If we want to know how AI will shape the future we need to think of it less as a computer program and more like infrastructure. Having AI is more like having electricity than like having Microsoft Word. As it is integrated into every task the tasks become easier. I’ve mentioned some of these tasks. But there are many more places that AI is already embedded in daily life. It is speeding up medical diagnosis and designing treatments. It is guiding surgeons. It is balancing loads in power grids. It is doing logistics planning in many industries. It will soon drive our cars and trucks for us. It can already manage our homes. It is and will continue to provide basic services for the house bound and disabled, or for that matter anyone. It is already playing a role in weather forecasting. But it is also in the background in almost every business through its ability to find patterns in large amounts of data.

And in doing these things, if we manage it well, AI will give us more leisure to be human for one another, and to be creative with one another in ways that we do not have time for now. But only if we manage it well. Because like every other advance in human knowledge there is the potential for marginalization. In the recent TV story Andor there is a chilling series of episodes in which humans are used like robots, because it is cheaper and easier to enslave humans that build robots. AI will serve us only if we preserve our humanity. In the UMC we have a prayer that we be “spared from grinding toil that destroys the fullness of life.” AI has the potential to be an answer to this prayer, if we won’t confuse artificial intelligence with human intelligence, or artificial intelligence with human consciousness.

The question isn’t whether we will use it. We are already using it. We are using it even when we don’t know we are using it. The question is how we will use it and whether it will use us. And those decisions will depend on our commitment to understand our own humanity and that of others, and our decision to cultivate that humanity as the fundamental response to our creator’s first command to be fruitful and multiply.