Extinction and Imagination

Nuclear weapons, AI, and the Psalms

“Genuine political narratives open up a perspective on a new order of things; they paint pictures of possible worlds. Today, we singularly lack such hopeful narratives of the future.” Byung-Chul Han

Gone are the great political theories of the 19th and 20th centuries. Marxism has proven inadequate. Late capitalism seems prone to consuming itself. Liberal democracies are harder to keep than we imagined with the fall of the Soviet Union and potential end of history.

Our bold visions for what’s next may be most clear in what’s spewing forth from Silicon Valley: except even the visionaries are both enthralled with artificial intelligence and uttering their fears. (One of the ‘godfathers’ of AI, Geoffrey Hinton—who won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on AI—estimates a 10-20% chance that AI causes human extinction in the next three decades. To be precise, he predicted this at the end of December, so that leaves 29.5 years left.)

These bold visions have a dark side, namely, that we might completely destroy humanity. This brings to mind, of course, the atomic bomb: the first technology humans invented where we might destroy each other on such a scale. And it’s no surprise that recent news includes how to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Perhaps this is due to the great historical question today: when will we kill ourselves? How can we game the system to survive a little longer?

In one sense, we’ve lived with the specter of our own extinction for so long that it’s both unreal and inevitable.

It’s no wonder that we have lost hold of genuine political narratives that paint pictures of possible worlds. Instead, we have narratives of bald profit. While nuclear weapons were a natural result of competition with the Nazis (though we could debate their actual use), AI isn’t being developed as an answer to win a war; it’s the answer to “how can we make more money?”

And yes, I include an obsession with efficiency as a means to answering the money question.

Photo by Yves Alarie on Unsplash

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In Psalm 9, the psalmist (and authorship is traditionally attributed to David) writes, “The enemies have vanished in everlasting ruins; / their cities you have rooted out; / the very memory of them has perished” (Psalm 9:6, NRSV). This is an imaginative stance that the psalmist takes—for seven verses later he declares, “See what I suffer from those who hate me…” The imaginative leap is that the enemies have already perished in God’s great judgment; the Lord has set things right.

This seems to be both a reference to an actual event—as the psalmist opens with poem with giving thanks—and a vision of what will actually become. You judged this one circumstance, which causes me to imagine everything being set right.

The spiritual life always takes such imaginative leaps. In psalm 11, again attributed to David, he creates a juxtaposition:

If the foundations are destroyed,

what can the righteous do?

The Lord is in his holy temple;

the Lord’s throne is in heaven (11:3-4, NRSV)

This isn’t pie-in-the-sky rhetoric that you may hear from your holier-than-thou aunt; it’s an imaginative leap. The poet’s imagination is tuned to see God on the throne. And while he may see glimpses of justice or things being made right that give credence to God being on the throne, there are still things very much wrong. The foundations are being destroyed. This is a stubborn and white-knuckled faith, not arrogant, but deeply imaginative and surely formed by our most imaginative practices: prayer and meditation, song and community.

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If we lack hopeful narratives for the future, this stems from a lack of imagination. In the book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson lay out a progressive future vision—one where technology helps solve human problems rather than creating human threats. While I have reservations about some of what they offer, I applaud the offering: they are attempting to create a vision of what might become.

Where Christians have become embroiled in competition, in winning elections, in the zero-sum game of electoral politics, they have equally lost an imaginative vision of the future beyond “winning.” But this is not what the psalmist writes about. The defeat of enemies in the psalms is much more about justice than winning, about God setting the world right.

The follower of Jesus ought to imagine a world flowering with creativity, with the poor being lifted up, the stranger welcomed, the orphan given a home. Or, in more modern parlance: with healing and hope (and a home) for the unhoused, with greater opportunities for people of all economic classes, with medical care for those who need it, with hospitality for those who are lonely, alienated, and disconnected.

We can debate the political ends to this vision, but if we ever need to debate compassion, it means something has gone deeply awry. (You’ll note I’m not prescribing a morality for inclusion in the Christian community, but rather a Christian vision for the common good—we would do better to differentiate the two more often.)

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The imaginative vision is a narrative of the future. For the psalmist to both declare that the foundations are destroyed and God is on is throne isn’t Pollyanna-ish, nor is it an allowance to let the world burn and let God figure it out. The closing argument of Psalm 11 rings truer:

For the Lord is righteous;

he loves righteous deeds

the upright shall behold his face (11:7, NRSV).

God on his throne calls for a greater engagement in “righteous deeds.” That is, it calls us to take an imaginative leap and then act out the story. And the “upright” shall behold God’s face, which we could take both as a promise and a natural outcome: radical care for others, offering hope and hospitality are ways to experience God’s presence and an intimacy with the divine. This is a way to see God’s face and experience the spiritual intimacy we long for.

The answer to war with Iran or nuclear threats or AI ruining the world? The foundations have always been under threat of being destroyed. It’s as old as the Tower of Babel: people using the latest technology to make a name for themselves, to get more for themselves, to protect themselves. Read a story or watch a movie to see that such activity always is destructive. And the figurative destruction: that our future is diminished to the decisions of a few powerful men.

To quote another psalm: “He who sits in the heavens laughs.”

Our future, both individually and collectively, is not dependent on AI or halting nuclear proliferation or a host of other things (climate change, the stock market, your salary). This is the imaginative leap for us to take. Do we trust a power and a story outside of these things?

And, crucially, does this God—for whatever belief you have, such a power and story would necessarily become a god—point us back toward our neighbors so we enact this story. Do we create and strive for goodness for all, and moral demands for those who want to live within this same story and belief?

This narrative of the future claims there is more at work. We have tears to shed with those suffering. We have dirt to clean off our own hands. We have a whispered hope to share over coffee and meals. This hope becomes most tangible not in the headlines (read the beginning of Luke 3 and its recitation of power; God moves far from the headlines and into the wilderness) but in the everyday acts of people. Someone painting. Mowing a neighbor’s lawn. Sharing a meal. Volunteering. Protesting. Daring to imagine a future with more love, creativity, hospitality, kindness, patience, peace, and hope than we currently have. Praying for that future—that way of being, that kingdom—to come.

And getting to work—doing our part—to join its arrival today.