Wake Up, Look Up

Hello everyone, and thanks for listening to Wake Up, Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weihrauch, and in today's episode, we're asking the question, is this the secret to job security in the AI Era? This is prompted by an article I read in the New York Times by Matt Dinan, a teacher who describes in the article his recent class he taught on the brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky piece of Russian literature. It's over a thousand pages long. And in the article, I love this, he talks about reading this book again and falling in love with it in a new way and wrestling with it. I mean, that book, if you've read it, is full of passionate characters and spirited dialogue. And, and this teacher said, man, I read it almost like for the first time again and actually fell in love, sharing it with his class and having great conversation with them, spirited dialogue and debate with them. And what he said he found fascinating is the way his students bought in. In fact, one of his students said to him, when asked why he found the book so interesting, said to the teacher, it helped me that you were so into it. And from that, Dinan makes a great argument, which is, you know, if education is all about producing outcomes, grades, then from both the teacher and student level, artificial intelligence eventually will make that faster and more economical. AI teachers will cut out the fat of human interaction. Students will learn the that AI writing their papers or taking their tests or doing their research will lead to a better outcome. But what AI can't replicate is human passion. In fact, that's really what the piece is about. That maybe where humans should be spending their time in an era of technological advancement, on the things that wake us up, that make us happy to be alive, that create a contagious kind of excitement. What he says is that maybe the key to being an effective teacher in the AI era is to be a student himself. to model courage, genuine engagement, excitement, intellectual curiosity, and wrestling. This, when I read this, it made me think, this is going to sound weird, but it made me think of a verse in First Peter. When Peter says, use whatever gift you have received to serve others. You see, here's the problem. If you view your job as simply a way to produce an income, that you are simply a cog in a machine. Eventually the machine will find an artificial cog that does the job faster, quicker, and more cheaply. And as a result, you'll be out of a job. But if you begin to see not work as something you do just to produce an income, but work you do as out of giftedness to serve others. In other words, if teachers began to see their students actually coming alive to subject matter, to getting excited about the material, then AI can't replicate. I found this so interesting and challenging because it's the difference between working for a paycheck and working for purpose. working for purpose requires passion. the truth is that many of us are going to realize in the AI era that perhaps maybe we're doing the work just get a paycheck. And when you think that way, it leads to companies that think that way about their employees. And so it falls on each of us to try to figure out how can we get excited again about the work we're doing, or go find work that we can genuinely be excited about. Because there will always be a market for human passion. You know that because it's contagious when you see it, being around. Anyone who loves anything is excited about anything, especially when what they love and what they're excited about is you. That's what Peter's saying. Look, God has given each of us gifts, and he's given them to us not simply to produce an income, but to serve other people. When I read this article, I was reading about a teacher that genuinely desired his students to fall in love with a great piece of literature. And what he's discovering, and I think he's right, is is it going to have a hard time creating a computer animated device that will do that? Where is your passion? How can you use it to serve others? What you might find is asking those two questions actually creates job security for you. Hey, thanks for checking out Wake Up, Look Up. For more content, be sure to visit the Christ Community Chapel app or website cccchapel.com.

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