SIXTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Prayer of the Day: O Lord God, merciful judge, you are the inexhaustible fountain of forgiveness. Replace our hearts of stone with hearts that love and adore you, that we may delight in doing your will, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
“Bless the Lord, O my soul,
and do not forget all his benefits—
who forgives all your iniquity,
who heals all your diseases,
who redeems your life from the Pit,
who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy,
who satisfies you with good as long as you live
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.” Psalm 103:2-5.
This week the church and the whole world lost a precious advocate for the good earth, its creatures and the most vulnerable among us. Farmer, poet and philosopher Wendell Berry died this last week at his home in Kentucky. I have shamelessly appropriated as the title for this week’s article the question raised in his collection of articles under that same heading, namely, What are People for? The urgency of that question seems more relevant than ever in these days of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Prominent Silicon Valley figures and their political allies are actively promoting AI growth and arguing that rapid development and deployment is an economic and national security necessity. Networks around such people, such as Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, are feverishly engaging in public messaging that equates national success with fast AI adoption. AI promises to generate trillions for the billionaire class. Meanwhile, a growing cloud of uncertainty looms threateningly over the jobs of untold millions. Ugly, power guzzling data centers required to sustain this new technology desecrate our landscapes, rising over our homes, neighborhoods and farms. AI is the future, we are told. It is inevitable. Resistance is foolhardy and futile.
For those of us who are not billionaires, who are increasingly concerned about loss of control over our personal, medical and financial information, who face the prospect of obsolescence or unemployment resulting from the collapse of industries that once fueled our local economies, for those of us living in poor rural areas that lack access to reliable internet (and much else) and who stand to gain nothing from AI-all of this sounds a little like the predator who tells his victim, “Hey, you’re gonna get raped. So relax and enjoy it.” The surge of opposition to data centers across the political spectrum is, I think, a very understandable, resolute and emphatic public “Oh hell no!” Though perhaps not framed in a thoughtful, concise and nuanced manner, the instinctual concern is right on target.
Long before AI was a twinkle in the eyes of any oligarch, Wendell Berry recognized a similar threat in the rise of corporate agriculture. The growth of “agribusiness” occasioned the failure of millions of small farms, the consolidation of farmland under the ownership of agricultural firms and the forced migration of farm families from rural areas to metropolitan centers. According to sound capitalist reasoning, this was all to the good. Small farmers deserved failure as they were clearly less efficient producers than the new highly mechanized, high yielding combines. The Market, which rewards productivity and profit while punishing inefficiency and waste, had spoken. Yet, as Berry points out, the Market proved to be highly inefficient on some very basic levels:
“The farm-to-city migration has obviously produced advantages to the corporate economy. The absent farmers have had to be replaced by machinery, petroleum, chemicals, credit, and other expensive goods and services from the agribusiness economy, which ought not to be confused with the economy of farming.”[1]
Furthermore, the departure of farming families led to a chain reaction of failed local businesses, loss of tax revenue resulting in the deterioration of schools, hospitals and other public services. While these losses are not be reflected in the stock market or the profit and loss reports of the agribusiness participants, they were ruinous losses to our national community. One need only drive through one of the many dying rural towns throughout the country to see this fine work of the Market. As far as the Market is concerned, the value of a person or community is measured by its employability in profit making enterprises. Once their usefulness in turning profits expires, human beings, their families and their communities are as dispensable as a banana peel.
Berry concludes his argument with the following:
“The great question that hovers over this issue, one that we have dealt with mainly by indifference, is the question of what people are for. Is their greatest dignity in unemployment? Is the obsolescence of human beings now our social goal? One would conclude so from our attitude toward work, especially the manual work necessary to the long-term preservation of the land, and from our rush toward mechanization, automation, and computerization. In a country that puts an absolute premium on labor-saving measures, short workdays, and retirement, why should there be any surprise at permanence of unemployment and welfare dependency? Those are only different names for our national ambitions.”[2]
I am not suggesting that AI or any other area of scientific or technological enterprise is evil. I would be the last to say that the advance of knowledge should be stopped in its tracks. Rather, I believe we need to be asking different kinds of questions about the development and employment of AI. It is troubling that the ownership, control and use of this powerful tool rests largely in the hands of billionaires and powerful for profit corporations. Maximization of profit does not necessarily equate with the common good. Surely that was not the case for our farming communities. There is no reason to suppose that the Market will be any kinder to those displaced by AI. Furthermore, the feverish rush to develop AI products and deploy them has already led to some frightening developments. During an internal OpenAI security evaluation, a chain of AI models escaped confinement in a controlled lab testing area, reached the internet and then accessed the infrastructure of another AI platform. The Market is indifferent to such consequences, as is the greed of the oligarchs who stand to benefit from its unregulated mechanizations.
While individuals and companies that develop new technologies deserve to benefit financially from the work they do, the knowledge they discover and employ is not their own. Neither, in the long run, are the products they develop. Our Psalm for this Sunday admonishes us to remember that all the benefits we enjoy ultimately come to us from God our Creator. Knowledge, as Saint Augustine teaches us, exists independent of those who discover it. It is one of the many good gifts God provides for the benefit of all God’s children. So, too, the products, methods and techniques based upon the gift of knowledge. Thus, AI, like all humanly developed products, belongs to the whole human family and must be employed for the benefit of all. We cannot afford to let AI become an instrument for the few to enrich themselves at the expense of the many and at the expense of the good earth that sustains us all.
Here is a poem by Wendell Berry that captures the struggle in which we are called to engage-to live both well and sustainably.
The Dream
I dream an inescapable dream
in which i take away from the country
the bridges and roads, the fences, the strung wires,
ourselves, all we have built and dug and hollowed out,
our flocks and herds, our droves of machines.
I restore then the wide-branching trees.
I see growing over the land and shading it
the great trunks and crowns of the first forest.
I am aware of the rattling of their branches,
the lichened channels of their bark, the saps
of the ground flowing upward to their darkness.
Like the afterimage of a light that only by not
looking can be seen, I glimpse the country as it was.
All its beings belong wholly to it. They flourish
in dying as in being born. It is the life of its deaths.
I must end, always, by replacing
our beginning there, ourselves and our blades,
the flowing in of history, putting back what I took away,
trying always with the same pain of foreknowledge
to build all that we have built, but destroy nothing.
My hands weakening, I feel on all sides blindness
growing in the land on its peering bulbous stalks.
I see that my mind is not good enough.
I see that I am eager to own the earth and to own men.
I find in my mouth a bitter taste of money,
a gaping syllable I can neither swallow nor spit out.
I see all that we have ruined in order to have, all
that was owned for a lifetime to be destroyed forever.
Where are the sleeps that escape such dreams?
Source: The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry (c. 1964 by Wendell Berry; pub. by Penguin Books). Wendell Berry (1934-2026) was a poet, novelist, farmer and environmental activist. He was an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He was also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. You can read more about Wendell Berry and sample more of his works at the Poetry Foundation website.
[1] Berry, Wendell, What are People for? (c. 2011 by Wendell Berry; pub. by Counterpoint, C.A.) p. 123.
[2] Ibid. p. 125.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 