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Job 39:26 "Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars, and spreads his wings toward the south?" This is one of the many questions God asks Job to remind Job that he cannot fully understand nor appreciate all God is doing and why. 

 

As long as the world exists, man will be attempting to tame and control it. Part of that is our duty, we have been given dominion, we are supposed to be God's help-mates in ordering and structuring the natural world in accordance with God's law. But, as with everything else, we have corrupted that duty in many ways. We have taken the power of dominion for ourselves, while ignoring the God who gave it to us, and very often using it to counter His Will (see abortion and transgender surgeries, for example). This has gone on so long now that there are generations who will never consider that what humanity has done with its power may be wrong. They think "progress" is good in and of itself, anything we can figure out how to control or manipulate, we should.

 

And yet, we still cannot cause the hawk to soar, to spread his wings toward the south. We should stop and think about how little we actually can control and be humbled by it. I believe that is why God allows major events and natural phenomena sometimes, to remind us who's in charge. We don't seem to be getting the message, though.

 

One thing (among several), that worries me about AI is that through it we can create worlds that we can control completely. We can cause the hawk to soar in our AI world exactly when and where we dictate; we can create the "perfect" partner and program "him" or "her" to love us as we desire; in short, we can create an unreal world to our liking and use it to escape from the real world in which God is speaking to us. I think that is happening more than we'd like to admit, and I think it explains a lot of the angst in the world. It is so much more difficult to function in a world we cannot control when we spend so much time curating our controlled space to be exactly what we want (blocking voices we don't want to hear, joining groups that offer nothing but support no matter how wrong we are, etc.).

 

I don't know what the answer to this is, for now I only see it getting worse. It is a tremendous playground for the devil. But, the devil can't do anything that God doesn't permit, and God, as always, is in control. Just like Job could not understand why God was doing what He was doing, nor can I. I do, however, trust that whatever He's doing will be for all of our ultimate good and will be greater than I can possibly imagine. And I do know no world we create could ever even come close  to the one He has in mind for us.