Continuing the faith and politics series, James Spencer and Ashish Varma turn to artificial intelligence — starting with the data centers going up across the country, which consume enormous land, power, and water while generating far fewer local jobs than the factories and mills they're often compared to.
From there the conversation widens. Both push on the promise of efficiency: whether a technology that lets you work faster has actually given anyone time back, what gets lost when a middle schooler reaches for the calculator instead of the long-form work, and why the steps toward a goal may matter as much as the goal. James introduces the idea of the tyranny of small decisions — that we adopt technologies one at a time, with clear near-term benefits and no view of where the accumulation leads — and argues that Christians at least have a telos against which to measure the trade.
They also discuss what a soft transhumanism looks like when it becomes ambient, why converging interests don't require a conspiracy, and where ordinary practices of resistance are still available.
Chapters (approximate, from speaker turns — verify against the final cut):
00:00 Data centers: land, power, water, and jobs that don't come
02:25 Does theology touch everyday life at all?
06:39 The efficiency promise, and what it actually delivered
12:49 Efficiency for whom? Paper, batteries, and hidden costs
15:00 The calculator, the long way, and what process builds
16:30 Phil Jackson and trusting the steps
18:33 The tyranny of small decisions
22:45 No telos, no way to weigh a trade-off
25:06 What would you give up to not have the data center?
26:00 Sealed devices and the compromises we already made
32:17 Vinyl, print books, flip phones: the analog return
36:29 Practices of resistance: skip the summary, read the page
43:10 Local action and Hauerwas on assimilation
45:27 Converging interests aren't a conspiracy
51:00 Soft transhumanism and the limits we can't engineer away
58:20 Bodies that need to move, creation that has limits
1:02:00 Atrophy: what we lose the capacity to do
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