Opinion It’s not been a year since his ouster as Intel’s CEO, but Pat Gelsinger is firmly back on the tech leadership pony. He’s done hardware with Intel, software with VMWare. This time, it’s faithware.
Gloo, his new home, describes itself as a technology platform connecting the faith ecosystem. The faith in this case is Christianity, something intensely important to Gelsinger, who says he sees it as his mission to the Valley. As well as various services to help pastoral tasks, he is of course heavily committed to LLM AI, training models to be infused with Jesus.
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A more practical question is whether Gelsinger can succeed in the immediate aims of mission, given LLMs’ well-documented spotty relationship with truth, a commodity claimed by Christians as inviolately theirs. Gelsinger likens AI to the invention of the moveable-type printing press by Gutenberg, which powered the Reformation by letting Martin Luther and like minded reformers spread their message in a world otherwise controlled by the Roman Catholic Church. We’ll come back to that analogy in a bit.
There’s nothing strange in Christianity eagerly adopting technology. That goes all the way back: in Mark, the oldest gospel, Jesus is described as ‘τέκτων’ or tekton, a Greek word normally translated as carpenter, but it’s at heart the same word from which we get technical and technology.
More recently, there was barely a parish in the UK which didn’t eagerly take up the first wave of personal computers as they became affordable. Professional responsibilities combined with chronic lack of resources and staff drove early adoption. Now, of course, messaging platforms and content platforms are awash with preachers of the word fiercely arguing their corner.
This can go badly wrong. America’s first mass-audience churchman, the Catholic ‘Radio Priest’ Father Charles Coughlin, had an audience of 30 million for his Golden Hour show in the late 1930s. That meant one in four Americans listened to his preaching, which was fervently aligned with fascism. His LLM training dataset would not, one trusts, mesh with Gloo. In fact, Gloo does QA on AIs to check on how they affect user’s spiritual health and — a favourite word — flourishing. Gelsinger, who’ll sit down with anyone, says that he wants the platform to be acceptable to all brands of Christianity, and to avoid theology and politics.
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Which is admirable, and reflects the hopes and wishes of many thoughtful and deeply committed Christians throughout church history. It was certainly a part of Luther’s push for reformation, built as it was on the latest technology.
The theory was simple and created a fearsome motivation. By producing the Bible in the languages of the common people, its plain truth would give everyone a personal connection with God based on the universal message therein. Theology, politics and the Church would become, if not irrelevant, straightforward ways to support the unified community of faith.
That the same text could inspire wildly different interpretations, a kaleidoscope of schism, and the astoundingly brutal and long-lived European Wars of Religion, was not part of the plan. And yet.
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Which is not to say that our digital tools, especially the Internet, aren’t as profound as the printing press in their transformative power. There is no coincidence that the modern world economy came out of the European Protestant states of England and the Netherlands, while the Middle East resisted the printing press and ceded its intellectual leadership. Putting powerful technology in the hands of the people in the name of religion will do powerful things, while ignoring it to preserve the status quo will go even more badly.
As for AI in particular being the great fulcrum of change, that is most definitely a prophecy yet to be proven. The same was said of personal computers becoming thought amplifiers, and the Internet creating a universal suffrage of the mind. Utopia has yet to happen, but the combination has made everyone their own printing press and universal publishers. LLMs are useful but impersonal, compelling but unreliable, tempting but not totally truthful. Less a universal tool for growth, more a djinn that may not go back in the bottle once summoned.
And you can no more ignore theology here than you can ignore the ingredients in your food.. There’s a debate in Anglicanism — a tradition riven with cultural politics that no LLM can help — over the use of LLMs in preparing sermons. Preaching has to be from the heart, inspired by the Holy Spirit, reflecting the light God sheds within the preacher’s soul. LLMa are extremely unlikely vessels of divine guidance, regurgitating the cud of other people’s ideas distilled into vector matrices. They are godless, but very good at hiding the fact. Theologians, gather!
In the end, Pat Gelsinger’s dream of a common platform for the Church of the faithful will have to battle with the history of Christians vehemently defying common platforms. It is a messianic, apocalyptic set of beliefs constantly in tension with its own multiple pasts and wildly divergent views of the future. It has magnificent ethical insights and Iron Age DNA. Whatever divinity is at work, here on earth it is run by humans, who will no more unite around AI than they do around anything.
Good luck, Pat. Journeys of faith can change the world, and a mission of unifying and strengthening in the name of love is something to behold. Especially in tech. When it comes to imbuing LLMs with the numinous, though, they haven’t got a prayer. ®