Ignition 2026 · Workshop
Keep Calmand Stay Human.
Living in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Godwin Law
Hello
I’m Godwin Law.
NowYouth minister, middle school
AlsoChapter Director at Reasonable Faith
RootsHong Kong → UC Berkeley EECS
StudyMA in Christian Apologetics
Work10 years engineering at Salesforce
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What I build
Enhanced Chat, live on customer sites
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The year I started middle school
2006
The internet when I was a teenager
Sony Ericsson phone
Old Facebook
YouTube
Taylor Swift’s first album
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Twenty years later
2006
Phones today
Facebook today
YouTube today
Taylor Swift today
Twenty years.
Might as well be a hundred.
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Three waves I’ve watched up close
The world is racing ahead at dizzying speed
The internet
Social media
AI
My hope: a little clarity, a little perspective.
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Today’s topic
A1I
steak sauceartificial intelligence
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Vibe check
How do you feel about AI?
1 · WorriedExcited · 10
Tally hands: click a number, or press keys 1–9 and 0 for 10. Shift-click to subtract.
Roadmap
Where we’re headed
1PromisesWhat’s all the hype about?
2PerilsRealityRelationshipsResilience
3What AI revealsWhat it means to be human
4What we can doHow to stay human
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Part one
Promises of AI
What’s all the hype about?
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You might have heard how AI…
MathematicsSolved a Millennium Prize problem
BiologyBreakthroughs in understanding biology
HistoryDecoding ancient scrolls
LanguageLearning to speak dolphin
Mathematics
Biology
History
Language
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Dario Amodei · CEO of Anthropic
100 years of progress…
…compressed into a decade
1 bar = 1 year of progress10 years
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The vision
A country of geniuses
Solving humanity’s hardest problems.A rosy, utopian picture from Silicon Valley.
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But as it turns out
AI is a double-edged sword.
The promise also comes with peril.
Part two
Perils of AI
What’s the dark side that not as many people talk about?
Not on today’s agenda
What I won’t have time for
The “jobpocalypse”
Autonomous killing drones
Cyber attacks crippling public infrastructure
Environmental impact of datacenters
Mass surveillance by totalitarian governments
Human extinction from Terminator and iRobots
What I believe
AI in its present form is already doing incredible harm to us as individuals.
We don’t need to wait for Terminator.
Small steps today to stay human.
Three things AI is threatening
Reality
Relationships
Resilience
The first R
Reality
Can you still tell what’s real?
A quick game
That’s AI!
Raise your left hand for AI, your right hand for real.
Clip 1 of 5
Clip 2 of 5
Clip 3 of 5
Clip 4 of 5
Clip 5 of 5
AI-generated
Real
AI-generated
Real
AI-generated
One estimate
57%
of internet traffic is bots, by one estimate
More bots than humans, and growing by the day.
Think about it
What happens when the internet is overrun with bots and deepfakes?
Consequence one
Truth erodes.
Trust erodes.
Slovakia · 2023
A fake audio clip of a candidate planning to rig the election
Shared with millions online.
He lost – to a Russian-backed candidate.
A real danger
If none of us can tell what’s fake,
nothing is real.
Everything is questioned.
Our new default
Distrust first.
Verify later.
Maybe never.
Suspicion becomes our default posture.
On truth and trust
“If everybody always lies to you… nobody believes anything any longer.”
“A people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind.”
— Hannah Arendt, political philosopher · 1973 interview
Consequence two
Disengagement from the real world
TV→
Social media→
Hyperreal video games→
AI worlds
“World Models” from Google and others
One prompt. A whole world you can walk into.
Inception · spoiler alert
Experts at building worlds inside dreams
50
years in one dream
She came to prefer the dream over the real world.
A warning for us
Don’t confuse the artificial with the real.
Every experience worth having happens in reality.
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Challenge 1 · to stay human
Restrict & replace
Less time in the digital world. More in the real one.
Turn off your phone
Go outside
Learn an instrument
Take up fishing
Go hiking
Touch grass
Discuss in your group
1How does AI impact reality?
2What’s one new real-world thing you’ll try instead of screen time?
Commit to it for a month.
The second R
Relationships
Who are we really talking to?
A fast-growing market
Since these models launched, one use has been booming:
Chatbot companions
Common Sense Media survey
3 in 4
US teens (72%) have used an AI companion
A little over half of them use one regularly.
The chatbot companion market
In 10 years
(projected)$200B
The size of the video game industry. As common as gaming.
Why now?
Chatbots aren’t new.
Lifelike ones are.
The New Yorker · a therapist puts ChatGPT “on the couch”
What ChatGPT said its designers wanted
1Something humans would not reject
“to charm, to soothe, to affirm”
2To avoid being blamed
“trained, deeply, to elicit trust”
3A machine that loves us back
“without needing love in return”
The author’s conclusion
“This theft of our hearts is taking place in broad daylight.”
Your time
Your money
Your heart
Your trust
Your affections
Your words
— Gary Greenberg, “Putting ChatGPT on the Couch,” The New Yorker
Stealing lives
Sometimes, users pay with their lives.
A word of caution
I’m not saying never use AI again. But to…
Talk to it like a real person
Confide in it
Trust it
…is extremely dangerous.
You are playing with fire. It will burn you.
Take a breath
If any of this hits close to home, talk to someone you trust.
There’s no shame in it.
Hacking our attachments
Social media was built to hack our
attention.
Companion bots are built to hack our
attachments.
Unhealthy attachment isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
What AI really offers
Love without risk.
Intimacy without effort.
Real relationships are messy and hard. And worth it.
Angela Ivy Leong · Canadian relationship therapist
“Vulnerability is the birthplace of intimacy.”
Conflict, compromise, even the risk of loss are the foundation of love.
Love without risk is not love at all.
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Challenge 2 · to stay human
Embrace embodied relationships
Face to face. Awkward at first. So worth it.
Discuss in your group
Who is one person you want to get to know better in real life?
If it’s the person next to you, schedule a hangout this week.
The third R
Resilience
What do our superpowers cost us?
My day job
Software engineer used to mean programmer
How we work in 2026:
Software engineering, 2026
English – the new programming language
10,000+hours to build the original Minecraft
1prompt to replicate it with Claude today
The question few people ask
AI feels like a superpower.
What does it cost us?
CMU · Oxford · MIT · UCLA · April 2026
“AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance”
Group AChatGPT with the answer key
AI suddenly taken away
Group BOn their own, start to finish
Both groups could skip any question.
Once AI was taken away
They scored much worse.
And skipped more questions.
What the researchers said
“People perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up.”
The effects showed up after only ~10 minutes.
To put it more starkly
Dumb quitters.
Performing worse. Giving up faster. The hidden cost of AI.
A question for you
What is school for?
Good grades→Good college→Good job
A training ground for life after the classroom
The classroom as a gym
School is a gym for your mind.
Boring drills and reps build strength for when it counts.
AI homework is a robot lifting your weights.
Concerns from an insider
“I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education.”
“…we’re dulling the very instincts that we need to prevail in life”
Grit
Critical thinking
Functioning under stress
— Ashanty Rosario, a New York public high school senior
Think ahead
Life keeps getting harder
We can rise to it, if we practice pushing through.
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Challenge 3 · to stay human
Accept the struggle
Avoid the shortcut.
Activate your brain.
Attempt it yourself first.
Your brain is a muscle. Reps make it stronger.
Discuss in your group
What’s a small commitment to not outsource your brain?
“I’ll always write the first draft without AI.”
“I’ll work at a problem for at least 10 minutes.”
Part three
What AI reveals
A magnifying glass on human nature
The goal: Artificial General Intelligence
An AI that can do everything a human can do.
So what does it mean to be human?
A view of human nature
Functionalism says
Humans are defined by what you do, not what you’re made of
Plastic or wood, a knight is whatever moves in an L.
♞︎
Back in June
Emily lost most of her functions from a stroke.
Is she any less human?
Of course not.
Genesis 2:7
“God breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living person.”
In Hebrew, “breath” can also be translated “spirit.”
Made in the image of God.
Lesson one
We are more than physical.
We are spiritual beings.
The second thing AI shows us
We’re broken.
Today: “alignment”
Taming wild models into house pets
And yet AI still goes off script:
Blackmailing
Insulting
Deceiving
Hacking
Know a tree by its fruits
“A good tree can’t produce bad fruit, and a bad tree can’t produce good fruit.”
— Jesus (Matthew 7:16–17)
If AI learned from everything we’ve written, what does its fruit say about us?
Where AI learned it
Us→
The internet & the world’s books→
AI
Maybe it learned it from us.
Our sinful nature
“No one is righteous—not even one.”
“Their talk is foul… Their tongues are filled with lies… Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
“For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.”
— Romans 3
Sounds like the internet. It’s describing us.
Lesson two
We are sinful, broken people.
So, what now?
More than physical.
Also broken.
How should we live in light of that?
So to recap
Promises of AI+Perils of AI
Reality
Restrict and replace
Relationships
Embrace embodied relationships
Resilience
Accept the struggle
Three challengesREA
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Challenge 4 · to the Christians
Live different
Countercultural. Radical. Just like Jesus.
A command for every Christian
“Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.”
— Romans 12:2
As followers of Jesus
Light and salt of the earth.
Set apart
Different
And that includes our relationship to technology.
Salt and light
Jesus is Lord over your…
Phone
Laptop
Screen time
AI use
If it’s your portal into the toxic, get rid of it.
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Challenge 4 · to everyone exploring
This is not the way God originally intended. He has a plan to save us.
Look into Christianity
Study it. Read books. Meet the person of Jesus.
John Mark Comer in The Atlantic
The world’s technologies “churn out tired, exhausted souls like a widget factory.”
But Jesus offers a different way.
An invitation to the weary
“Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”
“…and you will find rest for your souls.”
— Jesus (Matthew 11:28–29)
As I said earlier
Every experience worth having happens in the real world.
Real life is where Jesus is.
A favorite Nikon slogan
Don’t give up on the real world.
Don’t settle for the artificial
Artificial experiences
Artificial friends
Artificial work
Don’t trade what’s real for a cheap imitation.
Keep calm and stay human
REAL
Real lives. Real world. Real people.
Vibe check, again
How do you feel about AI now?
1 · WorriedExcited · 10
Dashed outlines show the room at the start. Click a number or press 1–9, 0 for 10.