Implanted with a brain chip...

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I wonder what you think about AI? Artificial Intelligence. I enjoyed the Christmas Wallace and Gromit with Norbot the robot who helped a jailed penguin steal a blue diamond (although that sounds like a local garden centre!), that was pretty harmless fun, but real AI- well people say it's either the key to the future, or a bit too scary.

There’s a novelist and screenwriter called Ewan Morrison and he’s just written a book called “For Emma”. I haven’t read it, but I heard him talking about it on the radio. In the story, Emma is a Harvard Graduate that offers her brain to be implanted with an AI computer chip that is going to herald the next advance in pushing back the frontiers of artificial intelligence. Tragically she dies as a result of having this chip implanted, and her father is devastated.

The writer Ewan Morrison said that he was trying to tap into the longing people have for something big to believe in, and I quote.. “we live in a modern civilization that has a meaning crisis- so we don’t know what to believe in, so people tend to believe in really extreme things… cults, survivalists, big tech and transhumanism... Stories about something huge and bigger than us to believe in, because this narrative about the “big me” that we were fed in the 80s and 90s, the self, I don’t think it’s enough, and people are looking for something to fill the hole that religion once had in our lives”.

Fascinating. Fascinating because I agree that living for self doesn’t satisfy, but fascinating also because he thinks that we need something to fill the hole.

Well as a Christian I do have something big to believe in. I really believe that Jesus Christ was real, that he really lived, and on Good Friday God was showing his love for the world, and on Easter Sunday God was defeating death for us to give us hope and a future.

I know that Jesus Christ won’t disappoint me like AI or like any modern ideology, because the Christian story is earthed in history and rooted in reality- a true story about love winning over evil. Let me finish with something Jesus said: “If the son sets you free, you will be free indeed”. Well that’s better news than any artificial intelligence.

Thanks so much for listening. Have a great day.

Charlie Newcombe 22APR25