The Ahistoric Age Meets AI: Time, Memory, and Being Human
(Episode 80)
Dr. Sarah Irving-Stonebraker — historian and author of Priests of History — returns to PostEverything to explore what happens when artificial intelligence meets a culture that has already lost its grip on the past.
In her first appearance, she diagnosed "the ahistoric age": a moment that treats history as irrelevant, grows ignorant of it, and reduces it to an ideological weapon. Here, John Houmes and Brad Edwards push the conversation forward into the age of AI. Does AI help us make sense of the past or sever us from it? Does it hand us mastery over knowledge while letting wisdom slip away?
The conversation moves through how AI is quietly reshaping our very experience of time; the day Sarah asked AI to retrieve real manuscript photographs and it fabricated them instead; how the eighteenth-century idea of "useful knowledge" once ranked whole civilizations and returns now in the age of algorithms; the connection between the drive to master knowledge and the oldest temptation in Genesis; why a large language model can never produce the idiosyncratic spark of genuine beauty; and how the church's ancient, embodied practices offer a hopeful counter-formation — anchoring us in a larger story in an anxious age.
A rich, wide-ranging conversation for anyone trying to stay human, and hopeful, in the age of AI.
Sarah's book: Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age. Her next book — an invitation to the Christian story — is in progress.
"When there is no larger story, you have no meaning and no purpose. These are counterfeit stories, because they don't have an end."
— Dr. Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Resources:
Priests of History (Sarah Irving-Stonebraker) • Sarah's forthcoming book, an invitation to the Christian story • The Reason for Church (Brad Edwards) • The Drama of Discipleship with Dr. Greg Perry (previous episode) • Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, Lord Kames — Scottish Enlightenment "useful knowledge" • Francis Bacon — "the improvement of mankind's estate" • Robert Boyle — "priests of nature" • Max Weber • George Santayana • Antonín Dvořák — New World Symphony • James K. A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time • Tristan Harris / Center for Humane Technology, Your Undivided Attention • Pope Leo's encyclical on AI • Dallas Willard / Eugene Peterson — "a long obedience in the same direction" • transhumanism; metamodernism
AI, artificial intelligence, ahistoric age, Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, Priests of History, history, useful knowledge, epistemology, time, spiritual formation, counterformation, church, liturgy, wisdom, beauty, technology and faith, Christianity and AI, discipleship, Post Everything
#PostEverything #AI #AhistoricAge #SarahIrvingStonebraker #PriestsOfHistory #History #Faith #SpiritualFormation #Church #Wisdom #ChristianPodcast #Technology #Discipleship
CHAPTERS
00:00 ⏳ Time as Meaningless Moments
01:21 👋 Meet Dr. Irving-Stonebraker
02:50 🤖 When AI Meets Ahistoricism
05:25 ⌛ AI Alters Our Time
08:59 🪞 The Digital Pool of Narcissists
10:57 💬 No Real Relationship
12:00 📚 The Biggest Epistemic Shift
13:56 🏺 Can We Still Know the Past?
15:53 📜 AI Faked the Manuscripts
17:27 🎬 Midway and Missing Context
19:09 ⚠️ Rewriting History at Scale
21:53 🕳️ The Collapse of Trust
23:36 🕰️ Counterfeit Stories, No End
25:43 🧭 Useful Knowledge Explained
31:51 🍎 Mastery and the Fall
38:52 🎨 Beauty, Kitsch, and Creativity
44:01 ⛪ The Pagan DNA of AI
46:08 🌱 Givenness and Counterformation
50:18 🕯️ Two Stories Entwined
54:01 ✨ Finding Hope in Small Things
57:09 📖 Sarah's Next Book
58:12 🪶 Priests Who Steward Stories
1:02:52 💭 John and Brad Reflect
1:07:28 ⏱️ Stewarding Time and Attention
1:12:51 🧍 What Will Humans Become?
