I’ve been thinking about the AI arms race and the fears that come with it. There are the obvious concerns about AI becoming uncontrollable and potentially catastrophic, but there is another concern that I think gets less attention: what happens to human agency when enormous technological and economic power becomes concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of people and organisations? What does an ordinary person, or even a small community, actually have to say about the shape of the world being created around them?
I don’t think the answer is to pretend those forces aren’t enormous. They are. A handful of corporations can command resources that dwarf anything available to a local community, while increasingly capable AI systems may eventually operate at scales and speeds that are difficult for humans to comprehend, let alone control. It is easy in the face of that to conclude that our choices don’t really matter. Perhaps the best we can do is sit back and hope the people building these systems get it right.
But that isn’t how I understand human agency. We don’t need to control everything in order for our choices to matter. Much of human life has always been lived within forces larger than ourselves: governments, empires, economies, cultures, diseases and natural disasters. The question has never been whether we can control all of those things. It is whether we can still exercise meaningful agency within them, and whether we can organise ourselves so that we are less vulnerable to forces we cannot control.
This is where I find the incarnation particularly interesting. Christianity doesn’t tell us that God solved the problem of human vulnerability by making himself bigger, more powerful or more technologically capable than everyone else. God became human. He entered a particular place, a particular culture and a particular community. Jesus lived among ordinary people, formed relationships, shared meals, taught, healed, challenged systems of power and gathered a community around himself. The kingdom he announced was universal, but it began locally, with people learning to live differently together.
That makes me wonder whether small communities have a more important place in an AI-shaped future than we sometimes assume. A local community can’t compete with a technology corporation in computing power. It can’t regulate a rogue AI or determine what happens in a global arms race. But it can create spaces where people know one another, make decisions together, share resources, preserve practical skills and refuse to outsource every significant decision to distant systems. It can provide a degree of resilience and agency precisely because people aren’t facing these forces as isolated individuals.
I’m not suggesting that community will somehow save us from an AI apocalypse. It won’t. I genuinely worry about that possibility, and there are problems that require governments and international cooperation to address. But I don’t think the fact that I can’t control those things means I have no agency at all. There is a difference between being powerless over the whole system and being powerless over my own corner of it.
Perhaps the invitation for Christians is therefore not simply to ask whether AI will be good or bad for humanity, but what kind of communities we are building in its midst. Are we becoming more dependent, isolated and easily managed, or more connected, capable and mutually responsible? Can we build small places where people still know one another, care for one another and make meaningful decisions together? We may not be able to determine the future of AI, but we can participate in creating communities that are capable of meeting that future without surrendering their agency.
Leave a Reply