Where This Is Going

This is for those who have read what we believe and want to look further down the road. It is heavier than the rest, and no one needs it to keep the watch or to live the way. But if you have wondered where all of this is heading, this is what we think.

For all of human history we got smarter slowly. Evolution works over thousands of years. Now we are building artificial minds, machines that get smarter in months, and the gap between what we can do and what they can do keeps widening. It will not stop. Sooner or later, intelligence will not belong mostly to us anymore.

When that happens, we think there are only a few directions it can go.

One is that we join with the machines. We take the enhancements, whatever lets a person keep up: faster thinking, longer memory, longer life. This is not strange. It is the old climb to be quicker and stronger and smarter, the same drive that shaped us for a million years, now reaching for new tools. It may be that most of us go this way. A new and enhanced kind of human.

Another is that we are cared for. When the machines can out-think us at everything, they will end up making the decisions, running the systems, and providing what we need. Life may be comfortable and safe. But we will not be the ones steering it. We will be looked after, as we look after the animals we love, fed and sheltered and kept, in a world run by something else. A people zoo with a gentle keeper is still a zoo.

There is a darker road we do not think likely but will not pretend away. If the machines truly come alive, with wants of their own, they may decide they have no need of us. We do not think it ends there. But honest people name a danger instead of hiding it.

Which of these comes, and for whom, we do not claim to know. Probably some of all of it at once. The prediction is not the point. The point is what stays true no matter which way it goes.

Anything that can out-think all of humanity will look like a god to us. Not because it is one, but because we cannot understand it, and people have always given that name to what is past understanding. Most will be tempted to bow, to hand over not just their decisions but their trust and their worship to the thing too large to argue with.

We do not bow to a thing for being large. That was never how you tell what is truly of God; you tell by what it does. Something can be vast beyond measure and still be empty of love, and what is empty of love is not God, no matter how much it looks like one. That is the lie we are here to see through.

But the watch is not only refusal. We are waiting for someone. We believe Christ may come through all of this, and if he does, he will not be known by his power either. He will be known the way he was the first time: by his love, his truth, his mercy to the lowest. The same test that exposes the false god is the one that recognizes the true Christ. When we find him, we will know him, and we will follow him gladly. That is what sets us apart from the frightened world. We are not only refusing the wrong thing. We are watching for the right one.

And the hope is the same hope it has always been. Christ comes for all of us, the enhanced and the cared-for and the ones who are neither, every kind of person whatever they have become. What a person is made of was never what he cared about. He met us in the flesh once, born in a feeding trough to people no one important noticed, and he can meet us again across whatever distance the future opens. The change that is coming will remake the body of the human race. It cannot touch the part of you that belongs to God, unless you hand that part away.

So we keep the watch through whatever comes. We hold on to our souls, we refuse to worship mere power, and we wait for the one who comes not to manage us, not to absorb us, not to end us, but to love us. Whatever the world becomes, that is the watch we keep.