AI Goes to Church by Todd Korpi

Author:Todd Korpi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: digital;mission;ministry;humanity;technology;pastoral resource;future;Christian;faith;a.i.;machine learning;robot;leverage;biblical;social justice;theological;ethical;missional;discipleship;work;tool;missiology;integration;future;ancient;scripture
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2025-09-30T13:08:34+00:00

SOCIAL JUSTICE AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Issues of social justice are clearly a crucial concern of the church. Justice is the very fruit of what we believe about the gospel as well as evidence to the truthfulness of the gospel. For our purposes, we must seek to gain a basic understanding of how the development of AI impacts Christian concerns and work toward more just human societies, to the glory of God.

AI possesses the potential to aid in some of the healing of oppression, inequality, and injustice, such as the identification of land mines in Ukraine. But it also possesses the capacity to widen the gulfs of inequality, further contribute to oppression, and cause further injustice—all the while appearing, at face value, to be a neutral arbiter. To many, AI may seem to be the truest Justitia (i.e., Lady Justice), informed only by scientific data and not to be bothered by human emotion or intuition. But this could not be further from the truth.

The injustice of AI. AI is driven by data. And data, believe it or not, is biased. In fact, fixing the pitfall of data bias is one of the drivers of “big data”—which is, as Tom Boellstorff and Bill Maurer put it, “the mobile and digital computational systems that permit the large-scale generation, collection, and analysis of information about people’s and devices’ activities, locations, and transformations . . . and the speculative hype, hopes, and futures that accompany them.”10 In other words, big data is a social and technological phenomenon that, in part, places stock in the hope that the more data we accumulate about everything and everyone, the more we will ascend to a place of genuine, objective knowing.

The problem is that data will always be biased. The idea of a complete and objective knowing of all things is no more than another attempt at eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but this time with smartphones. The data that feeds AI is inherently and forever biased for several reasons, to which we will turn at present.

Not everything produces data, equally or at all. The adoption rates of new technologies, government regulations on access, internet speed, and even internet availability vary from location to location.11 Because of this, data are naturally skewed against those with limited access or availability. In the early 2010s, while selling internet and mobile phones for a telecommunications giant in southwest Michigan, I was frequently accosted by customers who lived in the rural areas outside of Kalamazoo, enraged that they still did not have access to 3G internet on their iPhones and were forced to pay high prices for satellite internet services instead of the company’s high-speed internet. For regulatory reasons outside of their control (and mine, as I was adamant to point out), these rural communities were denied access to higher speeds of data, making their ability to use emerging technologies limited. But the flip side of that is that big data also collected less information about them. Not

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