Sermon: AI & Our Work
This sermon, by Joanna, is the third in our Back to the Basics series called “Living with Courage and Clarity in the face of AI.”
John 1:1-4,14
Do any of you remember seeing the billboards around San Francisco that said “Stop hiring humans” or “Hire Artisans, Not Humans” or “Artisans Won’t Complain About Work-Life Balance.”
This was an ad campaign by the AI company Artisan, whose CEO, Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, is 24 years old. Earlier this month he apologized for the ads and said they were retiring the slogan, and really the billboards were only meant to be provocative and Artisan is a pro-human company. Their new slogan is “Be More Human.” So whew, glad they got that all sorted out.
Another AI start up in San Francisco, Cognition, whose CEO Scott Wu recently became a billionaire and will turn 30 next month, is known for its extreme work culture. According to the SF Chronicle, its founders offered “buyouts to a handful of employees who were unwilling to let go of work-life balance.”
I share these examples not to single out tech companies, or even to determine which ones are good and which are bad. That is not even possible. We are all saturated in AI technology, whether we work in tech or tech-adjacent jobs or in other sectors.
And there are many ways that AI is a useful tool in our world. It helps me translate English to Spanish. It edits documents and code in helpful ways. It allows scientists to do in-depth research that would not otherwise be possible. It’s used by doctors to aid in diagnoses, drug discovery, and in robot assisted surgery.
Furthermore, I think that those who work in tech are important conversation partners (for those of us who don’t), since they are on the front lines of the application of AI technologies in workplaces and in our world.
I was talking with a friend who works at Wired magazine and she recounted that so many of her friends who work in tech are constantly wrestling with the ways they are required to use AI and how it’s often alienating. As we planned this series, I appreciated your reflections Colin, about the impacts on you as someone who teaches coding and experiences coding as an art form.
I began with the first two examples because they illustrate the worldview and values that are being articulated and imposed by billionaires funding the AI industry – that machines are better than humans and if you can’t be a machine, you should at least work like one.
As I’ve considered the impact of AI on our work for this sermon, what feels important is not the degree to which we use it (or are required to use it), or even the stats around jobs that are being lost to AI, but rather what the AI industrial complex – can we call it that now? – is telling us about what work is valuable and what kind of people are valuable.
In some ways I really just want to riff on Sheri’s first sermon in this series about what it means to be human in the face of AI. At least in the Bay Area, we are in a battle of narratives and worldviews, and it can deeply affect how we think about ourselves and our agency (meaning our power). The AI billionaires want us to think that the AI takeover of the job market is inevitable, but it’s not a done deal.
Who then is benefitting from the AI frenzy? And how does that inform the work we are called to do in the world? Following Sheri’s sermon at church retreat, she sent out some resources, including a link to the free PBS documentary The Ghost in the Machine that came out very recently.
I was able to watch the documentary last weekend and appreciated the way it explained where artificial intelligence originated, and how we got to where we are today. It was news to me that AI began with the eugenics movement, as a way of measuring certain kinds of intelligence.
Eugenics was first developed in the late 1800s. The goal was always to prove how European-descent men are the smartest humans, and therefore justified in their enslavement of others and colonial conquests, as well as their imperative to produce offspring while other races needed to be sterilized.
The IQ (intelligence quotient) test was a big part of upholding this myth of racist superiority, as well as the field of statistics that was created along with it. The IQ test was developed to measure “general” intelligence and has a through line to the measure of artificial general intelligence today. At this point, the main Large Language Models (LLMs), score in the “very superior to genius” levels of the IQ test.
They are especially good at IQ tests since these tests focus on matrix reasoning which is basically pattern recognition. As we know from Colin’s helpful AI primer, that’s what LLMs are built to do – recognize patterns.
As far as the IQ test goes, I have never taken it, but it’s connected to a painful story in my family’s history. My paternal grandfather was obsessed with being intelligent and put that expectation on his children. He went so far as to make them each take the IQ test and then told them their scores as well as each others’ scores, as a way of ranking them. My dad and his siblings never told their children the scores (I’m not even sure if they told their spouses) because it was so painful.
Nonetheless, I still felt a lot of pressure to be smart as a kid, but never felt like I actually was, since I had to work hard in school. I grew up with what we now called a “fixed mindset” around intelligence. And that’s exactly what the eugenics movement was going for – some people are smart and superior and others are not. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
This is also what we’re hearing from the tech billionaires funding AI – “these are the kinds of humans who are valuable and these are the ones who aren’t. The less valuable humans can be replaced with machines or they can be used to train the machines at the expense of their sanity.”
In Kenya, an English speaking nation, workers are paid less than $2/hour to train or cleanse the LLMs. “Their task is to filter out the most horrific content the internet has to offer—including live-streamed violence, child exploitation, and graphic war footage—to ensure AI chatbots remain ‘safe’ for Western consumers.”
“I spent six months watching videos of torture to teach an AI what ‘suffering’ looks like,” said a 23-year-old Keyan university graduate. “I cannot sleep without medication now. I was paid the equivalent of $150 a month to destroy my mind.” [deep breath]
Let’s contrast that monthly paycheck of $150 with the $500 million dollars of wealth that US tech barons gained in 2025 alone due the AI boom. That makes very clear who is benefiting from the AI industry.
On top of all this the AI billionaires think that even though AI “might kill all humans in the next decade” it’s still worth the risk. God forbid China develop the AI that kills us before the United States can. And why do they get a pass on regulating themselves, as if it’s someone else’s responsibility?
According to billionaire Peter Thiel’s lectures at the ACTS 17 Collective a year ago in San Francisco, regulating AI would actually create the anti-Christ. This is because regulation would have to come from a global body – like a one world government. In those lectures he also suggested that Greta Thunberg might be the anti-Christ, so there’s that as well.
The ACTS 17 Collective doesn’t just draw its name from a biblical reference. It’s an acronym – Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society. It’s a Bay Area group for “thinkers, builders, artists, and leaders who are wrestling with what it means to live with purpose and conviction.” Garry Tan, the Christian president and CEO of tech startup incubator Y Combinator, has hosted ACTS 17 events at his home.
As it turns out, we’re not the only Christians thinking about this tech stuff. How is our witness different from The ACTS 17 Collective? For one, we’re not inviting Peter Thiel to give a sermon during this series.
But seriously, how do we articulate what it means to be human? How do we describe who God is? What is our vision for the transformation of our world? These questions are deeply important when the world’s richest men are trying to enact their answers. The AI billionaires are trying to create god in their own image.
What narratives from our sacred tradition give us courage and clarity to speak the truth? I want to start with the passage in the first chapter of John. It was our call to worship. Let’s read it again together:
In the beginning was the Word
And the Word was with God
And the Word was God.
The Word was with God in the beginning.
Everything came into being through the Word.
What came into being through the Word was life,
And this life is a light for all people.
The Word became flesh, and dwells among us.
When this scripture first came to mind as I was thinking about this sermon, I burst into tears. The Word became flesh, and dwells among us. God chose to take human form in Jesus – to become the most vulnerable and dumb kind of human – an infant who is totally dependent.
Our scriptures tell of a God who took on flesh, in all our frailty and complexity. Our scriptures tell of a God who was poor and who created community with outcasts.
This Word becoming flesh in Hebrew, Hokmah, alludes to the whole of wild nature – the creative, feminine force that was with the Creator as this world came into being. Jesus (the Word) was this feral force, in relationship with the winds and water, with the mountains and the wilderness.
He nurtured a movement of liberation that disrupted empire, lifting up the leadership of women and being very DEI if you ask me. Jesus reminded the people in his movement that they were children of God, beloved by the Creator.
“That’s the audacious claim our tradition makes,” Sheri articulated in the first sermon of this series. “We humans are glorious, and we’re glorious not because of what we can produce or optimize or calculate. Our worth is not predicated on having some special capability on a rapidly shrinking list of things machines can’t do yet. We are intrinsically valuable, only a little lower than God, crowned with glory and honor.”
We are co-creators with God, as we make art, and families, and community, and care for plants and creatures, and share food, and sing together and grieve together and learn together. Our work is to be human within the web of creation. And our work is to challenge narratives and institutions who diminish and denigrate our humanity.
It can feel overwhelming when the tech billionaires have so much money and power. But we are connected to a power even greater. And next week I’m going to tell stories of how communities and movements are winning against these guys. Among others, I’ve been so inspired by the tech workers who are pushing back from the inside.
No matter the jobs we do, may we show up empowered in our humanity, not letting unjust measures define our worth or intelligence. May we support each other as we discern our engagement with AI and our withdrawal from it. And may we speak the truth of God becoming human and challenging tyrants even unto death for the healing of the world. Amen.