Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Part I

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A New A.I. Technology is Throwing the Market Into a Frenzy: China’s New A.I. Model Chip is Changing the Production of A.I.

Technology is one of the most important dimensions of humanity, and this goes back throughout all of human existence. Christians understand it to be a part of the dominion mandate found even in Genesis chapter 1. There are basic definitions for technology, which comes down to using just about anything for a purpose, devising something for a purpose, but high technology is what we generally refer to now when we use the term, we’re not talking about a screwdriver, we are talking about say, artificial intelligence. Most of us, when we use the term technology or technological these days, we’re talking about something that human beings, just a matter of say a decade or a generation at least ago, would not have understood.

We also need to take into account that technology doesn’t advance, it doesn’t move forward in any kind of symmetry. It moves forward with giant leaps. There are long periods of human history, and you can include most of the medieval period for that matter, you look at human history, long periods in which very little technological change took place. That’s not to say there was no technological change, it is to say you’re not talking about any major technological change that took place during that era.

On the other hand, you look at a brief period of time, say the late 19th into the early 20th centuries, and you had human beings very quickly changing from a mode of transportation that was basically as fast as feet, or as fast as a horse, to as fast as a train, to as fast as a car. And you know what happened soon thereafter, as fast as a jet airplane. But it’s also noteworthy to consider the fact that when I was born, jet aircraft already existed. And even though they’re safer and more highly technological in their advancement, the reality is human beings don’t travel much faster as they’re moving through the air in jet airliners. They go just about the same speed.

The shift from just something like a train and terrestrial transportation to any airplane was a massive jump. There were massive jumps between propeller aircraft and later jet aircraft, but once you have the development of jet aircraft, you do have other modifications such as the high bypass engine, but by and large, you’re still talking about the same thing.

Now as you’re looking at digital technologies, just consider the fact that what you likely are listening to right now didn’t exist, and we didn’t know it exists just a matter of a few decades ago. Now, we take these technological advances more or less for granted. The only thing we want to know is, what will this new thing do better than the old thing? And the answer is that when it comes to something like a smartphone, specifically an iPhone, the advances in recent years have been quite incremental, which is why the new iPhone version isn’t likely to make the headlines of a major newspaper or the front stories in terms of even digital media or cable news. It’s because it’s all incremental.

The big advance everyone’s been thinking about in technology over the course of the last several years is artificial intelligence, and as we’ve often discussed on The Briefing, artificial intelligence will come with an incredible universe of moral and theological challenges. But the reason we’re talking about this issue today is because just in the last couple of days, the entire world of artificial intelligence has more or less been turned upside down, not so much because of a moral or theological issue, those are still very much in play, but because of a big change in terms of the economic model and the technological reality.

Now, just to tell you how these things happen, just a matter of a couple of days ago, the headline in the Wall Street Journal was this: “China’s Homemade AI Wows Silicon Valley.” That wasn’t even on the front page of the paper, that was on the front page of the business section. But then you look at the front page of the paper yesterday, here’s the headline, “DeepSeek Flips Script on AI.” Here’s the headline on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial, “The DeepSeek AI freakout.”

We are talking about a freakout. We’re talking about Wall Street freaking out. We’re talking about one company, NVIDIA, whose advanced chips have been absolutely indispensable and which has been gaining in market value almost exponentially in recent years. It lost $600 billion just in the last few days in terms of Wall Street valuation. $600 billion lost. Now, will it come back? It well might.

As a matter of fact, that’s one of the big debates right now among major investors. How in the world did this happen is because, as I say, NVIDIA’s chips have been very, very necessary to the advancement of artificial intelligence and companies that have been building artificial intelligence platforms have had to turn to NVIDIA for their product. NVIDIA’s latest advances have been headline news in Silicon Valley and far beyond. And then you have the platforms that use it, and those platforms are using chips that use an awful lot of energy. But now you have a Chinese upstart, that’s the company known as DeepSeek, and it released a project, and indeed this project or product is available, it’s open source, that’s another big factor here. And this particular far more simple artificial intelligence system, it used far less sophisticated power. It used only a fraction of the electric power that is used to power these chips, and it was a far more simple technology and it seemed to deliver at least equivalent results.

As a business report in yesterday’s New York Times stated, “NVIDIA, which soar to the top of the stock market by selling the computer chips fueling the world’s artificial intelligence boom, has been dealt a tough reality check by a small Chinese company that showed it could do more with less of what NVIDIA makes.” More with less of what this company makes. My point is not so much about NVIDIA, it is about how technology works and it is about the unpredictability of technological advance. And so we’re looking at a reality here in which the titans of Wall Street and the czars of Silicon Valley, they are alike unsure of what all this will mean.

It could mean that you have far less demand for NVIDIA’s product and for the advancement on those products. Those products have been absolutely key. The chips are absolutely necessary to the AI technology as we have known it, and to the American advantage in artificial intelligence. But now you have this Chinese upstart, DeepSeek and to be honest, it has shaken everything up. As I say, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board declared it the “DeepSeek AI freakout.”

They then asked the question, “Who saw that coming? Not Wall Street, which sold off tech stocks on Monday after the weekend news that a highly sophisticated Chinese AI model, DeepSeek, rivals big tech-built systems but cost a fraction to develop. The implications are likely to be far-reaching and not merely in equities.” Now let’s just put this in economic terms. Let’s say you’re an investor in NVIDIA. You’ve been investing a lot of money because you believe those chips are going to be every day more in demand than the day before. You’re going to believe your company is the leading edge. And by the way, from all I can tell, it is the leading edge.

The point is that someone coming behind use a far simpler system that uses less power and less sophisticated chips and is producing something at least akin to or similar to, if not equivalent to, the AI computing power, the resulting artificial intelligence potency. Another footnote to all of this is that DeepSeek’s product is available open source. That’s huge, but we don’t know exactly what it means, which is actually part of the point.

We have to look at the technological advances we’re talking about here and understand with a bit of humility that unpredictability is built into the system. Now, just remember, it’s always been this way, just hasn’t always been this fast and perhaps the stakes haven’t always been this high. Let’s say that you were developing the best propeller plane you could possibly develop in the 1950s only to find out that the entire industry is basically going towards jets.

Let’s just say that you develop some kind of proverbial high-tech typewriter only to find out that the typewriters are placed by word processing. And indeed, even that term is quite antiquarian in feeling right now as you’re looking at the fact that very few people even use what they consciously consider to be a word processor. But I think it’s probably fair to say that a lot of Christians consider this issue to be somewhat abstract and pretty much removed from their everyday life. I can just assure you it’s not going to stay that way.

Now, one of the worldview issues we have to consider is what has been termed in the 20th century “the technological imperative,” and that comes down to the moral assumption of a secular age, which is if something is technologically possible, it is inevitable. If you can do it, you must do it.op

Now, when it comes to artificial intelligence, that raises a host of issues. More on that in just a moment. But it also reminds us of how capitalism works, of how a market economy works. The power of a market economy is that it can unleash innovation, but the unpredictability and sometimes the tumult of a market economy is shown in the fact that just one company can lose hundreds of billions of dollars in a matter of just about one day. And even with that happening, people can be unsure as to whether or not that’s an accurate reflection of reality. And furthermore, the assumption of at least some on Wall Street is that NVIDIA is going to do just fine. All of this is a temporary blip.

Many people on Wall Street consider the fact that an American lead in this technology, and that comes down also to a company like NVIDIA, also looking at Meta, Google, other major platforms and Silicon Valley industries that are heavily involved as big corporations in the development of artificial intelligence. But here’s where you also need to understand that when you have an upstart like this from China, it is a game changer in more ways than one.

It’s not just a technological game changer or potentially so, it is also a political game changer because this is a big wake-up call for the United States because the technological leadership and something as important as artificial intelligence, perhaps even important to our global security, as much as America considered its leadership posture in this industry, in this technology secure, let’s just say it looks a lot less secure in the middle of this week than it did the end of last week.

Soon after entering office, just last Monday, President Trump indicated that he would be taking actions and he would be leveraging his administration to make for faster innovation on AI and other major technologies. That sounds a bit more urgent this week even than it did last week.

But finally, on this issue, it is also worth noting that the editorial published by the Wall Street Journal on this issue, that’s the editorial on the DeepSeek AI Freakout, it ended on a biblical theme as the editor stated, “As DeepSeek shows, it is possible for a David to compete with the Goliaths.” Isn’t it interesting that even in our secular age, just about every reader of the Wall Street Journal can be counted upon to know exactly what the editors of the Wall Street Journal mean? We have to wonder how long that confidence can be extended into a secular future.

Part II

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The Ethics of Simulating Conversing With the Dead Through A.I.: New Documentary Points to Deep Moral Issues Behind Artificial Intelligence

But remaining on the issue of artificial intelligence, but now moving into the moral and theological challenges represented by this technology, I want to make reference to a documentary review that is a film review. The film in this case is a documentary published on Monday in the New York Times.

Here’s the headline, AI builds illusions of dead loved ones who can converse. The documentary is entitled Eternal You, and as the New York Times tells us, “Eternal You is mostly concerned with a very particular use of AI giving users the illusion of talking to their dead loved ones.” The article continues, “Large language models trained on the deceased’s speech patterns, chat logs and more can be made to imitate that person’s way of communicating so well that it feels to the grief-stricken as if they’re crossing the border between life and death.” The article continues, “These tools can be comforting, but they’re also potentially big business. One of the film’s subjects,” that means one of the individuals in the documentary “calls it death capitalism.”

Well, here you have the New York Times in a film review acknowledging that there are huge, ethical, moral, perhaps even theological issues, the New York Times might concede, in the development and use of this kind of artificial intelligence in which you are creating a person who is dead who can converse with you as if the person is alive. Now, just consider the potential manipulation of all of this.

Now, on the one hand, before we even look at the product, we even look at the documentary, let’s just back up and say, “We can understand why there would be a hunger for such a technology.” Death is a horrifying separation. It has been that way from the very beginning. Even when Adam and Eve sinned and death entered into human existence by God’s judgment, the fact is that death looms as the great separation of human beings from each other. The documentary mentions such horrifying tragedies as the loss of a child and the more common experience of the loss of a parent. You could also add the loss of a sibling, the loss of a friend, and it promises the comforting reality of being able through artificial intelligence to at least simulate the experience of conversing with a dead individual.

Now, let’s just make very clear the fact that artificial intelligence cannot bring that individual to life. As a matter of fact, artificial intelligence, by definition, doesn’t even know what it’s doing. Artificial intelligence is not a person. Artificial intelligence is simply a technology, but it is frightening to consider just how manipulative such a technology might be. It also tells you a great deal that the ethical discussion in and around this documentary is not so much about the ethics of the deployment of artificial intelligence in this way. It’s about whether or not it is right and ethical to charge to make a commercial product, to make money off of such an AI application.

Sherry Turkle, pretty well known in terms of debates over technology, she’s identified in the New York Times as a sociologist, indeed an eminent sociologist, as the Times tells us, “Notes in the film that artificial is a ‘brilliant device’ that knows how to trick you into thinking there’s a their there.” That’s a very perceptive statement. It tricks you into thinking there is a their there but there is no their there. The person is not there. AI might be able to assemble voice clips and other kinds of material in order to make it appear and to simulate that a person is talking with you but the person is not there.

We can understand that that raises a host of issues. For one thing, how, you might ask, would someone know that there’s a their there? Well, it’s because the biblical worldview reminds us the human beings are real. We’re a part of a real creation on a real planet in the midst of a real cosmos and we are created by a real creator. Our lives have real meaning. There is reality there.

A simulation of that reality is not the reality. The painting of a person is not the person. The development of photography actually raised this question with a lot of people who are quite concerned that the existence of a photograph could fool persons into a lack of distinction between the real and the unreal. By the way, that was not an unreal worry we now know in the age of manipulated images. It does tell us something that in this film review, we are told that the big ethical or moral issue that is considered by the documentary writers and those who are featured in it has to do with the ethics of selling this as a product, not so much with the ethics of the existence of the technology itself. Here’s where Christians understand the money is important, but the money actually points to a deeper moral issue. The real moral issue is far deeper and more foundational, more fundamental than just the money. The money’s important, but the money just underlines the fact that there is something big at stake here.

It seems that the people making this documentary, the people who are featured in it and even the reviewers writing about it, seem to understand that something more fundamental is at stake, something that might be even theological but they don’t know how to get to it. Here are the final words from the review in the New York Times, “Eternal you isn’t really about overcoming death as it turns out. In a wide-ranging and somewhat rambling manner, it is about humans’ desperation to find meaning in life wherever they can and how companies are rushing to fill that gap and inspire almost religious devotion even in the professionals making the tools. But,” says the review, “it also feels like a warning that’s not your loved one on the other end at all, and it’s not magic either.”

Isn’t that interesting? Consider all the issues that are brought up implicitly or explicitly just in the closing words of this film review. Human existence, the meaning of human existence, the fact that we are desperate for meaning, the fact that we and companies are “rushing to fill that gap.” Understand they even use the terms “religious devotion” in an odd way. Even in our secular age, even with reference to this documentary about one controversial application of artificial intelligence, even in a secular age when you get this close to the meaning of human existence, you can’t avoid a theological reference as much as you might try.

Part III

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Leader of Euthanasia Movement Dies at 94: Derek Humphry, the Hemlock Society, and the Morally Evil Argument of ‘The Final Exit’

But along similar lines, it’s also important that we turn and make notice of a New York Times obituary published on Sunday. Here’s the headline, “Derek Humphry, 94, Trailblazer in Right-to-Die Movement Dies.” Derek Humphry was born in Britain. He was most famous for his advocacy for euthanasia or assisted suicide. In his argument, what human beings needed was a final exit. The subtitle of his book was “The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying.” Notice that term self-deliverance.

In a secular age when life and death become absolutely confused issues and when you have the death wish show up as a demand for assisted suicide or euthanasia, voluntary or what’s defined as involuntary, the reality is that it does get packaged as deliverance, in this case self-deliverance. Self-deliverance by death.

We just need to note that that is directly contradicted by Scripture. It is God and God alone who has the power to deliver us. It’s God and God alone who gave us the gift of life and has the control over our lives. It is in his hands that our death is scheduled not on our own. And it is absolutely a revelation of the darkness and the death-centeredness of the age that a book like this would be declared to be about self-deliverance. Derek Humphry was notorious, as I said. Michael S. Rosenwald writing the obituary for the New York Times tells us, “Derek Humphry, a British-born journalist whose experience helping his terminally ill wife end her life, led him to become a crusading pioneer in the right-to-die movement and to publish Final Exit, a best-selling guide to suicide, died on January the second in Eugene, Oregon. He was 94.” Now listen to this. “His death at a hospice facility was announced by his family.”

Now, perhaps you noted the incongruity here. At least according to what you would make as an inference from this particular obituary, Derek Humphry’s offered the advice in which the final exit was described as self-deliverance, but there is no evidence in the article that that is how his life came to an end. He did die at age 95 in a hospice facility. The Times obituary also states, “With a populist flair and a knack for speaking matter-of-factly about death, Mr. Humphry almost single-handedly galvanized a national conversation about physician-assisted suicide in the early 1980s, at a time when the idea had been little more than an esoteric theory battled around by medical ethicists.”

One author who has written about the issue identified Derek Humphry as “the one who really put this cause on the map in America.” It’s also interesting to note that Leon R. Kass, the bioethicist at the University of Chicago, who rather prophetically confronted this issue, went on to confront the book with this statement, “What can one say about this new book in one word? Evil.” Now, when you have a lot of people making comments about these issues, especially from a place such as a prestigious university like the University of Chicago, here’s what’s interesting. Leon Kass had the prophetic wisdom and the courage to call it out for what it was. He used the word evil. Kass is rightly identified in the article as a conservative. It is said that he wrote in Commentary Magazine referring back then when the book came out to Derek Humphry, he said that the man was the Lord High Executioner. About the book, he said, “I did not want to read it. I do not want you to read it. It should never have been written, and it does not deserve to be dignified with a review, let alone an article.”

Nevertheless, it tells us something that evidently Leon Kass did write the article. It’s because this is the kind of argument that has to be answered. It is unspeakable and unthinkable except that we have to think about it and speak about it because it is deadly and it is out there. 

It’s also incredibly revealing when you think about the clash of worldviews that in this New York Times obituary we’re told that even as conservatives rejected Derek Humphry and his argument, “Progressives embraced the book even as public health experts express concern that the methods laid out could be used by depressed people who weren’t terminally ill.”

So notice that simple statement, progressives embraced the book. What’s progressive about the idea of assisted suicide or suicide or a final exit? It can only be explained, and this is crucial for us to understand. It can only be explained if one has rejected the biblical worldview and rejected the meaning of human life as determined by the Creator. If there is no Creator and human life is an accident, then there is no particular meaning to it, and once it is no longer particularly meaningful to you, you can make the meaningful decision to end it.

That is the repudiation of the entire logic of human dignity. It is also very interesting to note that one of the organizations that Derek Humphry had organized on behalf of this culture of death. It was called the Hemlock Society. Just think about it. It conjures back the classical age in Greek. It hearkens back to Socrates who was executed by drinking hemlock. By naming his organization the Hemlock Society, let’s just say he wasn’t hiding his worldview and he wasn’t disguising his agenda. One more interesting twist in the report in the Times tells us, “The Hemlock Society eventually splintered into several new groups including the Final Exit network, which Mr. Humphry helped start.”

This is something very interesting to observe. The Christian worldview leads to a consensus that has been shared throughout the centuries of Christian teaching and Christian experience. It is something that is affirmed by all the major representations of Christianity and indeed, if you’re talking about Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism and Protestant evangelical Christianity on the nature of human life as sacred because of the Creator of human dignity is grounded in the imago Dei, there’s been an absolute theological consensus. You depart from that consensus and you have absolute dissolution. Eventually, you have something like the Hemlock Society, but here’s the problem when you abandon any kind of objective mooring for human life and its value and dignity, you do splinter into endless groups. This group making this argument, that group making its argument and the final point, there is no argument conclusively definitively to be made if there is no ultimate point or meaning to human life.

Part IV

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Gospel Hope in a Nihilistic World: The Only Refutation to the Culture of Death is the Gospel of Jesus Christ

But as we come to the conclusion of this edition of The Briefing, we can’t end there. We can’t end with the discussion of the final exit. We can only end by affirming the fact and thanking God for the fact that we are not accidents. We’re not mere material beings. We are creatures made by a divine, sovereign, perfect Creator, made for his glory and made in his image. Thus, our lives have absolute meaning from beginning to end, and the beginning and the end are both in God’s hands. But we also have to remember that the backdrop of all of this is the reality of death. Something that has come together with several of the issues we’ve had to discuss on The Briefing today and here is where we simply have to remind ourselves over and over again of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the glory of that gospel, of the atonement accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ and the salvation that comes by faith in him and by faith alone in Christ alone to the glory of God alone.

I can only end by saying I praise God for the fact that it is not up to me, or to you, or to all of us together to come up with an understanding of the meaning of human life and for that matter, the meaning of human death. I also have to end by saying that if you do not know the gospel of Jesus Christ and you do not know the hope of eternal life beyond this earthly life, then a final exit from this earthly life might make some kind of horrifying sense. In light of the Christian gospel, it makes no sense at all.