When is Technology Not the Answer?

Hey, Adam, I've been thinking lately because I saw that there was a Michelin star restaurant and I realized that that's also the name of a tire company. But the connection is not clear to me. Is this something you've heard of before? Oh, man, Luke, I love this story.

It's such a fun thing of like, how did this get connected to this? Because you're right. Michelin tires and you've got the like the logo with the guy that has the big white, you know, his big white guy. He's got all the like tires.

He's made of tires, I think. Yes. And, and really, really fancy restaurants. In fact, I went to school in, at PUC, um, Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley.

And there are Michelin rated restaurants there. where people will go to a restaurant on a particular night because they know the name of the chef that's there. It's nuts. It blew my mind. I had no idea.

Yeah. It feels like a completely different world. Completely different world that a broke college student has no business knowing anything about. It was interesting though.

And what I learned was that these two brothers in France, I think they started their company back in, I want to say like 1889. and they only had 3000 cars in France at the time. They started the Michelin tire company and they noticed a thing that for so many years, people, for really the entirety of the existence of France as a country, they had very strong grooves in their mind and grooves around their neighborhood and their town that they would walk from this place to this place. So they'd maybe have a horse from this place to this place. And when you introduced the car, the vehicle, suddenly they didn't need to go any further than they had been going before.

People would get all excited. They'd buy a car and then for the most part, it would just sit. And these young entrepreneur tire makers like, I wonder. How can we get people to drive more?

And then they created the Michelin Guide. Have you heard the Michelin Guide? Yeah, I have heard of this because I, as I said, it's something that is often associated with food, but like it was failing me as to where the connection is to tires. So what you're saying is these guys that created this They did it as a tool or a means by which to get people to use up their tires faster so they could buy more tires from Michelin.

Is that what you're saying? Exactly. And so they created the three star system. One star means that good quality ingredients.

It's a good restaurant. Two stars means that it's worth a detour and three stars means that it's a destination. Right. This has become a place of legend where businesses are made and lost over the number of Michelin stars, but even a one star at the beginning, like, ah, that was kind of a nice thing.

But now it's a worldwide, they are very selective. And I think it's hilarious and incredibly interesting as far as how humans work and the entrepreneurship of these two brothers to come up with a way to get people to Use their tires up quicker. Well, this is, this is the age old story. This is how do markets adopt new technologies, right?

And so. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's fascinating when you think of the early adopter curve and some of the products that we can look back on in our lifetimes where people bought a what and how much did it cost at the time? And it did, it was like terrible, like TVs when they first came out and stuff like that.

Technology moves fast, and I am excited to dive more into this subject with you about when is technology not the answer and when is technology the answer. I'd love to dive into this question with you a little bit more. I think it's interesting because depending who you ask, if you asked the people that were around the invention of the tractor or the car, if you asked people around that time, is this a good thing or a bad thing? vastly different opinions, right? There'd be the early adopters like we were talking about to be like, this is great.

But there'd also be people that would be, you know, this is, this is evil. And there's certainly this great documented evidence for when, you know, TV and media started to get produced radio where people would say, oh, no, it's like evil spirits or whatever it is. There are people that really had very strong negative reactions to it. And I think they would say, well, there's the line.

That's the line where technology is, is, is good and bad and we should draw it no further than what we're comfortable with and what we're familiar with today. For sure. Yeah. I could see people buying early.

We don't feel that way now though, right? I think people buying early cars. What a waste, you know, of resources. Like you don't need that.

That could feed people and stuff like that. So there's always been a debate with technology. I think of One of the debates that I have in my own household that I think of, I've been a teacher in the past, is something like social media. And there's an interesting question with social media, because it's not what it used to be where it started out, maybe AOL or Prodigy or those different early platforms.

Yeah. And many of them are gone. MySpace, those are no longer, and it's not the social media that it started out to be. So here's my question.

Is social media a net positive or a net negative? All that's wrapped into that question. I was going to say that's a very hard question to answer because I think if you, if you took the time to weigh all of the elements, you know, I think you could make a pretty strong case either way. Like I feel like the, the, the balances are almost equal as to whether it's a net positive or a net negative.

Yeah. I think about how we want to get the word out about something. So like, all right, well, from my day job, from work, I've got to use social media to do that. But I don't know when the last thing I've posted anything on Facebook was.

I still have a Facebook account. We use it where we're at a Facebook marketplace in order to like buy like cheap stuff from other people. But I very rarely will post anything on there anymore. I don't like the time that I spend on it.

But LinkedIn is now a social network that I spend more time on because it's business oriented. And oh, man, so much in that question. Yeah, no, I think that's really interesting. What was once seen as new and fresh and a lot of people jumped on board.

You used I mean, I think Facebook's an excellent example because it had this enormous rate of adoption. It killed MySpace. It killed Friendster. It killed all of these other things that were out there, it became the monolith.

And now I think a lot of people and not everybody, but a lot of people share your experience with it, where it's just a it's a part of life now and it's something that is there. But, you know, whether it's a positive or negative, you said, you know, in schools, you know, with your work there, you saw the effects of social media. How do we then rank or measure new things that come along? Like now we can look in the rear view mirror at Facebook to a large extent.

But how do we measure things that are more in the here and now? I think it's hard to. We have several big technologies all happening at once in our society. We went from like car phones to like pagers to like cell phones.

There was like this progression of these different technologies. They kind of happened. But we're right now in this age of like AI. then you have augmented like reality like glasses all like what Apple is doing and Ray ban all those AI then you also have like robotics coming and there's a lot of investment and things happening with robotics How do we as Christians sit in and this space of where do I need to be investing my time and energy? What is safe?

What is not safe? And I'm curious if we can kind of come together with maybe just a way that we can think about this. What's a paradigm or a schema that we can use? A framework, we'll say, that we can use to determine good or bad.

Yeah. So I'm interested in your thoughts here, but two things just sprung to mind when you when you were speaking. I think like there's one aspect of the potential for harm. Right.

So, you know, What are the what are the potential negative outcomes of this technology? But, you know, obviously, hand in hand with that is, you know, what are the what are the positives and how? I think how do we account for our our blind spots, because when anything is new, like I'll use social media again as an example, when social media first came out, nobody thought that it would be doom scrolling, right? No one expected TikTok to invent this algorithm. that shows you people that you never followed that is giving you like micro doses of dopamine on, on the regular.

And therefore how that would affect, you know, adolescent minds as they grow. Like nobody was sitting there thinking that when, when they made, you know, Twitter, right? Like that wasn't the initial thinking. So how do we control for the things that we don't know is probably the other side of that question.

Yeah. I think even adding to the things that we don't know, um, have you seen the recent like Sora app played with that at all? I haven't played with it, but I've seen people, other people playing with it. It's crazy.

So it is an app similar to, you know, any of these doom scrolling apps where everything is AI. You can then also put yourself in these different situations because you take an avatar of you. put yourself in a, in a situation that isn't real and people are following each other, not because they made a good video that they were in or they shot, but they are a good prompter. And now we're following good AI prompting because the prompt that you made was funny and you get, you make good AI videos. So I'm going to follow you.

How, how do we judge this? The thing I think about with any of these technological innovations where it has to do with the transfer of information. And that's all it really is. We're transferring zeros and ones from one spot to another.

And that used to take forever when we had dial-up modems that are like, we're going to sit here for a while before anything good or bad happens. And so I would say now is that we have the propensity for both good and bad to happen in fairly equal amounts, but for them to happen much faster. And so it is the tool, it is the comparison of like a hammer to a jackhammer, like they're both hammers, but one's gonna do a lot more damage a lot quicker, or fix the thing you're trying to fix a lot faster. Yeah, yeah.

I think... So much of where the technology is is good or bad. I love I love that illustration. Right.

The hammer to the jackhammer, because I do feel like the rapidity of development is so fast now that it makes it much more important for us to know what we're doing, you know, as in or have thought about the consequences, because we can arrive at a place where a lot a lot more damage gets done. But also if we get the mixture right with so much more good gets done. And like I think. I think in a conversation like this, we were talking about the adoption of new technology.

And when is it not the answer? I think it's important for us to recognize that there are some areas that are so unique to our human experience that we don't really want them automated. Like I'd ask you, are there any things in your life that you could automate, but you haven't because you didn't want to? I think that automation can cheapen Some things there are things that I get these notifications on LinkedIn where someone's having a birthday and it'll actually fill out the like birthday message for me and I can just like wish them a happy birthday by that and I This is a silly little thing I never click that because I'm like if I'm gonna wish someone happy I could it's their birthday like I can take 32 seconds to actually write out a birthday message or not send anything at all like automation of relationships I think is indicative of that of how I interact with people I'll even add to that on many social networks you know people use them for selling and you can tell when someone is trying to reach out to you they're trying to personalize it with whatever magic, you know, email or messaging or whatever they're doing.

They're trying to personalize it, but it doesn't quite work. And you're like, I'm a person and you know that that's not me. Those are the areas where I don't want to automate relationships. Yeah.

Yes. And I think there's. Actually, this segues really well into ministry context. So I was thinking and sort of playing out potential futures with the way artificial intelligence is moving.

Okay. Now, we at Blue Vineyard, one of our team, he has built the Advent AI platform. And I am a user of this platform. I love this platform.

It is a platform that allows you to You know, use it as it's an LLM, but it allows you to get Bible answers, answers from Ellen White's writings, and it will put them into documents, research papers. And it also has like a Sabbath school tool in it where you can use it to like have a really in-depth discussion on the lesson to like illuminate new concepts. It's so many good things. I love this tool and I use it and I recommend it.

But I started to think in the future. Okay. Let's say hypothetically, we were able to get the AI trained to the degree that it was the best apologist. It could do evangelism better than we can.

And all we have to do is get people to talk to it. And so then our evangelistic series or programs become us trying to get people to talk to an AI because it can give better answers than we can. And there's a world in which that that goes, oh, well, then we can get the very basically we get the effect of having the best evangelist in the world that can talk to everybody in the world all at the same time. And, you know, therefore that's great for the gospel.

Like there's there's that argument. But then there's the other argument, which is I think what you're alluding to. And that is does that personal connection scale, though, like that might that might be fine for a certain percentage of the population. But. you know, then what happens outside of Adventism?

Like, is there then like the Mormon AI to end all AIs that can argue with the Adventists? AI to end all AIs and then everyone becomes spectators just watching a cage match between most of them. Yeah, you know. Well, and when you add to that, as Seventh-day Adventists, we have the great commission that we have a focus on.

And this instruction that we have a job to do. Like, and this is an important job to do and there's urgency behind this. And we, you know, at what cost, like, are we willing to not use the technology tools when we could be furthering the great commission? And, and I think that also, um, yeah.

Do you further the great commission at any cost? Where does the balance come from? Like, can the AI further the great commission on our behalf? Can we have agents?

You'd be like, can we, uh, can we delegate responsibility? Yeah. Like I, I, I sent my AI out into the world because God told me to, uh, I'm following that I'm supposed to be a part of the great commission. So I'm having my AI do it for me.

So I'm done. I have, uh, I have conflicted ideas here because in, in one sense, is that not the same thing that could be said for books when they were first created? Yeah. Books, radio.

Yeah, books, radio, it is a scalable way to communicate information to another individual, which is really what the Great Commission is all about. And so if we're saying that AI is just another way to produce information, it's just interactive. You know, then what's wrong with using that for the Great Commission? Well, and arguably in some ways better because you take a book, you take a radio, you take a TV show.

And I'm going to send out a message that isn't personalized for the person on the other end of the book or the radio or the TV show. And it's just going to be a generic message. And I hope it reaches you where you're at. Whereas we can take AI and say, I want this great commission.

I want this messaging going out about the love for Jesus that I have, but it's going to be customized to that person's individual situation. Isn't that better? Yeah. And I don't think that like, I think if, if, if Jesus was here on the earth and he was a software engineer, I think he would absolutely be thinking, yeah, how can we, how can we be using this better?

Right. I think perhaps, and there's a, there's a really, I think there's a really interesting, uh, convergence of, of, of two, two ideas here. I think there is the fact that getting the message out to many, many, many more people in a more personalized way. I'm all for that.

And so I don't have any issues with technology being used to achieve these ends. What I think is problematic is that if people are allowed to stay there, where AI is their pastor, their fellow church members, their whatever, where they're existing in their own bubble, I think this becomes a problem because when God designed the idea of the church or the people of God, that was supposed to be in community for us to be lifting each other up and serving each other. they're doing, we are growing in our Christian experience. And I don't think you can substitute community. So even if AI does a wonderful job of sharing the message, I think we need to be conscious that there has to be an end to that responsibility where it becomes the objective becomes building communities, not just getting more bots for them to talk to.

Well, for sure. And then you can take to the scary part of this. is that there's an other side of this coin is can this be used for bad? Can this same tool be used to confuse people and used to control people on what the Great Commission is and what we're supposed to be doing and what the message that Jesus has for all of us. As like a live example of that, I saw a news post yesterday and I'm not making political comments by saying this.

I'm just, it's an observation, but I saw that Israel has been hiring external contractors to create more AI optimized content so that LLMs would read that and have a more positive view of Israel, because especially in younger communities, there is a very, very strong negative association with the nation of Israel. And so they're trying to counteract that by filling the Internet with AI. friendly content so it can be ingested and so it can bend how the bias of the LLMs work. And I think that's a political example, but what happens in the spiritual context? A lot of this hinges upon how we relate to technology.

And this might be a little sidetrack, but I think it's important to understanding this concept or at least controlling for some of these outcomes. But how different groups of people or generations interact with new technologies matters. And I see my parents use chat GPT sometimes and my dad uses it more like Google, more like a search engine. What is this?

What is this statistic? Then I look at myself and my peers and we tend to be using it. Actually, I feel like it's changing, but we tend to use it as a tool. It's like, okay, You can leverage this to help us do our work faster, to do other things faster.

And I see that there is a corresponding rise now. I feel like there's this awareness, this maturation of how people are using AI. And I think people that are sort of in that 30s and 40s kind of area now are going, oh, I can actually use this. to improve my thinking, to make the ideas more robust, to make my brain work harder and be more efficient. And I think that's the best use of AI I've ever seen.

But then I see that the Gen Z community, they are using it for all of those things. But they're also, in some ways, they're treating it more like a mentor, a therapist. They're treating it as the first place they go to have relationship advice and questions. And that's interesting.

But then like the next age group down, the, you know, the gen alpha, as they're coming along, they're entering into a world where AI already knows everything that they could possibly ever want to know. And it, and I'm not, and when I say this, I don't mean this, I don't say this in so much a pejorative way as, as it may sound, but they're treating it more like God, right? It's where you go for all of your answers. It's the source of all knowledge.

And if it disagrees with a parent, a friend or whatever, The AI is probably right. So I'm just going to trust what it's saying to me. Yeah. And so I know it's not true for everyone, but I just think it's important to note.

Well, and there is a generational quality to this that is important to pay attention to. My age group and yours, I think, you know, is that I remember, I have memories of what it was like before the internet was everywhere. So I have some childhood memories of that. but I grew up figuring it out, fixing it, making just, you know, how do like routers work, building computers, like we had to cludge it all together and I would get in there and I can, I can do things with computers that my kids can't like, but the kids, they know how to do the computers. Like, well actually they haven't had to because the time they came around, the computers all actually all worked pretty well.

Yeah. Yes. Everything was kind of figured out by the time and For my kids will have a similar situation where my kids will know a life before AI Was a big part of their world, but it was pretty early on yeah, and and they'll know a time when like AI wasn't very good and but it getting better and It is almost impossible to know the the consequences of of all of this and in many ways we're kind of guessing yeah, we are I think this one like one extra thing that I want to point out here that I think is really important. And, you know, my niece has been has been living with us for for this year.

And it has been really interesting to have a person in their early 20s living in the house and so getting to see the world through their lens. And something I have observed through her and all of her friends is that there is this because they went through their formative years in high school, let's say, experiencing COVID and lockdowns and that, that came at a time in their life where that was very disruptive to their development. And so they have a very strong pushback against synthetic connections, virtualized connections. And so whilst they are using, you know, and I mean, Not every one of them, obviously, but whilst a lot of them are using AI in these ways that I was mentioning before, I think for us, we grew up in a world that was pushing more and more virtual because it gave you more and more options of more and more people you could connect to.

But I think the younger generations, there is the pendulum is coming back the other way. It's like, yes, they use the Internet, they are chronically online, but their desire is in reverse. For them, the sign of success is that they don't have to be connected. that they're and they're pushing back against some of those those things. And so why I think this is important for us as a church to recognize is that when we are thinking about ways to use technology for ministry, we need to make sure that it is in service to in personal connections, not pushing them in the other direction, because then it won't receive adoption, because it will be perceived as something that is a net negative.

Right. It's increasing separation in society rather than connection. And so I think that's a really important thing. Yeah, I think that would be something to be said for, like, at one point, like, oh, we're going to have these online Sabbath schools where all these young kids are going to come and do that.

You know, I'd be curious. The people who are watching church, they're not young kids that are watching church on YouTube. That's an older generation that is watching a church service. Because, like, if I wasn't there, like, it doesn't matter.

I'm curious what those demographics are of who's watching a virtual church service. But to your point, authentic connection is one of the most valuable things that our churches can offer in 2025. Yes. Yeah.

And so our technology should reflect that. Our technology should be giving people on ramps into that. And yes, those connections, I think for this season in history, I think the online, the digital is where those connections start often, but it's important that it doesn't stay there, right? We need to help them take that leap.

One of the things I think about this as I consider us, you know, technologists, we're pretty well tapped in like what's happening. People oftentimes come to me for technology questions. I spent a fair amount of my time today helping an elder gentleman work through some technology problems because Kind of I live and I eat and breathe this stuff oftentimes more than I'd like hmm one of our concerns is that we have with these giant companies like Facebook and Twitter and you know AI chagy between all these is that they are a Company that they are there to make money And there's a thing about that if you're not paying for something like wow Facebook. It's amazing Look at all the incredible things I can talk to people around the world and my old classmates and data But I don't have to pay.

It's free. Like, Luke, why is it free? Because we're being sold. We are the product.

We're what's valuable about Facebook. If you're not paying for it, you are the product. And I think with our digital selves, one of the things that I have been excited about and will be excited about, I hope for a long time, is the open web and open source where it is Not owned by a company that their purpose is to make money WordPress is that platform 43% of the internet is built on this WordPress platform in many ways because it is a thing that you actually own you can own those files and in fact you can run your own WordPress website that you pick and It's running on your computer at home. If you wanted to have a computer that you you did that on.

Yeah I'm so glad you brought that up, because I think the concept of the open web is I don't like making sweeping statements that are like overgeneralized or absolutist. But what I'm going to say is I think really that the future of freedom relies on the open web, because if people are able to crush the web into a proprietary mold, then you know, freedom of speech goes away and, you know, how society looks gets to be shaped by whoever it is that holds those keys. And this is one of the things. And, you know, again, this is like a personal peeve of mine.

Like, this is one of the reasons I really don't like Spotify. And that's because they're they are going after and I say this as a podcaster, right? They are going after podcasts in a big way. They're like, hey, everyone, come and listen to our music, which I think is a totally legitimate and good model.

OK, I mean, you could argue whether they pay the artists enough. But like basically the idea that Hey, here's a platform where people can listen to content and artists get paid for the amount of times that you listen to that content. That's great. I don't have an issue with that.

But when you have something like podcasts, which was always an open standard, and they have created this, you know, proprietary way for people to access podcasts that they could turn on and off, they can de-platform people. Right. If that's the way that happens. I think that's a negative for the industry because I think podcasting was designed as an open standard.

It should stay that way. But the open web is just the extrapolation of that, right? That makes it true for your website. And I think this also extends to cryptocurrency.

And this is, again, something that I'm just making my opinion known on. But I love the idea of cryptocurrency. What I don't like is the fact that The way it seems to be maturing is that the actual banks are just creating their own crypto. Right.

And so then we're back to a situation where the banks are still controlling the currency. And then what was the point of the whole endeavor? Right. So, yeah.

Well, so I think about these, these things with, with Spotify, with Facebook, with Instagram, with all of these things in that, um, wow, somebody may have found the blue vineyard podcast on Spotify. and they wouldn't have otherwise. Yes. So I don't think the answer is, well, we're not going to be on Spotify. Correct.

I think the answer is, well, we're also going to be on all the other places as well as on the Blue Vineyard website, which is a WordPress website. And you can get this podcast by going to the website that we have control over. Yes. Yeah.

And I think that is a big part. And I think I wish more of our church organizations would think about this a little bit more because your online presence is not a single thing, right? The footprint is many touch points because people exist on the internet in so many different ways. And if you're not in as many of them as possible, then there are inevitably going to be people that slip through the cracks.

And I think once you are, especially for organizations that are of a certain size, then planning how you show up on each of those platforms and how you can be consistent, but also how you can speak to the audience that's there. Like as an example, how we're living in, we're going to shortly be starting an Instagram account. Is there going to be crossover in the content that goes on our Instagram versus what goes on our LinkedIn? Sure.

Sure is. But is there going to be unique things that we can do with Instagram that we can't necessarily do easily with LinkedIn? Of course there is because there's a different expectation from the audience that's there. And so therefore we should be shaping our messaging.

Our website also, the content that goes on the website is not the same that goes on LinkedIn because again, the people that are there are expecting different things. And so, yeah, I think as, as, as, as church organizations or Adventist led organizations, we need to be thinking of how can we be contextual? Absolutely. And I think that's one of the things that we want to be a resource for is that as technologists, we are going to tell you when technology is not the right answer.

Yes. And that's some of the stuff with AI and some like, just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should do it. Technology isn't the answer for everything. However, I think that there is value in thinking through this, having strategy on how we're going to take this.

I have this ministry idea. There's this thing that I believe in. It's part of who I am and it's my identity. And if I'm the best kept secret in the whole world, I haven't done what God has asked me to do.

Because I truly believe that there is like, it goes to like the talents. Are you going to bury your talents? Or are you going to use them for good? And you don't give them all away.

You don't just like throw them all out there. You invest them wisely. And I think that's hopefully where we're going to land and where we are landing with technology in reference to the future of ministry. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I think that is a that is an excellent summary. So just as we as we do wrap up, what I what I will say is if anybody has any particular topics that they'd like us to speak to around this, please let us know because we would love to. be answering questions that are relevant to you. So if you have any specific places or one of the other things that we would love to be doing is to be inviting Adventist organizations onto the show with us so that we can, you know, be able to have these discussions and apply them specifically because what is helpful for you may also will be helpful for others that are in a similar position. So if you have interest in any of those, please reach out to us.

Absolutely, and go back to the Blue Vineyard archives and there are some interviews of some really incredibly talented people. I think of our conversation with Eric Capel from Amazing Facts to be able to what an incredible ministry Amazing Facts is and the reach that they have. And there's a lot to learn in our Avis ecosystem from some people who are honestly just a lot smarter than I am. Yeah, absolutely.

So we'll leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode, and we look forward to seeing you next time on the Blue Vineyard Podcast.