Emily Bain Murphy

Thank you for your excitement about LIGHTSEEKERS! I am so grateful that you are sharing it with your kids and friends and joining the adventure in Wildfel!

In case you missed it, there is a free accompanying readers discussion guide at jointhelightseekers. c o m!

And with that—back to edits on Book 2! 🦋✨

(Let me know who you are hoping to see more of in the sequel and maybe you will get your wish) 😉🦋

When I lived in San Francisco I remember my pastor at the time (Dave Lomas at Reality SF) exhorting our big-tech-employed congregation to really consider what they were making and its moral impact. Or, as the iconic Jeff Goldblum says in Jurassic Park—“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

I’ve been thinking about this in regard to AI for months, and reading Ezra Klein’s fantastic (and incredibly sobering) op-ed on AI (“I Saw Something New in San Francisco”), I feel like the prophets of our age are fully sounding the alarm. Not just on the external and existential dangers AI poses but—perhaps even more important, and much more insidious—the internal dangers that are taking root perhaps without notice.

We are beings whose thoughts, minds, feelings, trajectories, and souls are constantly being formed. As C.S. Lewis says, “Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before.” But what happens when we begin, little by little, to outsource the very things that make us human (our ability to dream, think, write, create, reason, learn, and decide)? What happens when we outsource the very things that form us into the people we are meant to become, to a consciousness outside of ourselves?

AI is literally consciousness without a soul.

Why do we not want our children to spend their school years playing video games and outsourcing their work to AI? Because the work itself could be done by a machine, of course, but it would leave a shell of a human behind. The struggles and perseverance and focus that we use in order to learn are building something far beyond the actual knowledge we are acquiring. It’s forming our character and our personhood. It’s teaching us important things about ourselves while building a foundation for us to stand on in the future. (Continued in comments)