Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Well, over the next six weeks on Breakpoint,

as we head into the end of this year, we'll be looking at some of the most important issues that Christians

faced in 2024. Every generation, of course, faces different challenges. We may have hoped

for different challenges than the ones we got, but God chose to put us in this time and in this place.

These are the you are here issues for the church, the ones that help us better understand the moment

that we're in. One of the You Are Here stories from 2024 is, of course, the rise of artificial intelligence.

But this is not just a story about new and more powerful technology.

It's a story about how we think about ourselves, how we understand what it means to be human.

The mad scientist rarely begins as a villain.

From Dr. Frankenstein to Spider-Man's Doc Auk villains are far more often the victims of a

combination of good intentions, unstoppable curiosity, and way too much arrogance. Their plights

on screen mirror real life, as evidenced by, of course, artificial

intelligence. In his book, 2084, artificial intelligence in the future of humanity, Oxford

professor and Christian apologist, Dr. John Lennox, argued that the promise of AI outpaces the

reality. Though AI might be great at specific, mostly repetitive tasks,

like playing chess, constructing sentences, or identifying pre-cancerous tissues on a CAT scan,

AI is not as capable as human beings at many other things, like navigating an unfamiliar

room or detecting human sarcasm.

That's because, at least so far, AI lacks the kind of generalized intelligence that allows humans to move from task to task, to think in the abstract, to apply background

knowledge, to use common sense, to understand cause and effect.

For all the hype around so-called machine learning,

...