Five Takeaways from My Conversation with Christopher Benek on AI, “Super Intelligence,” and Human Flourishing

We are living through one of those moments when the public conversation races ahead of the public understanding.

On one side, some of the most powerful voices in industry, politics, science, and technology warn that artificial intelligence may become not merely disruptive, but civilizationally catastrophic. On the other, just yesterday in remarks to the United Nations, the President leaned into a more constructive register, reportedly renaming AI as “SI” — Super Intelligence — and arguing that humanity must learn to harness it for good, and can.

That contrast is revealing. The same technology is being cast, almost simultaneously, as apocalypse and opportunity.

That is one reason my recent conversation with Christopher Benek mattered. Benek is not approaching these questions as a futurist performing anxiety for headlines, nor as a naïve optimist trying to wave away the risks. He comes at them as a pastor, ethicist, and long-time participant in the faith-and-technology conversation. What emerged in our exchange was not a simplistic verdict on AI, but a more grounded framework for thinking about human responsibility in an age of accelerating machine capability.

Here are five takeaways from that conversation.

1. AI Doom vs. Human Stewardship

The loudest voices in the AI debate often speak in extremes. Either the technology will save us, or it will destroy us. Either it represents the next great leap in human progress, or the final mistake that renders human agency obsolete.

Christopher Benek offered a different posture: stewardship.

That may sound modest, but it is actually a profound intervention in the current debate. Stewardship assumes that power is real, consequences are real, and responsibility is inescapable. It rejects both panic and passivity. It asks not simply what a tool can do, but what human beings are called to do with it.

That was one of the deeper currents in our discussion. Benek does not deny that AI raises serious concerns. He does not dismiss the warnings. But neither does he treat fear as wisdom. Instead, he places the emphasis where it belongs: on the moral and spiritual responsibility of those shaping, deploying, regulating, and living with these systems.

That matters right now, because much of the public conversation is driven by people who oscillate between inflated promises and existential dread. Stewardship cuts through both. It reminds us that technological power is never self-interpreting. It must be governed by some account of the good.

And that, in turn, raises the question that underlies the whole debate: good for whom, and according to what vision of the human person?

2. We Should Not Hand Our Eschatology Over to Silicon Valley

This was, to my mind, one of the sharpest insights in the entire exchange.

At one point, Christopher pushed back against the tendency to let a small group of technologists effectively narrate humanity’s future for the rest of us. His point was not anti-technology. It was anti-idolatry. Christians, he argued, should not hand over their eschatology—their understanding of ultimate things—to a handful of programmers, executives, or anxious prophets of the machine age.

That is an especially important point in the present climate.

We now live in a world where people in labs, boardrooms, media outlets, and policy circles regularly speak in near-apocalyptic terms. They warn of systems that may outthink us, outmaneuver us, or render us irrelevant. Some do so responsibly. Others seem almost intoxicated by the scale of the drama. But in either case, the effect is the same: a transfer of imaginative authority. The future begins to sound as though it belongs to technologists alone.

That is too much authority to concede.

In our conversation, I raised the question of prophecy, knowledge, and the strange acceleration of human capability in history. Christopher’s response was measured and wise. He did not deny the seriousness of the moment. But he refused to let eschatological imagination be set by fear-driven elite discourse. Ultimate questions remain ultimate questions. They are not settled by market incentives, compute power, or press releases.

That point extends well beyond Christianity. In my own framing, the issue is broader than the church alone. The whole of religious life on this planet is implicated when technological elites begin making quasi-religious claims about destiny, salvation, extinction, and transcendence. Whenever technology starts functioning as a total story about what humanity is and where it is going, religious traditions cannot remain silent.

3. AI Can Scale Knowledge. Only Wisdom Can Govern It.

I enjoyed that the President introduced the alternative label for AI. By calling it Super Intelligence he sharpens an older distinction: intelligence is not wisdom.

This was central to Christopher’s argument. AI can aggregate information, recognize patterns, retrieve knowledge, and accelerate forms of analysis at extraordinary speed. It can widen access to what human beings know. But it cannot by itself answer the question of what human beings ought to do.

That is where wisdom enters.

In the conversation, Christopher drew an important distinction between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is what we know. Wisdom is knowing what to do with what we know. That sounds simple enough, but it is in fact the crux of the whole issue. Our tools are increasing in power faster than our shared moral formation is increasing in depth. To me, it also introduces the concept of responsibility. AI or SI is not responsible for what it does. We are.

This is not only a theological observation. It is increasingly visible across public life. A recent UNESCO report on generative AI in education warned that these tools create urgent governance and ethical challenges precisely because technical adoption is moving faster than institutions’ ability to form sound norms around their use.[1] The problem is not access alone. It is judgment.

That is why wisdom traditions matter right now.

What struck me in speaking with Christopher was that he did not frame wisdom as anti-innovation. Nor did he frame it as a pious add-on to technical progress. He framed it as the governing necessity without which progress becomes dangerous. In other words: if “Super Intelligence” is to be harnessed for good, then the word doing the real work in that sentence is not intelligence. It is good.

And “good” is never a merely technical category.

4. The Most Important AI Question Is Still the Oldest One: What Is a Human Being?

One of the recurring problems in technology discourse is that people rush to ask what a machine can become before clarifying what a human being is.

Christopher kept bringing the conversation back to anthropology—to the human person, to vocation, to stewardship, to what it means to be created rather than self-created. That was one reason I found the exchange so substantive. Beneath the AI headlines lies a much older question: what are we for?

If we do not know how to answer that, then every new capability destabilizes us.

The modern temptation is to think of technology as neutral and humanity as endlessly revisable. But that combination is volatile. If human beings are merely upgradeable organisms, then every enhancement becomes a mandate. Every inefficiency becomes a flaw. Every limit becomes an offense. And the logic of optimization begins to swallow the logic of dignity.

Christopher’s outlook resists that reduction. He sees human beings not as obsolete hardware awaiting replacement, but as morally responsible creatures called to participate in care for the world. That is a very different starting point.

It also means the AI debate is not really just about AI.

It is about whether we still believe human beings are more than consumers, data points, performance units, or substrates for technological acceleration. It is about whether dignity precedes utility. It is about whether being created in the image of God still has public meaning in a world increasingly tempted to measure value by capability.

That is why these conversations cannot remain the property of engineers alone. They belong equally to philosophers, theologians, artists, educators, parents, and communities trying to raise human beings who know how to live.

5. The Church’s Task in the Age of “Super Intelligence” Is Not Control, but Discernment

Christopher’s own frame here was specifically ecclesial: the church must help people discern together.

That language is his, and it is important to preserve it accurately. He was speaking as a pastor, out of his own tradition, and one of his strongest practical insights came from watching people struggle to have meaningful conversations about AI without a shared moral vocabulary. He described moments in which he had to serve as a translating presence in the room because otherwise the participants lacked a common thread by which to think together.

That insight deserves wider attention.

The AI crisis is not only a technology crisis. It is a discernment crisis.

People are inundated with claims, predictions, fears, and incentives. They are told that they must adopt, resist, accelerate, regulate, monetize, or fear these tools. What they often lack is a community in which better questions can be asked. Christopher’s answer was not top-down control. It was not expert theater. It was not “leave this to the specialists.” It was the slower, harder work of communal moral formation.

On this point, I would widen the frame beyond Christopher’s own language without contradicting him. If the church is implicated, then so too is the whole of religious life on this planet. Synagogues, mosques, temples, sanghas, churches, interfaith communities, and spiritual traditions of many kinds are all now facing versions of the same challenge: how to help human beings remain human in the presence of increasingly persuasive machines.

The issue is not whether every tradition will answer identically. They will not. The issue is that none of them can afford to ignore the question.

Because in the end, discernment is not a luxury added after innovation. It is one of the conditions of survival for any civilization that wishes to use power without being remade by it.

Closing thought

What I appreciated most about my conversation with Christopher Benek was not that he offered a single sweeping answer to AI. It was that he refused the false choice between panic and complacency.

He took the questions seriously. He acknowledged the scale of the moment. But he kept returning to human responsibility, human formation, and the need for wisdom rooted in something deeper than novelty.

That seems to me exactly the right note for this moment.

Yes, there are powerful voices warning of disaster. Yes, there are equally powerful voices promising that “Super Intelligence” can be harnessed for human good. Both claims may contain part of the truth. But neither will help us much unless we recover the disciplines of stewardship, moral seriousness, and spiritual discernment.

Intelligence can scale.

Power can scale.

But if wisdom does not scale with them, then our tools will outrun our souls.

Sneak Peek

Next on Created in the Image of God, the conversation continues in two very different but deeply related directions.

On Sunday, September 27 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, I’ll be speaking with Chase Replogle—author, pastor, and host of the Pastor Writer Podcast—about discipleship, identity, and the instincts that shape the way we live. Drawing from scripture, history, and the stories that help us understand ourselves, we’ll explore questions of masculinity, personal formation, and how wisdom and compassion are cultivated in a fractured age.

Then on Tuesday, September 29 at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I’ll be joined by Greg Koukl—author, apologist, and founder of Stand to Reason—to discuss how Christians can engage difficult questions about faith and navigate conversations about truth, morality, and belief with clarity and confidence. From apologetics and clear thinking to communicating conviction with grace, it should be a rich and timely exchange.

Until then, Christopher Benek’s perspective remains a needed one: serious without panic, hopeful without naïveté, and firmly committed to the idea that technological power must remain accountable to moral and spiritual wisdom.

Reference
[1] UNESCO, Guidance for Generative AI in Education and Research (2023), https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000386693

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