AI

Ed Schofield · CHBC · 13 June 2026

What is AI?

Definitions & a short history

The Moving Target

"As soon as it works, it isn't AI any more."

Moravec's Paradox

Machines can out-think grandmasters before out-toddling toddlers.

Truth or Hype?

A quick pass through claims worth testing

Prediction

“AI is a huge financial bubble.”

Claim

“A billion-dollar company run by one person is now plausible.”

✓

Claim

“AI will increase inequality”

vs “AI will be a leveller”?

Claim

“AI can be an amazing tutor on almost any topic.”

✓

Claim

“Young people will be left behind.”

Claim

“AI can tempt you to be lazy.”

✓

Claim

“AI companies steal artists’ copyrighted work.”

Fear

“AI will take my job.”

Hype

“AI will lead to mass unemployment.”

Hype

“AI is conscious or sentient.”

Hype

“AI will kill us all.”

Hype

“AI knows everything.”

Dismissal

“AI is just autocomplete; it can't create anything new”

AI and Faith

Does AI challenge what it means to be made in the image of God?

Source question: does AI challenge what it means to be made in the image of God? Is intelligence what makes humans special, and if machines have it, what then?
My answer from the source: plants have intelligence too. Trees communicate via chemical signals in their root systems; flowers open and move toward sunlight.
So intelligence is not the same thing as personhood or soul.
We're not really playing God and creating a soul when we create AI systems.
Searle's Chinese Room: a system can manipulate symbols perfectly and produce intelligent-seeming behaviour while understanding nothing — syntax without semantics.
Useful phrasing: the computer may seem to understand you, but it is very advanced mimicry of understanding and intelligence, not actual understanding.

Psalm 8:1 (NIV)

Lord, our Lord,

how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory

in the heavens.

Psalm 8:3-4 (NIV)

When I consider your heavens,

the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars,

which you have set in place,

what is mankind that you are mindful of them,

human beings that you care for them?

Psalm 8:5-6 (NIV)

You have made them a little lower than the angels

and crowned them with glory and honour.

You made them rulers over the works of your hands;

you put everything under their feet:

Psalm 8:7-8 (NIV)

all flocks and herds,

and the animals of the wild,

the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea,

all that swim the paths of the seas.

Psalm 8:9 (NIV)

Lord, our Lord,

how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Intelligence ≠ Agency

Knowing things vs doing things on your behalf

Key distinction from the source: intelligence versus agency. Telling is one thing; doing is another.
Giving up agency can be efficient but can backfire: dodgy GPS routing once led cars to get stuck on a street in Edinburgh.
AI agents raise the same issue: if you say "clean up my inbox" and the agent deletes everything, that is not just a wrong answer; it is action in the world.
Alignment analogy from the source: a misaligned AI agent is like having an employee who is secretly a spy for a foreign government or practising industrial espionage.
Google Duplex at I/O 2018 rang a hair salon; the person on the other end did not know it was a bot. That was ethically uncomfortable and was also far ahead of product reality at the time — Museum of Failure, "Duplex Demo."
But the capability is now normalising. More than 50% of internet traffic is bots; more than 50% of my phone calls are spam or scam calls.
Voice-cloning scams targeting older people deserve special mention.

Power & Gatekeepers

Whoever controls the model controls the answer

Source note: previous technologies eventually decentralised. Anyone could own an engine, a press, a personal computer.
Frontier AI so far concentrates because of three bottlenecks: compute, data, talent.
About 5-6 companies, and two countries, effectively control the frontier.
Whoever builds the models decides what they will and won't say, what they treat as true, which values they encode.
That's not necessarily sinister — every encyclopedia had editors — but it is a new kind of editorial power: invisible, global, and concentrated.
Christian analogy from the source: Christians know what it means for a powerful institution to control access to the text — the world before the vernacular Bible and the Reformation's revolt against mediated knowledge.
Open question: will AI be the new vernacular Bible, knowledge for everyone, or the new chained Bible, knowledge mediated by the few?

Inside the modern granary: racks, cooling, power, networking.
The model feels weightless on a laptop, but it depends on industrial-scale infrastructure.
This is why concentration matters: the capability lives behind expensive gates.
The Christian doctrine of sin says everyone is corruptible, including the well-meaning.
Concentrated power guarantees handing power to a sinner. Good intentions do not immunise anyone.
Scripture's heroes fall when powerful: David, Solomon.
Church history too: inquisitions, crusades, burning Bible translators, selling salvation — each defended at the time by sincere men with excellent intentions.
So when AI labs say "trust us, our intentions are good," Christians have no excuse for naivety.

Tool or Threat?

The Gutenberg lens

Power Takes a Shape

The same strength can cultivate or consume

Stewardship

Plunder

Civilisation and Energy Capture

A long arc of harnessing power beyond the human body

Source detail: anthropologist Leslie White argued in the 1940s that civilisation advances as it captures more energy per person.
Historian Ian Morris built a comparative history of East and West on "energy capture" as a master metric of social development.
The recognisable steps: fire, agriculture, animal muscle, watermills and windmills, fossil fuels, electricity, atom.
A human body runs on about 100 watts; for most of prehistory that was the whole energy budget.
Each step shows the same pattern: more energy captured per person, then population growth, specialisation, and social complexity the previous energy regime could not support.
Computers and AI convert raw energy into something like thought. That is qualitatively new.
Source caveat: this is one lens. Ideas, institutions, and faith have moved history too.

Fire

Animals

Water

Coal

Oil

Atom

Source detail: for three hundred years from 1613, "computer" was a job title for humans; from 1700 it was an established profession.
Teams of human computers calculated tables of numbers for ballistics, insurance, astronomy.
During the 1960s, IBM mainframes took over the bulk calculation and the human computers retrained as programmers.
Why this is gold for the talk: the whole AI anxiety already happened, with a known ending.
A cognitive profession — skilled mathematical work, the "thinking job" of its day — was automated within a generation.
Some fears came true: the job title literally ceased to exist. But people largely moved up the stack into programming, a job that hadn't existed before.
The volume of computation done by civilisation increased about a trillionfold, enabling things like moon landings that no army of human computers could have done.

"What is Man?"

Another decentring — like Copernicus, like Darwin

Source thought: every previous technology outperformed our bodies.
The plough out-dug us, the engine out-pulled us, the camera out-remembered us, the calculator out-added us.
None of that felt like a threat to human identity because we had quietly located our specialness somewhere else: in the mind.
Reason, language, creativity, judgment: that was the sanctuary.
Aristotle defined man as the rational animal; Descartes made thinking the one undoubtable thing; the Western tradition agreed that whatever makes humans human lives in the head.
A tractor could out-pull a farmer without anyone losing sleep over what a farmer essentially is.
AI threatens the sanctuary: it takes over, or convincingly imitates, the thing we thought we were.
But Psalm 8 never put intelligence at the centre in the first place.

The Creation of Adam, painted around 1508-1512 as part of the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the Vatican.
God, borne by angels, surges toward a languid, reclining Adam, their outstretched fingers nearly — but not quite — touching.
Pope Paul VI chose Psalm 8 as the Vatican's message among the goodwill messages from world leaders left on the lunar surface by Apollo 11.
On this reading, AI as the latest harnessing of creation's power is not inherently hubris: dominion over the works of God's hands is vocation rather than trespass.
The psalm marvels that God was mindful of man and made him in His image.
Now man has made a thinking thing in his image and must decide how to be mindful of what he has made.
The Psalm 8 question returns here: what kind of maker will we be toward the things we make?

Questions

Thanks!

edschofield@fastmail.com