AI is a Technology

Mozart's dice game and the future of digital craft

I have a new essay out in Mere Orthodoxy on artificial intelligence. The title is aggressively boring, but this is intentional and I hope it clearly signals the direction I’ve taken. And I worked hard to make sure readers only have to look up a quarter of the words as opposed to the usual half.

The piece reflects several months wrestling with technology. As an indie game developer in a field dramatically affected by LLMs, and as someone who now works with them every day, I see a disconnect between my on-the-ground experience and what I’ve observed reading Christian accounts trying to make sense of artificial intelligence. Reading Anthropic’s recent paper on emergent helical manifolds resolved these tensions for me. As with the internet, I understand modern technology to be largely continuous with the industrial revolution, both with respect to its promises and its perils.

I’ve been trying to write this essay for a while, so I welcome any thoughts or feedback. As always, if you are reading this in your inbox, you can email me directly by simply replying to this message.