Are You Ready For The Ai Apocalypse?

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.

2. AI shows us what we think work is for.

AI is forcing us to ask fundamental questions about the meaning and purpose of work. I feel this every day in my job as a university lecturer. If AI can write an essay better than the students can, what do I think I’m teaching them, and why? What’s the point of a college degree? What’s the point of education? As one recent article asks, “If the machine is as good as me, then what use am I?”

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.

I welcome these questions. We should have been asking them a long time ago, and now AI is forcing them on us all at once. Better late than never. What AI is revealing in this case is the importance of process, not just of product, and the importance not only of what work we do but of what our work does to us.

AI wonderfully reduces the friction of work: the grunt, the slow bits, the obstacles. But it also reveals to us how gravely we misunderstand this friction. We most often see friction as a nuisance, something to be optimized away in favor of greater productivity. After all, is it really so dangerous if AI outsources drudgery?

But AI presents us with a vision of almost infinite productivity and almost zero friction, and in this way it acts like a living thought experiment to help us see something that was hiding in plain sight all along: Friction is a gym for the soul. The awkward conversation, the blank page, the child who won’t sleep when we have a report to write––these aren’t roadblocks to our growth; they’re the highway to wisdom and maturity, to being the sort of people who can deal with friction in life with resilience and grace. Without it, we remain weak and small, however impressive our productivity.

We can have too much friction; we knew that already. But AI, perhaps for the first time, shows us we can also have too little. Without friction, we can never become “the sort of person who . . .”

In this way, AI can drag us toward a more biblical view of work. The God of the Bible cares not only about outcomes but also about processes, not only about what we human beings do but also about who we’re becoming as we do it. God seeks out David for being a man after his own heart, not for his potential as a great military commander or king (1 Sam. 13:14).

And why does God whittle down Gideon’s troops to a paltry 300 before attacking the Midianites (Judg. 7)? Because it’s not just about the victory. God intentionally introduces friction by reducing the army to reshape the character of his people, making them “the sort of people who” rely on God, not on themselves (see v. 2).

By short-circuiting the process to focus only on the product, AI exposes our obsession with outcomes and opens up a space in which we can reflect on what we miss when we focus only on what we do, not on who we’re becoming.

3. AI showcases God’s glory.

For Christians, AI reveals reality to us in an even deeper way. Its disembodied brilliance, its ability to churn out content, code, and even sound advice uncovers what’s most glorious about the gospel.

At the heart of the Bible’s message, we don’t find a series of pieces of good advice, or even a list of answers to our deepest questions. AI shows us that this isn’t what we’re searching for anyway. Here’s a question for you: What do you think is the top use of AI in 2025? According to a Harvard Business Review report, it’s “therapy/companionship”. At our deepest level, we don’t want to know something; we want to be known by someone. We don’t want information; we want intimacy.

The God of the Bible cares not only about what we human beings do but also about who we’re becoming as we do it.

We want intimacy so deeply that we’ll seek it even when we know it isn’t real, even when we know that the “person” we’re chatting with is a highly complex transformer-based architecture that’s very good at predicting the next word in a sequence but can feel nothing of our pain, suffering, or anxiety.

Over against this dim, simulacral comfort for lonely hearts, the gospel blazes with a fresh and glorious invitation. Because in the gospel we find One who not only knows the right answer or can string together the right words to imitate empathy, but One who is himself “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3), One who “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), and One who doesn’t only offer wise life advice but dies in our place (1 Pet. 3:18). AI can inform us about diseases, but Christ “has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isa. 53:4). AI is a word that can instruct flesh, but it cannot become flesh; it cannot suffer with us; it cannot die for us.

And precisely because of this incapacity, AI does us an inestimable service: It shows us the uniqueness, preciousness, and incomparable wonder of a God who became fully human and bore our sufferings to die in our place.

Three Questions for the AI Age

The real AI apocalypse, the true exposé of our human condition, isn’t the rise of killer robots. It’s about the unveiling of our hearts, our priorities, our idols, and our hopes. Are you ready for that, for what AI might reveal about your view of humanity, work, or God? Like a scalpel, AI cuts us open, revealing our real priorities and values in new and uncomfortable ways.

At our deepest level, we don’t want to know something; we want to be known by someone. We don’t want information; we want intimacy.

Progress in AI will likely skyrocket over the coming months and years. As it does, let me leave you with three diagnostic questions to orient you as each new AI breakthrough comes and goes: (1) What can we do with this technology? (2) What does this technology do to us? (3) How is this technology apocalyptic (what does it reveal about us)?

AI isn’t just a tool. It’s a mirror, and when we look into it, we are confronted with a revealing reflection of ourselves. The question you and I have to face is whether we’re ready for the apocalyptic vision staring back at us.