Would an Angel Use AI?: Discerning Good Work in an Age of Efficiency

Would an angel use AI?

This whimsical question occurred to me as I contemplated how AI is shaping our daily experience of work. For many of my friends and colleagues, AI has already shifted their regular routines at the office. An attorney at my church tells me he uses a custom AI legal software daily, condensing the first step of his research for a new project from an hour to a few minutes. One of my coworkers at the Food Bank uses a popular chatbot to brainstorm ideas for communication pieces and refine language for grants. A technologist/spiritual director friend is using an AI coding tool to launch a sermon feedback app.

For my part, I love using a text-to-voice app to read articles to me while I’m in the car. Yesterday, I listened to a self-deprecating reflection about the spiritual dangers of chatbots from scholar Matthew Milliner . . . in the (computerized) voice of John Rhys-Davies. 

It no longer takes imagination to see myself and other human beings using AI for everyday tasks. But what about an angel? The image tickles my fancy. And I don’t mean a cheerful, bumbling angel like Clarence from It’s A Wonderful Life or a sly, avuncular angel like Al from Angels In the Outfield. (Where does Hollywood get its ideas about angels, anyway?) I mean a bonafide, biblical, make-you-fall-down-dead minister of the presence of the holy. Would such a creature have any use for our AI tools?

The Presence of the Holy

My gut tells me the answer is “no,” but I’m not sure why that is. After all, the biblical accounts of angels show them using heavenly analogs for human technologies. Angels have been known to use stairways, swords (a lot of swords, actually), staffs, tongs, trumpets, scrolls, and sickles. Why not AI?

Even so, I can’t get the image of angelic AI to work in my mind. Somehow, it seems right to envision an angel holding a staff or a sword as they declare the mysteries of God to awestruck human beings. But to imagine an angel holding a smartphone? Laughable. Why is that?

My best guess is that there’s something about the simplicity of ancient technologies that makes them more fit conduits for angelic ministry. There’s a directness and immediacy to a staff or a sword that you don’t get with a smartphone. Complex digital technologies like AI are remote in their functioning. I hold a smartphone in my hand, but it’s connecting to a data center somewhere far away to run my query. I’m pretty sure that whatever tools they use, angels do not have to wait on lag time or buffering or put their work on hold during a server crash. 

Angelic ministry is, after all, all about presence. One of those sword-bearing angels is “the commander of the army of the Lord” who meets Joshua and commands him, “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy” (Joshua 5:14-15 NIV). The ground is holy because the angel is there, and the angel comes from God. In both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, we see angels functioning like mobile outposts of divine presence and purpose. The angel Gabriel describes his standing in such terms to Zechariah: “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news” (Luke 1:19 NIV). Whenever angels show up, they are there. And through them, God is there.

Are We There Yet?

If angelic ministry is so intensely present that it makes some technologies seem superfluous or laughable, then what about human work? Does the remoteness of AI make us less present and less likely to minister the presence of God to those around us?

Here, we would do well not to make sweeping statements of either condemnation or endorsement. The “AI” label is being used to describe a dozen different technologies right now, and most of them are rapidly evolving. To the extent that our judgment rests on the perceived quality of AI results, it, too, will need constant updating. Then again, if we wait until the technology “gets there” to render judgment, we will wait forever. Technology never “arrives”; the horizon of change is always receding.

For example, a couple years ago, I fiddled around with a chatbot and decided the hype was overblown. Query responses were bland, error-ridden, and needed so many rounds of revision that the tool wasn’t actually saving any time.  Seeing what chatbots can pull together now, I’m flabbergasted. Responses contain nuances that, if coming from a human writer, would make me say, “How insightful!” and note their name to go look up what else they’d written.

Bodies of Work

But even there, the comparison to a human author entails a “catch,” a clue about how presence matters in our work. My habit of looking up the names of authors comes from my desire for discovery. Each human author is particular, distinct—an undiscovered continent of imaginative life. A good essay or poem is often the rumor of a world ready and waiting to be explored. As I step into it, that world always has its own flora and fauna and topographical oddities. An author becomes present to me in their writing through the intricacies of their human personality, each so different from the others: Dallas Willard is not Madeleine L’Engle is not bell hooks is not Ignatius of Loyola.

What’s more, human writers are limited. A human being can only write so many books in one lifetime, and so, with patience, it is possible to get to know a writer’s “body of work.” Like the human body, it has definite starting and stopping places, and even in the best specimens is usually a little flabby here and there. Part of every author’s legacy is the “null curriculum” of what they did not write. What they chose to say, out of all the things they could have said, is itself part of their gift to their readers.

Distinctiveness and limitation are both features of human life, not bugs. They are part of how we are present to one another. When I deeply pay attention to one human being and listen to them, I am surrendering all other possible uses of my personal energies for that interlude of time. There is, in that sense, infinite opportunity cost in every act of embodied, limited, distinctive love.

When Inefficiency Is the Point

The word “love” brings us to the world of persons. Regardless of how efficient and advanced it is, a machine, as long as it remains a machine, cannot love. Love requires will, an interior life, the capacity for freedom and choice—features of human (and presumably, angelic) experience that AI still cannot offer, despite the marketing ballyhoo. If ever the “technology” does come to possess these qualities, then Pinocchio will have become a real boy. The question of how to properly honor machines that are no longer machines remains a meaningful ethical debate, but still the purview of science fiction.

Part of what makes human love—and human work—so meaningful is that it requires the presence of a limited, distinct human being. Think about the difference between getting an automated marketing email and getting a handwritten note in the mail. The meaning of the note is embedded in the personhood of the writer, the time and thought they gave to it even though they could have spent it in some other way.

Christian scholar Read Schuchardt writes that “the opposite of love is not hatred; it is efficiency.” Sometimes, the inefficiency is the point.

Maybe that’s why I can’t imagine an angel using AI. The ministry of angels, perhaps always, is a kind of personal presence that can only be appropriately mediated through the simplest of tools. For us, there are almost certainly times and spaces when doing things “the efficient way” is an appropriate and faithful way to discharge our responsibilities. Discerning uses of AI can honor Jesus as Lord as we follow him in our daily work.

But we would do well to pay attention to what gives our work meaning. If the point of a given work task is presence, then good work is almost certainly inefficient work. Getting more done, more quickly, but with less of a personal touch is a net loss for thank you notes, for much writing, and for accountable decision-making. In domains like pastoral care, therapy, and spiritual direction, true counsel arises from knowing who you’re counseling and insight about what to say and not to say that comes from having skin in the game of life, not just hyper-adept pattern recognition. Even in more technical fields, I imagine we’ll only see how much humanity the work needs after we try to remove it.

We need to discern when AI is amplifying our efforts, and when it’s dehumanizing them. Much of what matters most in life cannot move faster than the pace that Schuchardt aptly calls “the slow, difficult work of embodying God’s love, one embodied soul at a time.”