Real liberty

Like it or not, artificial intelligence is being foisted upon us. I think we can all see the writing on the wall – the day is coming when every car, computer, phone and other electronic device will be run by AI and networked to AI. Jobs and entire ways of life will be lost. Elon Musk put the odds of AI destroying humanity at something like 20%.

So, why do it? Why have AI? What is the point? Why are we putting people out of jobs and risking annihilation? Artificial liberty. 

Boil down all the arguments for AI and you get this: work less and live longer. AI will do the work so you don’t have to (that’s the theory). And, AI will be able to solve all those medical issues out there so that we can live longer and, according to some proponents, one day live forever. 

Fundamentally, that’s what AI is all about. Working less, having more free time, having more money, that all relates to quality of life. If we only live for 75 or so years on average, if that is our bookend in our minds, our free time becomes more important. We want to spend as much of that 75 years having “fun” as we can. But, if we can live forever, well, that changes the equation because, suddenly, we have so much time that we don’t have to worry about squeezing maximum fun into every moment. The finite nature of our lives traps us.

It does not matter what religion (or not) you might be: death shapes our lives. The Bible comments that we are, “through fear of death, subject to lifelong slavery.” Hebrews 2:15. We come out of the womb and soon begin to cry because we are hungry, for example. Though we do not yet know the word “death” or the concept of “death”, yet our bellies preach to us the fear of death. So, we cry.

If we step back and take an honest look at our lives, we are motivated in everything by fear of death. Death dictates our thirst for fun, our escapism, our retirement planning, our employment, and every other paradigm of our lives. 

Death isn’t just what happens when someone’s heart stops. Death exhales fear - fear that our hearts will stop, that the hearts of our loved ones will stop. It is pain and fear of pain. It is not just our bodies feeling pain, but the suffering surrounding a life without love, without hope, without joy. 

Death is bigger than just biology even if it is embedded in our biology. Our deaths aren’t just dates on a calendar that we wait to find out. Our knowledge of death trickles out into our lives every day and gives us fear, and that fear of death is the enemy of a love of God and love of one another. It cripples our trust in God, narrows our hearts so we are afraid to help each other and leads us into all kinds of evil. Our slavery to evil for fear of death (Rom. 6:6, etc.) is real, tangible, testified to every day on televised news. It is a spring-loaded book end that crushes us more and more each day.

But humanity has grown up. Now it is building AI so that it can escape its fear of death, to overcome its lifelong slavery caused by fear of death. Humanity is betting on artificial liberty. For those familiar with the Bible, humanity tried the same thing a long time ago with the tower of Babel when humanity sought its own name. Gen. 11:4. And the same thing happened when Eve ate the forbidden fruit in order to be like God, to have her own righteousness apart from God. Gen. 3:4-6. 

I can’t say whether there will be hordes of killer robots, but I can say with certainty that artificial liberty will never be real liberty. We will never be able to truly escape death by our own efforts – not even if we extend our lifespans. See Rev. 9:6. No, artificial liberty is just a new permutation of being enslaved through fear of death. These synthetic idols will rule over us, directly or indirectly. 

That’s artificial liberty. But, there is real liberty, genuine liberty. The key to genuine liberty does not lie within us. We are, after all, enslaved through fear of death. To have genuine liberty, we must be liberated. Genuine liberty must come from outside of us and that means grace. Grace isn’t who we are. Grace is undeserved, unmerited. That is what makes it grace. 

We don’t fully appreciate that word “grace” as much as we should. We don’t earn or merit grace before or after we receive it. We never pay a penny for it. It is alien to us and entirely a gift. We can’t mess it up. We can’t destroy it. We can’t do anything to not have it directed at us – it does not depend on us. That’s what makes it grace. And that’s why it is grace that gives us genuine liberty. Because it cannot be undone or messed up by us, it is entirely liberating. 

And the grace of God is given to us through God becoming man in Christ Jesus to die on the cross to pay the price demanded by all our sins, all our death. Christ’s death for our forgiveness, to gather us back to the Lord of life and give us eternal life, is all grace. Col. 2:13-14; Rom. 3:21-28; Eph. 2:1-10; etc.

He didn’t do it because we deserve it or ever will deserve it, but out of grace simply because He loved us even when we deserved it not at all. It cost Him His life; it is a gift to us, paid in full. And that’s what makes this real liberty. Those who do not reject this gift live life already free from death because death has no hold over them. They are liberated because all their illnesses, all their sufferings, all their hardships are overcome – they have an end. For those who do not reject this gift won by Christ, the cross is for them the end of death and all its enslavement. For them, the end is not death, but the cross is the end of death. For them, the end is not death, but life, true life, genuine life. For them, their last illness is just that – the last one they will ever have to deal with. That’s real liberty because it is founded upon the righteousness of God poured out and finished, given to us as a pure, unmerited gift to set us free from death forever.