Pastoral Letter for the Month

At some point when I was away from my computer, recently, it did one of

those ‘updates’ which computers seem to like to do, these days. It closed

everything that I had open and then updated itself, without asking me.

When I came back to it I found that the new, updated, functions of the

computer now included an AI helper. As soon as I start a new line a cursor

kindly offers to prepare a draft for me, I simply need to tell it what to write,

and it does it for me. “Write a newsletter article about… hope,” I suggested. It

took a few moments to process my request and then out popped four

paragraphs of text concluding with what seemed like it was supposed to be a

‘call to action’.

‘Let us remain steadfast in our hope, and let it inspire us to create a

brighter tomorrow.’ It suggested, as the final line. “A brighter tomorrow?” I

thought. “Steadfast?” I thought – “well, at least it doesn’t write like me.”

I wondered what my granny, a woman who died, in her late 80s, more

than twenty years ago, would have thought of this latest technological

innovation. As far as I know she never touched a computer in her whole life –

hers was a world without high technology, without mobile phones or tablet

computers, certainly without self-driving cars or social media. Colour TV was

the innovation that impressed her most.

A little over two decades later things look very different. The pace of

change in a very short period of time has been extraordinary.

Things are changing fast, they will continue to. At the same time, though,

some things never seem to change. That’s the strange thing about change,

actually, that things change and stay the same at the same time.

The hope of all this new technology is that it will usher in exactly what the

AI newsletter writer suggested, “a brighter tomorrow”. This imagined future

might be one in which beleaguered ministers no longer slave away over their

computers as the day ebbs away around them because an artificial

intelligence writes their newsletter pieces for them. Perhaps, as the number

of ministers available to write such articles grows smaller, this truly is a

brighter tomorrow.

I’m not altogether convinced, though.

I’m just not convinced that a computer can replace a person as easily as

all that. I don’t think that a robot can offer the sort of love and care that we

get from other people, because the robot, fundamentally doesn’t ‘care’. It

can’t ‘care’.

If there’s one thing that can’t be replicated it is genuine, human, care and

love. No machine can copy that, no programme can genuinely replicate it.

So what will come next? Holograms of popular preachers in the pulpit?

(“This week we’ve got Dr Martin Luther King!”) Or robots delicately passing

around the communion elements? Will we see cyborgs delivering youth

work programmes? I suppose that some of these things, or versions of them,

might happen. Perhaps they won’t even be as bad as I imagine them to be.

But fundamentally I would miss the human touch.

There’s something uniquely wonderful about human interaction. It’s the

reason I always want to speak to a person if I have a problem with a product

or a service – it’s the reason I prefer to go to a shop than buy something

online.

“Write something about why human interaction is better than AI,” I

suggested to the small blinking cursor that appeared on my screen at the

start of a new paragraph. It spent a moment or two processing, and then

coughed up another four paragraphs of text.

‘AI may offer efficiency and convenience, but it lacks the soul that makes

human connections so meaningful…’ it suggested. I stared at this for a

moment or two. “Well… yes, it does seem to have got that right,” I thought.

Simon.