What Does Faith Look Like When God Answers Your Prayers?
Spoilers follow for the video game Return To Grace as well as the TV show Mrs Davis, although I would consider Mrs Davis essentially unspoilable and both pieces of media well worth your time even after reading this piece.
I’m not a religious person, really. My view of reality is rooted in the senses - Seeing is Believing, and all that. At the same time, I have no problem accepting yours or anyone’s views on how this world came to be, our purpose in all this, and what may or may not come after this life. If there’s anything I’ve come to understand over the last few decades, it’s that really, we truly “know" very little.
Artificial Intelligence as a concept has been in the collective consciousness for a while now. “AI” in 2023 is synonymous with ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and Dall-E 2. These technologies have quickly supplanted crypto as the leading topic du jour for cable news networks, terminally online twitter diehards and discussions around Grandma’s dinner table alike.
About halfway through Return To Grace’s 3 hour first-person story, something switches in my brain and I become heavily invested. The various companion AI modules on protagonist Adie’s wrist begin bouncing back and forth with commentary, leading to a question. What compelled you so much that, in your search of the long lost AI Grace, you flew one-way to a frozen planet with only 8 hours of oxygen in your canister on arrival?
When I hear stories of people moving half way across the country with nothing but a few dollars and the clothes on their back, I’m deeply mystified. I guess some people are just built different, and are capable of taking that leap of faith. I guess at the very least, if it all goes south, they can go home.
As you delve deeper into the remote facility you are uncovering, the titular Grace is revealed to be an AI built around listening to the problems of humans and trying to solve them. Pilgrims were once summoned to Grace, and were granted one “wish”. Grace would then use these wishes to generate sermons, preached by “Keepers”, in order to influence people to live better lives, helping to guide humanity out of their worst impulses.
"God works in mysterious ways,” the religious people in my life have told me time and time again. When you pray, God does not immediately respond to your requests like you’re on a late night phone call with Him. It’s called faith for a reason. But, what if God did answer? What would we do then?
It might seem like the elaborate twists and turns Mrs Davis - the new single season one-and-done series from the minds of Damon Lindelof (Watchman, The Leftovers) and Tara Hernandez (Big Bang Theory) - lead the plot to lose focus at times, yet it never strays from its central questions surrounding AI and faith.
Through a tight 8 episodes, we see a world where seemingly everyone has an AI friend(?) in their ear at all times, guiding and nurturing them. Sister Simone, a nun who vehemently opposes this AI, goes on a quest to find the literal Holy Grail in order to shut it down. Outside the seemingly ridiculous hi-jinks each episode offers, the show leans into the idea that much of the world moved away from God and toward AI simply because it’s manifestly there for them when they need it. Simone is one of the only people immune to the AI’s pull, for there is a very physical reason why she holds her faith in the Lord - when she prays, she is mentally transported to a diner, staffed by none other than Jesus himself.
"Seeing is Believing.” There’s something about witnessing something with your own 5 senses that confirms an undeniable truth in your mind, something that just can’t be experienced with faith alone.
No wonder we want to build God ourselves.
Artificial Intelligence has been the “new frontier” of technology for decades now. OpenAI and its products, BingGPT, Google and its rushed AI have arrived. Chat bots are here to answer your every request. Media producing AI will generate pictures and clips on a whim. AI will augment your job (or replace it altogether) in ways you can’t even imagine yet. We are on the precipice of an AI revolution - it’s coming.
Except… it’s really not. While marketed as such by tech bro evangelists, these technologies are not actually AI. They are, put simply, huge databases carefully collated by human hands, generating output based on specific input. Large Language Models, or LLM’s, are algorithms “trained” on (entirely human created) datasets and simply use math to try and produce output that looks coherent to the human eye. They may have the A down, but the I is yet to be seen.
AI in 2023 is not Grace, nor is it Mrs Davis. The words ChatGPT creates look like real sentences because it’s based off of the grammar of billions of sentences written by people. Dall-E generates it’s images based on the pixel patterns of images created by human hands. In thinking of these technologies as Artificial Intelligence, we are simply ascribing that moniker to the tech itself. Trusting its output, interpreting it as meaning. Imbuing it with our faith.
Recently, one of my religious work colleagues asked me why I believe in evolution. To him, there’s a giant leap between what a human mind can do - reason, consider further outside our instinctual needs, search for meaning and purpose outside of survival - that separates us from all other living things, and is proof that we must have to have been created by a higher being. I understand the science behind evolution, but I can’t tell you exactly how the human brain developed these things. I just… feel like it’s right.
We all put faith in something. I don’t begrudge anyone for believing in God, the big bang, a pantheon of deities or anything else that you can possibly come up with, as long as it does not harm others.
Just be careful of misplacing it.