That question is no longer theoretical. We live in a world of AI companions, emotional chatbots, and wearable devices that promise to track our stress, improve our sleep, and help us manage our inner lives. Some of these tools can be genuinely useful. But the more persuasive they become, the more we need to ask: are they helping us flourish as human beings, or training us to settle for a simulation of care?

Few people are better equipped to help us think about that question than Rosalind Picard, a professor at MIT and founder of a research group at the MIT Media Lab that develops technologies designed to recognize and respond to human emotion. She has spent decades working at the cutting edge of affective computing, a discipline that she founded. But what makes this conversation especially compelling is that she is not dazzled by the rhetoric of AI, but clear-eyed about both its promise and its danger.

In this episode, Roz helps us think carefully about the difference between reading the outward signs of emotion and actually knowing a person’s inner life. She explains why AI can imitate empathy without feeling anything at all, why emotionally intelligent technologies can sometimes support human flourishing, and why companion chatbots in particular should raise alarm bells for Christians. Along the way, we talk about consciousness, embodiment, meaning, and the temptation to become, in C. S. Lewis’s phrase, “too easily pleased.”

Roz joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to ask what AI can really know about our emotions, what it can never know, and why the richest forms of love, care, and meaning can never be reduced to code.

Resource Mentioned: Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom

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That question sits at the heart of this episode with Brett McCracken. Brett is Senior Editor at The Gospel Coalition and a perceptive writer on faith, media, technology, and culture. In our conversation, he helps us see that AI threatens not only jobs or industries, but something deeper: our sense that the process of making, wrestling, waiting, and learning might actually matter. Great art, he argues, is never just about the polished final product. It is also about praise, patience, formation, and the personal gift one human being offers to another. 

We talk about why wisdom is more than information, why AI can imitate emotion without sharing in human suffering, and why boredom, solitude, and even daydreaming may be among the most important human habits to protect in an age of constant optimization. Brett also reflects on the attention economy and the subtle ways our desires are being shaped by technologies designed to keep us looking, clicking, and consuming. 

Brett joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to explore what AI is doing to art, attention, and discipleship, and why some of the most human things we do may also be the least efficient.

Resources Mentioned:

• The Wisdom Pyramid by Brett McCracken
• Scrolling Ourselves to Death by Brett McCracken and Collin Hansen
• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
• The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
• Resonance by Hartmut Rosa
• The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen
• On The Death of Daydreaming by Christine Rosen
• The Wisdom of Sleep by Brett McCracken

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That question lies at the heart of this episode with Stephen Driscoll. As AI becomes more capable, many people feel a growing sense of anxiety about what human beings are for. If our value rests on intelligence, creativity, or productivity, then AI will always seem to threaten our worth. But Stephen argues that this fear reveals a deeper problem: we were never meant to ground our identity in performance in the first place.

Stephen is a Christian ministry worker in Australia and the author of Made in Our Image: God, Artificial Intelligence and You. In our conversation, he turns to Genesis 1 and 2 to show that human dignity is not something we achieve but something we receive. We are made in the image of God, and that means no machine can take away what God has given.

Stephen joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to explore why AI is forcing fresh questions about identity, and why the Christian answer offers a surer foundation for human worth than any technological vision ever could.

Resources Mentioned:

• Made in Our Image by Stephen Driscoll 
• Dominion by Tom Holland 
• The Experience Machine by Robert Nozick 
• Your Brain on ChatGPT by MIT Media Lab

PREORDER The AI Apocalypse: A Survival Guide for Humanity, featuring Ridenour, Watkin, Brett McCracken, and many others, such as Ben Sasse and Alan Noble.

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That question drives this episode with Michael Keller. Michael is lead pastor of Redeemer Lincoln Square in New York City, and he also brings a rare technical perspective to the conversation, having completed doctoral work in computational linguistics using early machine learning methods. In our discussion, he argues that AI can give us information, polish, and efficiency, but it cannot give us the one thing at the heart of Christian life: real relationship. It can help draft a prayer, but it cannot pray. It can mimic understanding, but it cannot know or love a person.

We talk about friction, formation, and the danger of outsourcing the very struggles through which God shapes us. Michael makes the striking point that AI offers the appearance of depth without the cost of it. That is true in ministry, in relationships, and even in our devotional lives. If prayer, preaching, and discipleship become frictionless, something essential is taken from us.

Again and again, Michael brings the conversation back to a richer Christian vision of the human person. We are more than our outputs. We are not defined by efficiency, performance, or the ability to process information. Michael joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to explore what AI can do for us, what it can never do, and why this cultural moment is forcing us to ask afresh what it really means to be human.

Resources Mentioned:

• Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin

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That question runs through this episode with Rachel Gilson. Rachel is Director of Theological Development and Culture for Cru and the author of Born Again This Way and Parenting Without Panic in an LGBT-Affirming World. In our conversation, she brings unusual clarity to the question of work in the age of AI: not simply what these tools can do, but what they may be doing to our integrity, our vocation, and our sense of ourselves.

We talk about writing, voice, and the temptation to present work that is not really ours as though it were. AI may be able to write, but it cannot witness. It cannot speak from a life, a body, a history, or a situated perspective. That is why this episode is not a simple rejection of AI, but a careful exercise in discernment: learning where these tools may genuinely help, and where they risk hollowing out the very human work God has given us to do.

We also explore desire, embodiment, personhood, and the difference between using a tool and being quietly deformed by it. Rachel joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to ask how Christians can work faithfully in the age of AI, and how the Scriptures help us hold together honesty, community, embodiment, and hope.

Resources Mentioned:

• Born Again This Way by Rachel Gilson
• Parenting Without Panic in an LGBT-Affirming World by Rachel Gilson
• Biblical Critical Theory by Christopher Watkin
• Entering into Rest by Oliver O’Donovan
• The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis

PREORDER The AI Apocalypse: A Survival Guide for Humanity, featuring Ridenour, Watkin, Brett McCracken, and many others, such as Ben Sasse and Alan Noble.

JOIN the conversation on Discord, along with other Silicon Spiritualities listeners.

Help The Gospel Coalition renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel: Donate today.

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PREORDER The AI Apocalypse: A Survival Guide for Humanity, featuring Ridenour, Watkin, Brett McCracken, and many others, such as Ben Sasse and Alan Noble.

JOIN the conversation on Discord, along with other Silicon Spiritualities listeners.

Help The Gospel Coalition renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel: Donate today.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.