It was surely one of the most revealing cultural moments of the decade so far. On his podcast, Interesting Times, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asks PayPal cofounder, tech billionaire, and Silicon Valley guru Peter Thiel about the future: Douthat: “You would prefer the human race to endure, right?” Thiel: “Er . . .” Douthat: “You’re hesitating. Yes . . . ?” Thiel: “I dunno . . . I would . . . I would . . . erm . . .” Douthat: “This is a long hesitation . . . Should the human race survive?” Thiel: “Er . . . yes, but . . .” Their exchange is a canary in the coal mine. Something has changed. We used to leave forecasts of the AI apocalypse to shadowy characters lurking in the darker corners of 4chan and Reddit, but not anymore. In the interview, Thiel waxes eloquent on his transhumanist aspirations, Thiel’s vision, and alongside other recent interventions the AI 2027 project and Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI, he casually forecasts the end—or at least the radical transformation—of humanity as we know it. The AI apocalypse is becoming mainstream. But a more immediate and revealing AI apocalypse confronts us. The word “apocalypse,” after all, doesn’t originally mean “catastrophe” or “annihilation.” Apokalypsis is Greek for “unveiling.” This AI apocalypse is an exposé, revealing something previously obscure or covered over. More than any other technology in memory, Generative AI (which I’ll simply call AI in this article) is making us face up to uncomfortable or even disturbing truths about ourselves, and it’s opening a rare and precious space in which we can ask fundamental and pressing questions about who we are, where we find value, and what the good life looks like. With our reality laid bare, here are three aspects of the current AI apocalypse and how we can lean into them as Christians. 1. AI shows us who we think we are. Listen to how people enthuse about “productivity” in the age of ChatGPT, or listen to the latest debates over whether AI-generated art or essays “count” as genuine creations. There’s both an excitement and a panic, yes, but underneath that, there’s a kind of existential squirm. AI is exposing our assumptions about identity, value, and what it means to be a person. Let me ask you straight: What’s your value? For many in modern society, our value is connected to what we produce. We’ve trained ourselves (and maybe our children) to see our value as a function of our productivity: The more we can pump out or the more efficient we are, the more meaning and value we find in our lives. And when AI comes along and produces more, better, and faster than we can, we’re left wondering whether our value can come from our productivity after all. The question of value gets to the heart of a view of human beings that legal scholars John Coons and Patrick Brennan call the “host properties” approach, where our dignity and value lie in a particular host property, a faculty or capacity we possess: intelligence, creativity, wordsmithing, strategic insights, or wit. AI is apocalyptic in that it exposes the shallowness of this approach. It becomes harder to find our value in what we can do if AI can do it better, and that’s not a bad thing. In Genesis 1, God creates Adam and Eve to know him before he gives them a task to complete. The creation mandate is meaningful because of how it expresses humanity’s relationship to our Creator, to each other, and to the rest of creation: communion before commission. We late moderns have forgotten communion and reduced our meaning to commission alone: productivity, efficiency, getting things done. AI exposes this shallow vision of humanity, and in so doing offers us a rare opportunity to address it. READ THE OTHER TWO ASPECTS | 
