With Christmas now on the horizon, some of you will be understandably alarmed to learn that I have been considering whether to write yet another twenty-four Advent devotions for this December. Because, contrary to what might be imagined by those who’ve been foolish enough to read what I’ve come up with in previous years, rather than frantically cobbling something together at the last minute, I do actually prepare them in advance.
And so it was that I came across Luke 2:19 where we read how Mary, after hearing what the shepherds spoke of when they visited her newborn baby, ‘treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.’
Curious then to know a little more about the word, I decided to look up ‘ponder’ in my dictionary. And in so doing I discovered, not only that, after years of relying on Google to answer my every query, I still had sufficient grasp of the alphabet to know that ‘p’ comes after ‘o’ – although not, I reflected, in the word for which I was seeking a definition – but also that ponder means ‘to consider carefully’.
Not that this came as any surprise, you understand, but as a consequence I found myself asking whether any of us actually ponder anything at all these days. Because, as my ironically hurried research revealed, the attention span of the average individual is dwindling such that it is said by some to be just eight seconds in distraction-rich situations. Which is, let’s face it, exactly where most of us now spend most of our time.
And why, perhaps, so many of us are now looking to AI to do our thinking for us.
Because when I asked one suspiciously charming chatbot how long it took to answer a question, it almost instantly replied that it varies depending on what is being asked, but that even the most complex problems take no more than twenty seconds to respond to.
Which in turn caused me to ponder: if the intelligence a chatbot allegedly possesses is artificial, what does that say about us, whose attention span is apparently half that of those fraudulent thinkers?
Rather than using AI to prompt and encourage our thinking, are we instead, having already become intellectually lazy, now becoming even more so as we allow AI to stop us thinking altogether?
And what hope remains, for us, now that our minds are too weak to follow Mary’s example, to ever learn to appreciate things of real worth, develop a deeper understanding of the unfathomable, or know what it is to marvel at the truly divine.
Or even, come to that, to remain focused long enough to finish this sente…
Related posts:
To read ‘Me, Myself and AI – Interacting with the Ghost in the Machine’, click here
To read ‘Keeping it Real’, click here
To read ‘Machines – enough to drive you berserk’, click here
To read ‘Contactless’ click here
To read ‘On not remotely caring’, click here
To read ‘Eleanor Rigby is not at all fine’, click here
To read ‘Life in the slow lane’, click here
To read ‘A Sorrow Shared’, click here
To read ‘Professor Ian Aird – a time to die?’, click here
To read ‘When Rain Stops Play’, click here
Some musings 