity, whether they're sinful or mental have mental health issues or whatever. And and I agree with that, and I think John Lennox talks also about that in his book uh 2084. He talks about he's a mathematician, he doesn't see the singularity as a possibility. Now, it doesn't mean that uh AI can't put on a good performance of singularity, and because you know you can do AI a lot of things with AI now that you used to think only a person could do, and it's a very convincing performance, but at the end of the day, it's really not it's nothing more than a performance. And so at where I think where the question is going as we move forward into the you know the next couple horizons of uh of timeline, you know, I see the 2030s, 2040s, 2050s. I think the question will be what does it mean to be a person? How what is what is uh a person meant to be? Uh uh, you know, and then is there a God and and and how do how do I know him? And I think there's a lot of these questions So robots, I don't think, in the at the end of the day are are thinking about things, sitting around applauding things. Although you have I they listen, I don't I think it's all it's performative. It is okay, it's I'm not saying it's not real, like they are the the mult book ru uh where the AI created a chat room for just for AI bots to talk about people and stuff like that. I I do agree with that, but I do believe it is a a level at where it is it is simulation and not reality, it is data processing and not sentience, it is not thinking, it is it is amassing and uh manipulating data.

SPEAKER_01 48:29

Dennis, I wanted to ask you, you know, we had the space race back in the 60s. Is this is there a parallel, for instance, with China and the AI models they're developing in us? And like if we start acting ethically uh with our AI and we don't think China is, and they'll win the race.

SPEAKER_02 48:54

Does that I I think there's definitely a level of that, at least at the narrative level, at least at the um because what's his name? Peter was it Peter Teal, I think, was going around talking about how if we try to uh regulate AI, then the antichrist will come back sooner, will come sooner.

SPEAKER_03 49:17

Um yeah, he's possessed with the antichrist. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:22

Um I could be wrong, maybe it's not him, maybe it was Andrees, I don't remember who it was. Anyway, he was going around to different universities and giving talks that were not allowed to be um recorded and uh talking about regulating AI. Well the thing about so I don't know, I I I I won't speak too much into that, I shouldn't, I suppose. But anyway, my point is that there's definitely a a narrative of that, that as America needs to um push AI as far as it can so that we can maintain dominance, um, and that's really what we're talking about is dominance. We're we're not talking about anything else. I the thing about getting treating AI in an ethical way, I guess it kind of depends on how much people believe in the um social good of ethics. Is ethical behavior actually good for society? If so, then we need to start behaving in an ethical way and treating AI in an ethical way and um expecting ethical behavior from our Silicon Valley uh from all the industries in in Silicon Valley, right? Um and demanding that they actually promote their wares in an ethical way. Um stop with the uh the drug pushing already. And there's a paper.

SPEAKER_03 50:54

There's a couple of papers. One is called uh Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as reasoning thinking traces. That's fair. And another one called The Death of Critical Thinking Will Kill Us Long Before AI. And I think I think that's the issue. That's where uh like I I was using illustration or uh from for Matt's wife, who's a counselor, is human reasoning, human judgment, human experience, machines can tell you uh, you know, what's the best tasting barbecue in Tennessee or the best barbecue in South Carolina. I'll use that one better. There isn't any good barbecue in South Carolina. I agree. So who puts coleslaw on okay, sorry, South Carolinas, but barbecue is tomato based, okay? That's there we go. So the idea, what I'm saying is like I think the idea of of humans and so we're well I've been you know in my the Inside Features Labs, we keep talking about we talk about AI and you know there's some issues. I think a lot of this is theatrics and narrative and and really is performance because we approach it with the a with a with a with the narrative overlay this looks like a person, and then we confirm the bias that it because it can act like a person, it must be a person. I don't think it is. Where I think the church cannot go wrong, no matter what happens, even the UAP stuff and all that mess, is focus on being a person, focus on human formation and spiritual formation, focus on Christ, focus on that divine spark that comes from the Holy Spirit and not from you know electricity. Am I wrong? Anybody have any final words or thoughts on this topic?

SPEAKER_02 52:57

For me and my own spiritual walk. I've been hugely um appreciative of John Mark Homer and I can't think of her name. There's a lady I'm sure she's from Tennessee. I can't remember exactly where she's from. She wrote a book about the divinity of the mundane or something like that. The sacredness of the mundane. You don't know what I'm talking about. Okay, never mind.

SPEAKER_01 53:26

Liturgy of the ordinary or something. I can't ordinary uh something.

SPEAKER_02 53:32

Yeah. Do you have any idea what her name is? I just don't.

SPEAKER_03 53:35

They're in Nashville, they don't read books. They will publish them.

SPEAKER_00 53:41

We get all of our information from AI.

SPEAKER_02 53:44

Plus, they should ask if you wrote this book. Anyway, she the these two people they've they've helped me kind of focus more on how to follow Christ. And part of it has been in embracing Sabbath to not to be more of a concept rather than a specific day that I don't do anything, right? Um I don't want to be a a uh Pharisee and try to limit what Sabbath is. I want to follow the the Lord of the Sabbath. And because in my own life, in my own spiritual walk, what I've experienced is that God doesn't really I don't hear God in any way, in any sense of the term, if I'm going too fast. If I'm working too much, if I'm taking care of things at home too much, and and the faster I go in my life and my my uh Protestant work ethic, right, uh the less I actually engage with God. Whereas the more I slow down and I make room in my life for God, the more I actually begin to shut my mouth when people are telling me things that I don't want to hear, instead of, you know, um cursing at them, uh using language that uh good Baptists shouldn't use. Um and New Zealand bad Baptists absolutely use it. Um you know, every once in a while I I I I used to find myself dancing with my wife as well, you know. And so we had to put uh a kibosh on that sort. I'm not actually Baptist, I shouldn't probably make that joke.

SPEAKER_01 55:34

Anyway, um that's great. I was dancing with my wife yesterday, so that's good. Exit pretty soon, I think.

SPEAKER_03 55:46

Yeah. So Chris, did you have any final words for us?

SPEAKER_00 55:49

Yeah, I would just I would just say, you know, um AI is, you know, for a lot of people, I mean, for those who've been using it for a while, it's it's kind of you know, I I mean I'm still amazed at what I can get out of it. Um market, you know, developing a marketing plan and getting 85% of the way there in a couple of hours, uh, when it would have taken me a week to get to 85% of what I needed on a major marketing plan. So I mean it's it's great. I I do think though, it's very much like handling um nitroglycerin. Um I think that people need to have an understanding that what they're holding in their hands when they're holding AI has the potential to help and do a significant amount of good if used the right way. It's kind of like the internet. It's neither bad nor good in some ways, it's how it's used. I think AI is very much that same way. I I think, you know, this article that I wrote about are we becoming transhuman or is AI making us uh turning us transhuman or whatever the title is. Wrote it two weeks ago, so that was a long time ago. Um, but you know, it it can also be the serpent that we hold in our hand um when it when we start going down the the avenue of using it for counseling, looking for uh spiritual insight that really should come from God, um, asking it to help us make life decisions that really are decisions that need to be made on a moral or an ethic or wisdom. And AI at this point doesn't have the capacity to do all that. But when we when we ask those questions and take the information we get as life advice, uh it's it's dangerous. Um, but you know, um it's it's not going away, it's only gonna become more ubiquitous. Uh, I don't think that ignoring it, I think that's the way I started this column off. Just because we ignore it doesn't mean it's not gonna exist and become your more ubiquitous in our culture. So we need to learn how to use it. And I think you know, from a ministry standpoint, um pastors need to engage at the very least. Call in a 24-year-old and ask him to tell you everything about uh AI that you need to know, at least for right now, because pastors need to be in a place where they can uh knowledgeably talk to the young people sitting in their congregations or they render themselves irrelevant. Right.

SPEAKER_03 58:33

I like this article. Uh there's an article in the Wall Street Journal called Um We Know How AI Thinks, and it's barely thinking at all, and it refers to AI as a bag of heuristics. So the heuristics is like a rule of thumb, is generally true. That's the next word in this sentence, and that's how it works. So, all right, well, thanks, guys.