Frederick Buechner passed away last week at the age of 96. Arguably one of the greatest Christian writers in English of the 20th century, Buechner was a novelist, essayist, minister, teacher, and more. I first encountered him in Philip Yancey’s book, Soul Survivor, where he appears as one of thirteen authors that influenced Yancey. Over the years, I have read a handful of Buechner’s works. My favourite was his 1980 novel, Godric, about a 12th-century hermit. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Buechner saw the world as “charged with the grandeur of God,” to borrow a phrase from one of his favourite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is the kind of vision I also long for. His reminder in all of his work is to bear witness to what’s really in front of us—not speculations—and what’s really inside of us—not abstractions. Although my focus in this blog tends to be more about technology and other obfuscating artefacts of modernity, my hope is to scratch away at the surface enough that it too might (again, with Hopkins) “gash gold-vermilion,” revealing the Holy.
In a meagre effort to honour his memory and express my gratitude for his work, I thought I’d attempt a very brief theological ABC in the mode of Buechner’s own classic lexicons. Beginning in 1973 with Wishful Thinking: A theological ABC and followed by Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who in 1979 and Whistling in the Dark in 1988, Buechner’s “lexical trilogy” contains hundreds of short reflections on words and names. As he puts it in Whistling:
“All the great religious words point to ways in which we variously experience the Holy… These words have grown musty and shopworn over the centuries, but the experiences to which they point are as basic to the human condition as they ever were … In this book I have taken a number of just plain words … and tried to do something of the same sort with them. Most of them couldn’t be less overtly religious, yet I believe that they, too, have a profoundly religious dimension to them and point, like the others, to how—whether we are aware of it or not—the Holy is all around us.”
A is for Artificial Intelligence
Enough has perhaps already been written about the “artificiality” of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Can a computer ever adequately simulate a human being, let alone achieve a sentience of its own? The Turing test, which seeks to assess whether a machine can be said to “think,” invites us to wonder at whether there actually is a difference between consciousness and its simulation.
But, to take a step back, what does it even mean for something to be “artificial”? Is “simulation” really an unproblematic synonym for that word? Or does this qualifier of intelligence (i.e., artificial intelligence) have implications for our conception of intelligence that must first be unpacked?
The origin of the word, “artificial,” has to do with craftsmanship, with making. For this reason, perhaps, “artificial intelligence” has sometimes been linked with the story of Pinocchio (for example, in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi retelling of Pinocchio, A.I.). The handcrafted, human-created boy who longed to be flesh and blood and not just wood aligns with our fears and questions about what the nature of desire might be for a being on the cusp of consciousness.
Yet “artificial” may also bring to mind other handcrafted objects besides lifelike marionettes. Furniture, for example. Or wooden toys. A piece of art can be handcrafted. What draws us to these objects? Is it their adherence to that which they imitate? Their simulative quality? Or is it because they are utterly unique? They are handcrafted, which means that they are able to account for the strange idiosyncrasies of a human maker. Years after it was produced, I can still see the shape of the chisel’s edge pressed into the wood grain.
AI cannot do this. In fact, is not the perfect AI the opposite of handcrafted? Isn’t it rather something like “mass produced”—produced by committee for the purpose of a mass deployment and duplication? A truly artificial intelligence, bearing the marks of a human maker, full of gaps but also charms, is perhaps a better way to describe human intelligence: the artifice of our human intelligence.
AI, by contrast, has the potential to become something much purer, and because pure, not human. Pinocchio cannot become a real boy—nor does he want to.
B is for Bitcoin
The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. But what does it mean to love money?
And what is money today? It has been many things over the centuries. Cash may be king, but few people carry it these days. Antony Lewis (in The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains) writes:
Unlike cash, which settles using the transfer of physical tokens, digital money settles by increasing and decreasing balances in accounts held by trusted intermediaries.
Does the character of loving money change whether it’s stored in a vault or a bank or a distributed ledger? Does the thing that we love change whether it’s a fiat currency made of paper and affirmed into existence through the insistence of government power or competing debts and debits issued across the globe as with digital money — or a set of digital calculations fuelled by the world-destroying energy of a high-performance graphics card?
Comparing these currencies — physical, digital, and crypto — is like comparing apples and oranges and an NFT of an apple-orange hybrid. Yet there is a common denominator/denomination.
Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) promises the anonymity of cash along with the ostensibly material value of a commodity currency like gold or silver. Unlike digital currency or the paper money that preceded it, both of which require a speech act to create the value ex nihilo, crypto makes a claim to a more innate value, grounded in activities as real as a glimmer in a pan screening creek water. A desire for freedom and autonomy forms the backdrop from which it emerges. Its value is not guaranteed by a necessary trust in the authorities.
Despite the inherent libertarianism of the movement, it is also by no means a rejection of community. The ekklesia of crypto encompasses the YouTube videos, webpages, and (perhaps, above all) the subreddits that make up a vibrant and intense online culture. The central role played by the distributed ledger moreover provisions the community with its sacred text.
What kind of love drives such a culture? Is it a fascination with the complex—a kind of gnostic intrigue that attracts those who are looking for novelty and challenge? Is it the love of money that Jesus warned of? Despite the diversity of what can be counted as currency, its common denominator/denomination is that it has the ability to capture our love. Digital or physical. Fiat or commodity.
A parable. There was a man who lost a hard drive in a landfill. In his panic, he sold all he had and bought the landfill. Is that what the kingdom of heaven is like?
C is for Cloud
I open my browser. I navigate to my online drive — The Cloud — and open the file that I have saved there. My computer downloads the data in order to display it on my browser. It is downloading the data from a server somewhere in the world. The data is only saved temporarily on my machine; it lives elsewhere.
There is an inherent abstraction in the digitization of everything. The translation of our words and images into zeros and ones and then back into instructions for the lights in a computer monitor to display involves numerous mediations. The Cloud adds yet another mediation on at least two fronts.
First, there is the obvious layer of place. A computer unconnected to the world wide web may be opaque, but its place is known. The countless calculations undertaken in mere nanoseconds within its components cannot be seen or traced, yet the space they occupy can be conceived. It’s here collecting dust beneath my desk, or here irradiating my lap. By contrast, the cloud-connected computer (like anything on the Internet) interfaces with a whole series of routers and servers and wires and data centres, the locations of which can perhaps be catalogued, but not easily.
Second, there is an abstracting layer of metaphor. There is uncertainty about the origin of the term “cloud computing,” although most agree that it was born in a marketing department. A 1996 brainstorming session produced an evocative phrase: “Cloud Computing: the Cloud has no Borders.” The image of the Cloud that may have been helpful at one point to acknowledge the way its architecture rises above the boundaries established by different operating systems, different hardware capabilities, now functions to obscure the physical servers and other infrastructure that are required to make the remote storage of files and programs possible.
The Cloud invites us to treat it as a cloud of unknowing. A cloud has no borders. You cannot map a cloud. Its edges are diffuse and its internal structure indistinct. According to Albert Borgmann, this attempt to obscure is true of all devices: “[It] makes no demands on our skill, strength, or attention, and it is less demanding the less it makes its presence felt. In the progress of technology, the machinery of a device has therefore a tendency to become concealed or to shrink” (Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, p. 42).
The anonymous 14th-century mystic who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing spoke of God as a kind of cloud of unknowing too.
“For He can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you must step above it stoutly but deftly, with a devout and delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you; and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens.”
There is a helpful difference highlighted here. Where the only response to the divine cloud of unknowing is ultimately “a sharp dart of longing love,” the unknowing claimed by The Cloud is without grounds. The routes down which the data travel can, albeit with difficulty, be traced. The Cloud can, in fact, be known. And, rather than inviting our love, its obscurity is meant to distract and redirect our attention.
Perhaps, therefore, wherever we encounter that which has been hidden, we should take this as an invitation (intentional or not) to attend. And in attending either we will discover that the cloud has simply been concealing something much more banal — business interests, marketing jargon — or we will experience the transformation of our contemplation into something more like love in the ineffable presence of the Wholly Other.
There’s much more to be observed and said about all of these things in good time.
Frederick Buechner’s writing reminds us, above all, to pay attention to reality as it unfolds. So it is perhaps only fitting to give him the last word and to let that serve as a benediction and commissioning to us:
“Literature, painting, music—the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look, and listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever occurs to us to suspect as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot. In a world that for the most part steers clear of the whole idea of holiness, art is one of the few places left where we can speak to each other of holy things.”