I am driving down the highway and I hear a beep. A message pops up on the screen of my car to tell me I have received a text message on WhatsApp and asks if I want to hear it. I touch the button on the screen and a pleasant female voice reads the text message. Then she asks, “Do you want to reply?” I say yes, then say what I want to say. She asks again “Do you want to send the message?” I say yes, and it is done.

This is am example of helpful Artificial Intelligence. There is no person behind the pleasant female voice speaking to me, reading aloud a text message and converting my voice message to text to send to someone, only a computer algorithm.

You can ask AI to research any topic for you. Within seconds it will produce a report, written in clear, grammatically correct, language. Can you trust it? Maybe. Maybe not. How will you know without doing the research yourself? There are reports of university students using AI to write essays for them. How does that help them learn?

There are reports of people receiving strange, sometimes scary, messages from AI. That does not mean that foreign espionage services, extra-terrestrials, or demonic forces have taken control of AI. It is just a powerful algorithm that searches the internet and responds with what seems relevant to the words you have entered from your keyboard.

The real question is, if we outsource our thinking to an algorithm, a robot, does our own ability to think begin to atrophy? If we let an algorithm with no consciemce think for us, does our own conscience begin to atrophy? Maybe even our humanity?

What does it mean to be human? Who would know better than the one who created us? C an we be fully human if we do not have a close relationship with our Creator?