I want to talk about inefficiency.
I’m from St. George, Utah. We moved there when I was 12. We drove across the country from North Carolina, where we lived, and arrived, I think, on July 16th. It was 120 degrees. I had never felt such heat and couldn’t understand what kind of hell we’d moved to.
We lived in an area called Bloomington, a little bit outside of town. There was a golf course and a country club that was probably pretty nice in the 60s and had definitely seen better days by the 90s. One of my first assignments as a new member of the ward was to go around and collect fast offerings.
So it’s August. It’s 2 p.m. I am walking around, door to door, asking Brother Sorensen and Sister Carter if they have their fast offerings to give. I’d wait for them to go find the checkbook and write it out. They’d give me this little blue slip, and I’d put it in this blue pouch and faithfully carry it back to the bishop.
Eventually we made this whole process digital, and it made things easier. Fast offerings became faster, more efficient—probably better record keeping, and fewer teenagers dropping the tithing and fast offerings. It preserved privacy; you didn’t have the shame of having to fill it out—or not—at the door. And it no longer required teenagers to walk around the neighborhood knocking on doors and asking people for their offerings.
But it also made some things worse. It no longer required teenagers to walk around the neighborhood knocking on doors and asking their ward members for offerings. It removed meaningful human interaction that bound us together in thick bonds of community. And it removed physical objects that, to me, made the world rich and textured and beautiful. That blue pouch—there was something kind of cool about it. It was a real thing made of fake leather.
I came of age in the digital revolution. I lived through the launch of the personal computer, AOL, Netscape, Google, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, the iPhone, Twitter, and now ChatGPT. And I used to believe one of the foundational myths of our culture: that more technology is always better, that we were making progress if we just got more technology, more gadgets, more stuff.
But the many challenges that flow from our digital age—things like isolation and loneliness, rampant pornography and gambling, conspiracism, hate-rewarding algorithms, and cognitive, attentional, and spiritual atrophy—have caused me to lose my faith in the myth of technological progress.
New technology isn’t merely additive, like building blocks stacked higher and higher. It’s more like a species in an ecosystem, a major component of a dynamic system of relations.
Here’s an example. This is a picture of kudzu, a species of vine. In the early 19th century, kudzu was brought to America because it was a nice ornamental plant you could put on your porch. Eventually it became a useful plant for agriculture and feeding livestock. By the 1950s, though, people started to realize just how fast it spread. It would climb up all the trees and take everything over. By then it was too late. They couldn’t stop it. The ecosystem had changed.
The same principle applies when you introduce a new technology. It affects how the entire community relates and functions, sometimes very dramatically. Just think about how culture changes with the advent of major civilizational, world-shaking technologies like the wheel, the printing press, the gun, the smartphone.
Tech also has trade-offs. You can’t just assume that technology is inherently good. That is why I’ve become a little bit of a tech atheist—or at least a tech agnostic. But that’s okay, because I don’t want to place my faith in Silicon Valley. I want to place my faith in Jesus.
So I want to think a little bit about AI with Jesus today. Perhaps with his presence, he can open our eyes and help us approach this challenge with the light that we need.
Let’s begin with this teaching:
“Which of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one, does not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it?”
From the logic of efficiency, this is totally absurd. It’s 1% of the flock. You’ve still got 99%. That’s just part of doing business. You lose the 1%. It’s costly to go on a rescue mission. You might not find the sheep. The flock might be exposed to other risks while you’re away.
The logic of efficiency can treat individuals and human beings as abstractions, as statistics. And sometimes, at the extreme, the logic of efficiency can treat human beings as problems. Efficiency thinking can place value on people for what they can contribute—wealth, intelligence, ideology, preferred racial categories—and those who are perceived as being inefficient or a drain on society can then be pushed to the side, discriminated against, or, at its worst, eliminated. The Nazis were obsessed with efficiency. Today, I would say that elective abortion and assisted suicide can be manifestations of efficiency thinking.
Love, on the other hand, is inefficient. It treats each person as carrying infinite value simply for being a cherished member of the human family—a beloved son or daughter of heavenly parents.
Think about how Jesus went about his ministry. He taught and blessed and healed one by one, or in very small groups. The Gospels are remarkable in their particularity, in the texture of each individual life. Why didn’t Jesus preach from a heavenly megaphone so he could rapidly scale the gospel? Why did he teach one by one or in small groups?
I think it’s because Jesus doesn’t love humanity in the abstract. He loves particular humans: Matthew, Mark, Joseph, Mary, Peter, James, John, Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, the woman at the well, and one of my favorites, Zacchaeus—who shares my name—this short little guy who couldn’t see, climbed a tree, and got a dinner invitation out of it.
Jesus loves each person individually. He loves you. He loves John. He loves Ben. He loves me. Spiritual transformation can’t be done at scale, because it can only happen at the speed of love. And if love is our goal—as it should be—we should be very suspicious of tools that make human connection harder.
Let’s look at another couple of verses:
“The Lord Omnipotent who reigneth, who was and is from all eternity to all eternity, shall come down from heaven among the children of men and shall dwell in a tabernacle of clay.
“For man is spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element inseparably connected receive a fulness of joy.”
When God declared creation good, and when the Word became flesh, we learned that the natural world and our physical bodies are not limits to escape but blessings to inhabit. Embodiment is not a temporary, annoying trial, but an essential partnership of spirit and matter. Full joy only comes through their union.
So we should be very wary of tools and experiences that disembody us, that pull us away from our full range of senses, that promise total freedom but can only deliver artificial imitation.
Consider this story:
“Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’ They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
“But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.’ Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
“At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned thee?’ ‘No one, sir,’ she said. ‘Then neither do I condemn thee,’ Jesus declared. ‘Go now, and leave your life of sin.’”
In this story I see Jesus refusing the algorithm. The algorithm of the Pharisees predicted that the woman deserved a violent death by stoning. Jesus instead responded to this moment with the opposite of an algorithm: wisdom.
Algorithms prioritize speed. But notice how Jesus took a moment to slow down, writing in the sand, reflecting on how to open the situation into a new possibility, into a new consciousness and awareness.
Wisdom is doing what is needed for wholeness in each particular situation. Wisdom is not about abolishing a law, but about uniting spirit and law—having the judgment to seek the flourishing of the one and the whole at the same time.
I love how, when you read the scriptures, you really couldn’t predict what Jesus was going to do in any particular situation. Everyone around him was totally bewildered all the time: “What is he doing?” Predictability is easier. Wisdom is harder, but worth striving for. And we can’t cultivate wisdom in ourselves if we delegate our thinking, our spiritual wrestling, or our inner conscience to a machine.
So I humbly suggest three rules of AI engagement:
Never use AI as a replacement for human connection.
Never use AI to escape the body.
Never use AI to replace an activity that would help you develop wisdom.
A shorter version of these three rules would be: be more Amish.
The Amish are misunderstood as being knee-jerk against all technology. That’s not true. They’re against technology that threatens community connection and spiritual vitality. It’s more accurate to say that they use technology selectively. Televisions, radios, and personal computers are rejected outright because they introduce values contrary to their own. But other types of technology are used or selectively modified: gas grills, shop tools, camping equipment, farm equipment.
They use horse and buggy not because they irrationally hate cars or think they’re evil, but because they rightly understand that cars lead communities to spread out and become disconnected. They want to stay devoted to their local land and their local community. If you can’t drive 80 miles an hour down I-15, you stay in one neighborhood.
I think we could learn a lot from how the Amish approach technology. To meet the new challenges presented by the internet and AI, we might need to be willing to diverge from mainstream culture more aggressively than we have in recent decades. We might need to “make peculiar great again”—peculiar in our focus on community, on the spiritual formation of the next generation, and in our commitment to follow Jesus’ teachings and example even when they diverge substantially from mainstream, tech-mediated culture.
Maybe we need to stop using smartphones—or at least not just give our kids “Gabb phones” and think that solves it. Maybe we need to avoid using ChatGPT for daily thinking tasks, to ensure we don’t atrophy our ability to think for ourselves. Maybe we need to be bolder in challenging the ability of companies and products to spread slop and porn and spiritual poison for ourselves and our children.
The challenge is great, but so is our faith. We can draw on the strength of our loving Heavenly Parents.
I want to conclude by sharing with you my favorite painting. I’ve shown this to Carl Youngblood many times. It’s called The Wedding Dance by Pieter Bruegel. It shows a little village in the Netherlands in the 16th century. To me, it’s my favorite representation of community and conviviality.
In my home ward in St. George, I knew everyone’s name and they knew mine, in large part because I did the inefficient and embodied work of collecting those fast offerings. And my bishop, our scoutmaster, the Relief Society president, the ward chorister, the deacons quorum second counselor—they too did the inefficient and embodied work of serving one another in love as we journeyed toward God.
That service—that love—is what builds Zion. And Zion is where we can dance with the joy that we are seen, we belong, and we are loved.
