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. 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

Ock 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 precancerous 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, AI systems just continue to be at the most

...