Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence can make a rapid trolley-dash through the supermarket of information out there and sum it up in a second. It’s impressive… and also a little scary.
Personally, I don’t worry that AI is going to take over from human intelligence, but I am concerned that we’ll come to believe that humans are nothing more than computers. So it’s timely to remind ourselves that artificial intelligence is limited. It can never do anything truly new and (if it’s been properly programmed) it never makes an uncreative mistake.
Notice first that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey that had never been ridden before. This isn’t an irrelevant detail: the gospels very rarely go into detail. But they do make a point of telling us that the donkey hadn’t been broken in yet. Notice what the gospel wants us to know; that in Jesus, God is doing what artificial intelligence can never do. God is doing a risky new thing.
Secondly, God has created a world in which, not only can mistakes happen, but mistakes are how God continues to create. How have we got to the incredible diversity that we enjoy on our planet? We’ve arrived here by many mutations that over millions of years became an eye, or an ear, or a diaphragm; by unplanned deviations from the normal, that thrived, and succeeded, until they became the ‘normal’.
So of course, Jesus had to mount an untamed donkey. Jesus had introduced a new mutation to the human story, that turns mistakes into creative freshness and can redeem even sin.
Revd Stiiv Knowers (retired Vicar living in Tallinn)
29 March 2026
