ChatGPT and a Better Theology of Work

I have been, in some way, shape, or form, engaged in conversation about AI technology and our relationship with technology for a really long time. In 1999, or 2000, I read Ray Kurtzweil, his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. And I was shocked if it was way beyond my understanding the terms he was using the vision he was painting of how life would work in relationship with technology like I didn't have a context for it. And then as time went on, and this is part of what good books do as they provide us with language for things we haven't encountered, yet, I started seeing some of his predictions come to life that we would become not just more dependent upon the machines we use, we become more like them. And they would become more like us; it was a fascinating sci-fi-ish kind of adventure for a long time. And now, I'm going to hit pause here for a second because the place I'm not going to go is this place of sort of Luddite ism, where, like, I'm anti-technology; I'm actually not anti-technology; I love that I'm looking around at the tech in front of me and actually love all this stuff I really like having around me. And at the same time, I become increasingly aware, the older I get, of the ways in which the tech around me, the instruments, and the devices around me, and my use of them have actually detracted from my experience of living in my own body. And living as a human. There are ways in which all of this stuff has made my life way better, way easier, and sometimes more enjoyable. And there are ways in which I'm not as fully alive as I could be. If I wasn't as dependent on some of the things that I use technologically. This brings me to this because I'm someone who has been in this conversation and talked about it publicly; folks will send me things every once in a while that they're encountering. And a friend of mine recently sent a tweet thread that they were reading about chat GPT showing up in their workplace. The thread was critical of chat GPT, but maybe not in the way you would think. So Chad GPT had been used to write this vision statement for an organization that this person was working for. It's a charitable organization that helps people in various ways. And the meeting he was in was about vision; it was about who they are as an organization and what happens next. And normally, once a year, once every once in a while. He and the rest of the team and some board of directors types would get together in a room they would talk about, are we on a mission? Are we on? You know, are we living on our vision? Are we who we think we are? It's a very human question. And how do we continue to live that out? And then they would, over the course of time, have this conversation in a meeting, and people would write down these things. And then, they would pass all these notes on to someone who would then write them out. This is who we are. And this is how we're going to execute on who we are. And they would live that out over the next few months or years. This article, though, was put on the table; this document was written by Chet GPT, and someone in the company said I can expedite this process. I can make this faster. I'm just going to plug in the information and make these asks to check GBT, they brought the document, and they were working then from this document that a bot had written a chatbot had run. Now his critique wasn't just that someone's job had been taken by a chatbot. And oftentimes, it would have been him that was part of why he was writing. And normally, he was the person that would impasse these notes. And he'd spend a few hours over the, you know, every day over the course of a week or so to compile them and write a document; he'd been replaced. So there was that there a sense of, like, my job has been replaced, and I'm bummed about that. But it wasn't just about not having the job to do. He actually talked about missing the process, that instead of sitting in the room with these people that he works with,