🪴Sprout 😁Strongly-Agree 🟡Consideration 🛠️BringingLifeintotheWorld
The Big Idea
Sometime we can react to new technology or tools in two unhelpful ways:
- Avoidance: We can run away or avoid new tools because they are unfamiliar or seem hard to learn or use. Or we just are comfortable with the way we have gotten used to doing things.
- We miss opportunities to be more productive and effective. What if Paul refused to use the then premier technology of Roman roads? His missionary trips would have been much shorter.
- Blind Acceptance: We are quick to dump resources and time into a new shiny tool because it is marketed well or seems like an exciting up and coming tool. (Think Betamax or floppy disks).
- What was true of ancient organic tools is true of our silicon technology as well: “The king is not saved by his great army; a warrior is not delivered by his great strength. The war horse is a false hope for salvation, and by its great might it cannot rescue.“ - Psalm 33:16-18
Related Notes: Religion of Technology A Theology of Technology
General Principles
In order to healthily engage with, learn and employ technology, I have found a few important principles to keep in mind:
- Avoiding Vendor lock-in
- Be aware of tech churn. Always start with a plan of exit.
- Be aware of where your data is stored and how you could be cut off from it or lose it.
- Be aware of data storage format and reliability. don’t get stuff locked in a format that is impossible to get out of.
- Favor Open source for general tools and services. They are cheap and generally have the core functionality needed (even if maybe not the full “professional” features).
- Favor Big name companies for security and data sensitive tools. They have huge security teams and a reputation to uphold.
- Make sure the problem a piece of technology addresses is worth the overhead of time and money needed to keep it running.
- Make sure a new piece of technology will play nice with other currently employed tools. If not is it worth the added workarounds to make things work?
- Every piece of technology is oriented toward a particular type of client or way of life. Make sure this underlying narrative will not work against our core mission.
- For example, think of trying to use a point of sales system made for a business to collect church offerings. They are similar but do not solve the same fundament problems.
Thinking about Using AI
Many people want to talk about AI as either super accurate and amazing or point out the mistakes it makes and lament how horrible it is. But I think it is important to remember that the baseline metric all AI runs off of is statistical probability. It really does not care if it is “accurate” or “truthful” in the human sense it is simply giving the most probable response after all the guardrails, and other tweaks that are built on top of the base level neural network. This means for me that using AI as an unequivocal source of fact or as a primary Reality Filter is a bad idea. AI is not built for precision fact and truth. What it is built for is pattern recognition on a large scale.
For me this has started to look like using an AI chat as a way to kind of churn up information on a subject. it is not until I have asked the question a few times in different ways or to different models that I feel like I have an idea of what I’m looking for. In other words, AI is great for the general “what is out there” questions and getting a better answer than a search bar tends to give. It is also very efficient if you know exactly what you are looking for but can’t seem to find it because that level of specificity means that the statistically likely response is probably what you want.
All of this to say that AI can be useful but it is important to know what kind of tool it is. It is easy to treat it like a human or to rely on it without secondary sources of information. I will say that the online searches with Gemini and Copilot have made it easy to access some of those secondary sources which helps address that concern within the tool. That being said it is still using AI as the filter for what secondary sources to look has the potential to still get us into trouble.
Helpful Articles: Article on a Dude’s attempt to deGoogle his life
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