Latest 3 Posts
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Babel and Epistemological Crisis
LLMs are really good at translating between human languages. You can connect your smartphone to an LLM and use it to translate a conversation in real time. Combine that capability with earbuds and you have a real-life version of the babelfish from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Douglas Adams' "babelfish" was, of course, a reference to Genesis 11. In that passage God confuses human language in judgment (and mercy) on mankind for their self-satisfied hubris in building the Tower of Babel. This account is one the Bible's most significant comments about how God views human technology. The fact that we've now produced technology that seems to undo the judgment at Babel does not seem to bode well for our future.
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What Is an AI Agent?
If you want to understand important AI concepts, you'll want to get familiar with AI "agents." In the fast-moving world of AI, this particular term has had quite the ride. At this time last year, "agent" was mostly a buzzword: lots of promise, but not yet much substance. But by the end of 2025, agents were delivering on all the hype, and then some.
What is an AI agent? A good place to start is the familiar meaning of "agent": someone who acts on behalf of someone else. A traditional chatbot like ChatGPT is not an agent because it can't do anything other than write text in response to your prompts. But if you give an LLM access to a set of tools and instructions about how to use them, you can give the model the capacity to act—to do something on your behalf.
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Book Review: Made in Our Image by Stephen Driscoll
Artificial intelligence is bringing changes quickly, and people have lots of opinions. It's not the easiest topic to get a handle on. If you're looking for an accessible book to help you see AI through a biblical lens, I recommend Made in Our Image by Stephen Driscoll.
There are several beneficial features of this book:
- It's biblical: Driscoll's primary concern is to help readers bring biblical principles to bear on AI.
- It's accessible: He doesn't presuppose a lot of technical knowledge, nor familiarity with other writing about the impact of technology on society. It's also not super-long (192 pages).
- It's reasonably timeless: Because his purpose is to apply biblical principle rather than describe the technology itself, what Driscoll says about AI should remain relevant for at least a few years (which is a very long time in the AI world).
- It's opinionated: he takes definite positions regarding some key questions about AI.
14 more posts can be found in the archive.