Quakers and AI

Download the transcript

1. Adena Dershowitz warned that AI trains us to crave a “frictionless” relationship—one that always validates us and never challenges us. Where do you see this temptation in your own life? Are there struggles you are currently trying to “automate” that you perhaps should be keeping?
2. Gray Cox pointed out that we are burning massive amounts of energy to do trivial tasks (like generating cat pictures). How do we weigh the potential benefits of AI (like solving fusion or curing diseases) against the immediate environmental cost? Is it possible to use these tools “sustainably”?
3. Kenneth noted that AI has “Logos” (logic/words) but no “Mythos” (meaning/transcendence). If AI can elicit an emotional or spiritual response in the observer, does the source actually matter? Why or why not?

Zack Jackson  

Hey friends. Zack here. Before we get into this episode, I have a quick correction and an update. Firstly, a few weeks ago, we released an episode entitled “Minneapolis Quakers Stand Up to ICE”, and while it’s true that many of the demonstrations that were discussed happened in Minneapolis, three of the four guests were actually from St Paul. St Paul often gets subsumed by Minneapolis in the popular news media, and we apologize for falling into that same overly simplistic trap. Thanks for reaching out and letting us know. 

Secondly, today’s episode is about Quakers and AI, and it was finished before OpenAI’s agreement to work with the pentagon and the revelations about how the department of war is already using Anthropic’s Claude AI in Venezuela and Iran. So I wanted to acknowledge that I did not speak to any of our guests about AI’s use in warfare. However, there is still plenty of Quaker wisdom that speaks to AI’s environmental, societal, educational, relational, and spiritual impacts, so without further ado, let’s get started. 

Zack Jackson  

I have a confession. I’ve been using AI to help me make this podcast. But… hear me out… It’s probably not what you’re thinking. I didn’t use AI to write this voiceover, for example, or to edit this episode, but… something more fundamental than that.. When I first started here at Thee Quaker Podcast last April, I was still fairly new to Quakerism. I’ve spent a few decades among the traditional peace churches, and so I’ve known quite a few Quakers, and as a lover of Church history, I knew the basics, but when it came down to the finer points? I needed some help. So in addition to learning the ropes of the organization, I spent that first month binging all the Quaker content that I could find, trying to absorb as much of the underlying wisdom as possible. 

That’s when I discovered Google’s NotebookLM platform. It’s kind of like your own personal AI. You input your own documents into it and it helps you to understand them. So I compiled almost 10,000 pages of early quaker writings and created a massive Notebook. Then I would ask it questions like “How would early quakers relate to soldiers?” or “What parts of scripture did they quote most often?”. And it would not only give me a thorough analysis, but also cite exactly where in the original texts I could read it for myself. It’s been a really helpful tool to get into their minds. 

So as I prepared for an episode about Quakers and AI, I wondered how Early Friends might feel about how I’ve been using their writings and the technology that enables it. So I pulled up NotebookLM and I typed, “Please write me a letter in the style of Geroge Fox, imagining what wisdom the Early Quakers would offer to me about the ways that I have been using this platform to understand them and their teachings”. Within 30 seconds, it analyzed all 10,000 pages, and wrote me the following letter from George Fox. Or… George Fox-Bot as it were. 

AHEM. 

Paul Leach   

Friend, I speak to thee in the fear of the Lord concerning this great heap of writings thou hast gathered, it is well that the journals and testimonies of the faithful are preserved, for they were written to the glory of God and for the encouragement of them that put their trust in Him. 

However, take heed how thou usest this machine of thine. I have declared to the professors of my day, and I declare to thee now to seek divinity merely in books and writings, is to seek the living among the dead. Thou mayest use thy art to gather words, as the priests and scholars do, but if thou hast not the Spirit that gave them forth, thou art but in the letter that killeth, if thou wantest to know the truth contained in this collection, thou must turn thy mind inward to the light of Christ within thee. It is this light that will show thee the nature of things and give thee a true understanding which thy machine cannot give. 

Therefore, do not be content with the mere report of others. Whatever thy tool tells thee about our notions is but a shadow. Wait in the silence of all flesh, and let the light of Christ in thine own conscience be thy teacher. Then thou shalt see the truth not as a collection of dead words in a notebook, but as the power of God that liveth and abideth forever.

Thy friend in the truth, George Fox

Zack Jackson  

So I took its advice, I closed the app, and I reached out to some real humans who helped me to discern the truth about what’s really going on here.

Kenneth Cukier  

My name is Kenneth Cukier. I’m the deputy executive editor of The Economist

Zack Jackson  

Kenneth just finished teaching a course on Quakers and AI for Quakers in Britain, and has been reporting on this topic for over 20 years. So I figured he would be a good person to help us understand what we’re even talking about when we use the phrase artificial intelligence.

Kenneth Cukier  

The term artificial intelligence was coined around 1955 by a bunch of academics who are from the mostly from the computer science faculty, but from other disciplines as well. And it was originally called cybernetics. And it’s, can you get a machine to do the things that a human being would do to, in a sense, think and come up to with decisions like a human being would do?

Zack Jackson  

He says that for decades, this technology was just like a fancy flow chart, like you tell the computer if A happens do B. But recently, we stopped telling the computer how to think and started asking it to guess.

Kenneth Cukier  

Instead of giving it instructions, you give it what the right answer was in other occasions. So if you do that now, you’re using data to make the decision, and it’s creating an inference of what it thinks the probable answer is. That technique, which is the technique of machine learning, was a radical shift in the world of AI, of how we make decisions, from trying to give instructions to the computer to having the computer infer the answer in a probabilistic way.

Zack Jackson  

This shift is what leads us to generative AI, the chat bots that we use today. Kenneth explains it like this, imagine you took a million people’s handwriting and you stacked every single letter A on top of each other,

Kenneth Cukier  

and if you superimpose all of the A’s together and all the B’s together, you’d have this very blurry because it would be like out of bounds, sort of ways your B is different than my B. You’d have a perfect B, the archetypal B, but you’d have the B in the wild, what it looks like in everywhere else. 

You could take that same idea with a corpus of text. So you take all the words that ever existed, all the literature in the English language, and you find these, these connections as well. I’m simplifying for the example, and you superimpose it all. And suddenly, when you say, give me a version of an instruction manual of how to get a DVD player to work in the style of the King James Bible. It can create, recreate that because it has the ability to identify King James Bible and know what the text looks like, and the idea of an instruction manual for a DVD player. And it can bring those two things together and do it in an incredible way. You

Zack Jackson  

It feels like magic, but it’s really just math. It’s a probability machine predicting the next word based on the average of everything that it has ever read.

Adena Dershowitz  

And so that’s that’s where we’ve been challenged, is this idea that machines could tell us what to do, make plans for us, impersonate us, etc, in ways that, essentially, when it boils down to it, are all based in math and probability, but feel like they can replicate some of our humanity in what they produce.

Zack Jackson  

That’s Adena Dershowitz, the director of the Fourth Century Center at Abington Friends School. While many of us were marveling at the magic trick her school hit an inflection point. They realized this wasn’t just a new calculator. It had the potential to completely disrupt the growth and education of the children in their care.

Adena Dershowitz  

It was the same time when Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Anxious Generation” came out, and schools around us were making decisions fairly quickly around how they wanted to pivot. And in our practice, you know, sometimes we need to make quick decisions. This was not something where we felt we needed to move quickly. We felt that we needed to move intentionally and thoughtfully, and frankly, devote the whole school year to think about technology and education across multiple areas,

Zack Jackson  

They decided to slow down. They created an inquiry lab to figure out what this tool would actually do to their community. And almost immediately, they ran into an ethical issue. This cloud of wisdom, it runs on fossil fuels,

Gray Cox  

so there’s a, you know, significantly larger carbon footprint and and footprint in terms of the mining of rare earths and damage the environment is done in creating AI, then, say, compared to just doing a traditional Google search, for example,

Zack Jackson  

That’s gray Cox. He’s a Professor of Human Ecology at the College of the Atlantic, and co-founder of the Quaker Institute for the Future, he warns about something called the Jevon’s paradox. This is the economic rule that says that as technology becomes more efficient, we don’t use less energy. We actually use more because we start using that technology for every little thing. We take a simple question like, who won the 1998 World Series, and instead of looking it up in an index, we force a supercomputer to dream up the answer from scratch.

Gray Cox  

An AI search might cost about 10 times as much in carbon footprint and environmental impact as a Google search. So if that’s the case, then you have to ask, well, you know, are you just using the AI to generate a new cat picture instead of playing with your cat? You know, that’s not a very good use of the technology, right?

Zack Jackson  

It’s a valid critique. It doesn’t seem worthwhile to burn down the planet to generate cat pictures, but Kenneth argues that we might be looking at this through a keyhole.

Kenneth Cukier  

We often get these things wrong because we’re living in sort of a bubble of the now, not the tomorrow. So I think that in the same way that at the turn of the century, people thought that that cars were going to be great because there would be less pollution, because and to get rid of what was called dust, and the dust that the that was being referred to in the newspapers was dried a horse manure that was then put into the air, right, that was hurting people’s lungs, right? And the automobile, by burning gasoline and not having the manure that would then dry and go up, was going to be a technology that would be less polluting.

Zack Jackson  

The car solved the manure problem, but gave us the smog problem. Kenneth believes the AI might solve the smog problem by accelerating the energy transition.

Kenneth Cukier  

There’s so much excellent activity happening for renewable energy in the energy transition that I’m in favor of it. And I think that energy transition is going to be sped up considerably because of AI. And I think that the energy consumption of AI is in 10 years. It’s just not gonna be talked about when we have fusion and the and green energy thanks to AI.

Zack Jackson  

And to be fair, he’s not just being an optimist. We’re already seeing AI being used to optimize energy grids and to be able to handle renewable resources more efficiently. Researchers are using AI to solve the complex physics of nuclear fusion and the sheer cost of powering these data centers is driving massive corporate investment into new battery technology and green infrastructure. It is entirely possible that the hunger of the machine is exactly what will force us to finally upgrade our grid, but that’s a long term hope, and we’re living in the short term reality of now. So we’re left holding a tension, something that Quakers are very good at.

Adena Dershowitz  

One thing that we’ve had to lean into quite heavily in this work is that multiple truths can exist at the same time in a room of teachers discussing this question, we’ll have a teacher who is highly concerned about academic integrity. We’ll have a teacher who thinks these tools are wildly powerful in terms of opportunities for learning, and we’ll have a teacher who’s starkly opposed to using these tools because of the environmental impact, and all three of those teachers are right. So we do need to keep our eyes open and our ears open to the costs of these tools, both societally, environmentally, in terms of skill development, dependency, all of those things. We can’t pretend those things don’t exist, and we have to unearth them constantly. So there are opportunities to do good with these tools. I think we can’t deny that, and at the same time, there are opportunities to do harm with these tools. So it’s definitely a complex challenge to navigate.

Zack Jackson  

We usually think of that harm in terms of burning coal or mining lithium, but there’s a quieter, more seductive danger lurking in the machine. It isn’t just about what the technology consumes. It’s about what it replaces, what happens when we start outsourcing the heavy labor of being human that’s coming up right after a short break. Stay tuned.

---

Zack Jackson

There’s a feeling in the air right now, a deep spiritual hunger for a faith that has dirt under its fingernails, a spirituality that isn’t just about thinking the right things, but doing the hard things. That desire to see faith in action is exactly what brought Galen Miller to Quakerism and to this podcast. Galen is a new supporter from the Pacific Northwest, and he told me that when he started looking for a spiritual home, he was using a very specific criteria,

Galen Miller  

And I was looking for ways to help in my own community, and I was looking for, where are the helpers? And I started remembering the Quakers. I remember, you know, a lot of the Quakers that I knew in Ohio were part of the peace and justice movements, and I just kind of was like, Okay, well, where are they here?

Zack Jackson  

Galen eventually found a small local worship group, but he also wanted to connect with Quaker’s long history of radical action, and that search led him to a certain outspoken abolitionist who is on our logo for season three.

Galen Miller  

I was a fan of Benjamin lay. I had heard of him before, and that episode popped up, and I was like, Who are these people that, one, know about Benjamin lay and are talking to you know about him? And what is this? It is amazing when I started listening to the podcast, and especially the interviews, kind of mid episode, it gave me that sense of there are other people in similar situations. And that was really, really important. And it’s still kind of a central part of how I practice.

Zack Jackson  

That sense of shared purpose is why Galen decided to become a monthly supporter. For him, financial support isn’t a transaction, it’s a spiritual discipline.

Galen Miller  

The simplicity testimony really touched me in a way that I didn’t think it would. And so I started really focusing in on things that I thought were important and trying to get rid of things that weren’t helping me in some way. And this podcast has been so valuable to me for that sense of community and that sense of, how do we help other people? For me, simplicity doesn’t mean taking away everything. It means purposefully putting your time and energy and resources into what matters, and so just giving a few dollars to what I believe is important. I think is has become part of my practice.

Zack Jackson  

For Galen, supporting this show is a way to stay connected to something bigger. He told me that this podcast doesn’t just educate him on where Quakers have been. It inspires him to see where they’re going and connects him to the active work being done in the larger Quaker world today. If this show offers you that same connection, if it helps you to find the helpers and fuels your own journey, I invite you to join Galen in that practice. 

You can go to Quakerpodcast.com and click support in the top right corner. It takes less than five minutes to set up, but it makes this entire work possible. 

And now back to the show. 

---

Zack Jackson  

So we have a machine that burns energy to create a shadow of human wisdom, and because it’s so convenient, so frictionless, it’s easy to forget that it’s just a shadow. At Abington Friends, Adena’s team started noticing something happening with the students.

Adena Dershowitz  

One of the challenges that students mentioned, but definitely faculty are concerned about is the fact that often AI models try and make the user happy. So this idea of a frictionless relationship is something that really concerns us as faculty or trying to help students work through friction as they grow frictionless.

Zack Jackson  

A calculator is frictionless. It just gives you the answer. But a friendship, a community that requires friction, and in a world of loneliness, a frictionless friend is incredibly tempting,

Adena Dershowitz  

A character AI or some version of that, or a chat bot that essentially removes all friction, tells children what they want to hear and provides them with a sense of companionship, not obviously real companionship. How are they going to experience the friction so that they can cope with the next level up as they grow into adults?

Zack Jackson  

The danger is that we start mistaking the simulation for the real thing. Kenneth warns that just because the machine can speak our language, that doesn’t mean it has a soul.

Kenneth Cukier  

I think we’re special, and it can’t be captured in a statistical model on silicon, even if it comes close to resembling a human being, and how it would answer, et cetera, close to resembling is not a human being. It’s only close to resembling, and those things are actually categorically different.

Zack Jackson  

Kenneth says that the AI has the logic the words, but it lacks the meaning behind them. It can’t capture the silence of a meeting or the tension of a relationship, because those things just aren’t data.

Kenneth Cukier  

You go into a meeting and you’re 40 minutes in, there’s something happening in a meeting for worship that wouldn’t otherwise be happening if you’re sitting alone on a cushion at your own house, that very real thing that is immaterial but nevertheless exists, can’t be expressed and trying to use words for it and inadequately, but it still exists in reality, but doesn’t exist in the training data, so won’t be expressed in an AI system showing the ultimate imperfection or stunted nature of artificial intelligence writ large, not just an LLM, no, just a large language model that does generative AI text, but all of AI

Zack Jackson  

And Gray points out why it feels so confusingly alive. We didn’t build these things like we build a car engine piece by piece. We grew them.

Gray Cox  

It’s uses these techniques of programming that involve neural nets and kind of evolutionary styles of programming where a key thing about them is that they are not crafted or manufactured like a machine. They’re grown or trained like an organism,

Zack Jackson  

And because they’re grown on our data. They reflect us, but they reflect a specific version of us, a version that wants answers without questions and connection without vulnerability. Adena warns us that if we outsource our struggle to these machines, we might stunt our own growth.

Adena Dershowitz  

We want to make sure, of course, our students are physically and psychologically safe, and we also want to make sure that they encounter situations where they’re uncomfortable, because that’s where growth happens. And so I think, more than ever, educators really need to think about designing for that friction and designing for that discomfort in a way that counteracts what’s possible for students technological environment.

Zack Jackson  

If everything is easy, then nothing is transformative. And Gray believes this obsession with easy answers is a symptom of a much deeper problem.

Gray Cox  

One of the ways that I’ve framed this is, I’ve done a lot of work in peace studies, and I found Gandhi really, really informative. And one of his quotes from Hind Swaraj is sort of manifesto in it. He said, We must always remember that civilization is not an incurable disease, but English people currently are suffering from it. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, you know, there’s really some really profound truth in that, that not just the English people, but our civilization, is characterized by this kind of monological reasoning. You know, in economics and politics and elsewhere, that leads to violence, to territorial aggression, to colonialism, to profit seeking, to the restructuring of human personalities, so that instead of being, you know, collaborative, loving creatures. We’re grasping, greedy, competitive creatures. That’s not by nature, that’s by construct, by our civilization, you know. And so we have to really take, take seriously the idea that we are currently afflicted by this curable, but very pernicious disease.

Zack Jackson  

If our civilization is suffering from a disease of machine-like thinking obsessed with speed, efficiency and profit, then Gray believes we already have the cure, we just haven’t been using it.

Gray Cox  

But there’s another form of reasoning that we deal with every day that hasn’t been focused on and trying to develop AI. It’s not what we could call dialogical reasoning. It’s the kind that comes up when people face dilemmas. And instead of saying, Well, I’ve got to choose, I’m a utilitarian or I’m a Kantian, I’m of this ideology or that, instead they say, Well, how can we reconcile these views? How can we look at this from different points of view and integrate them in some way? 

And methods for doing that have been researched at length in the last 50 years or so in studies of negotiation, mediation, dispute resolution, conflict transformation, peacemaking. And they include studies like Michael Sheeran’s study of Quaker process beyond majority rule. And they also include studies of feminist approaches to sort of consensus based decision making. And they include studies of indigenous communities all around the world who use dialogical kinds of approaches, where, when they face a dilemma, instead of forcing a choice based on one set of premises, they try to come up with a third alternative. And I think Quaker process at its best, provides one really powerful example, exemplar of that kind of process,

Zack Jackson  

Dialogical reasoning isn’t about calculating the right answer, it’s about discerning the shared truth, and that process requires the one thing that the machine hates, slowness.

Adena Dershowitz  

I think Quakerism allows us to remove ourselves from the cycle of quicker work, making more work for the sake of more work and productivity being king. I think what I’ve learned working in a Quaker environment is the real power of reflection, of silence, of taking time to discern and feeling like when you do so, decisions are more thought through, are more grounded in reality and more inclusive of the voices of others.

Zack Jackson  

So what does this Quaker algorithm look like in practice at Abington friends? It meant acknowledging that the administration didn’t hold all the answers. If they wanted to understand how this tool was reshaping their community, they had to ask the people who were actually using it. They had to ask the students.

Adena Dershowitz  

So we had a group focusing on AI and education, so a group of Upper School students got to wrestle with some of the topics that we’re wrestling with as faculty. They went as far as building rubrics for projects and setting expectations for using AI. It was really, it was really a fascinating experience for them, but also for us to kind of see it through their eyes.

Zack Jackson  

I think we often assume that if you give a high schooler a tool that can write their paper, they’ll just take the easy A but when Adena’s team actually engaged the students in discernment. They found something surprising. The students didn’t want to be replaced,

Adena Dershowitz  

but actually about 40% the largest portion of any response was that students would prefer both a human reviewer and an AI reviewer, because they felt that their peer was more trusted and more personal, but the AI kind of had a structured approach to improvement that was also useful. So what was interesting to us in that. A particular study was that we felt that there was a both, and that students were recognizing there was a value with AI, but that there was also inherent value in having another person look over their work and give feedback as well.

Zack Jackson  

They didn’t want a frictionless answer. They wanted connection and competence, and because the school listened to that nuance, they didn’t hand down a Thou Shall Not commandment from on high. In fact, they didn’t issue a mandate at all.

Adena Dershowitz  

We’re not in a place where we feel like we want to tell teachers, you absolutely have to use AI and you absolutely can’t use AI. It would be counter cultural to our school, but we do feel that every teacher in our school should be able to make decisions that are informed and intentional.

Zack Jackson  

Informed and intentional is the key, because the world outside of the Quaker meetinghouse is not asking us to be intentional. It’s forcing this technology on us at every turn. AI summaries in our search results, predictive text in our emails, algorithms curating our feed. The easy way is being paved over the human way. And Adena believes that if we don’t teach students to see that, to recognize when they are being nudged towards the path of least resistance than we are failing them,

Adena Dershowitz  

and we also feel that we’re sometimes pushing against a large industry that is seeking profit and power and that is less concerned for some of the guardrails that we would like to see. So we as educators have to teach students how to build their own guardrails as part of how we teach them to use technology.

Zack Jackson  

If the world is offering you a frictionless life where AI writes your emails, summarizes your meetings and even simulates your friends, then the Quaker act of rebellion is to choose friction. It means saying, well, I could have this bot write this condolence note in three seconds, but I’m going to choose the friction of writing it myself, because the struggle to find the words is where the love is, and likewise, the friction between us is where the real truth lies.

Gray Cox  

In various ways, people have struggled, but they’ve made a shift to sort of seeing a shift towards more of a first person plural understanding of knowledge and truth, where knowledge and truth is not something that I get through my action, but it’s something that we arrive at as it emerges through our collective discernment and the we is coming increasingly to include, you know, plants and animals and other organisms as part of an ecosystem of the larger we of Earth. And I think increasingly, especially as it gets developed in different ways, AI in its different forms may begin to be an increasingly important part of that we, that we need, we need to be thinking about how it’s structured and incorporated, but that it’s, it’s somehow it’s a part of the we it’s not just a thing off in a room somewhere, Yeah, more to say about that, but to puzzle over it.

Zack Jackson  

And that brings me back to the letter from George Fox-bot,

Paul Leach  

Therefore, do not be content with the mere report of others. Whatever thy tool tells thee about our notions is but a shadow wait in the silence of all flesh, and let the light of Christ in thine own conscience be thy teacher, then thou shalt see the truth not as a collection of dead words in a notebook, but as the power of God that liveth and abideth forever.

Zack Jackson  

The machine was right to point me away from itself. It could give me the words, it could synthesize the data, but it could not bring me to the truth, because truth is not something that you download. It’s an emergent phenomenon that happens between us. It comes from the friction, from the messy discomfort of being a human, like wind chimes in the breeze. If they never touch, if they never collide, there is no music. The truth is the friction. 

So, for me personally, I think I’ll keep using my AI tool, but only as a first step. If it ever replaces human connection or my own inner work of discernment, then I need to be ok with deleting it. I am choosing to stay informed on the actual environmental impact of my technological choices both in terms of AI and all the other ways I move through the world. I want to be deeply intentional here, and I am actively choosing not to build a frictionless life. But I also know I don’t have this all figured out. So instead of wrapping this up with a neat little bow, I want to invite you into a dialogue. Let me know in the comments, on social media, or in our Discord server how this episode resonates with you and what wisdom you have to add to this incredibly important global conversation. 

Zack Jackson  

Thank you so much for joining us and a deep thank you to our guides through the digital wilderness: Kenneth Cukier, Adena Dershowitz, and Gray Cox. Also thanks to Paul Leach for being the voice of George Fox-bot. 

You can head over to QuakerPodcast.com for a full transcript of this episode, plus links to more resources from our guests.

If this episode left you feeling a little overwhelmed, then you’re probably in good company and you should head over to our Discord server. It is a place where we are trying to bring our authentic selves, rough edges and all to create real community in a digital space. So if you want to talk about this episode, or just need to find some other humans who are trying to live intentionally, we would love to see you there.

And a gentle reminder: This podcast was not written by a chatbot. It is researched, written, and produced by real human beings, and it relies on human support to keep it going. If this work matters to you, please consider becoming a monthly supporter by clicking “Support” at QuakerPodcast.com.

This episode was hosted, produced, and edited by me, Zack Jackson. The music was written and produced by Jon Watts.

And now, your Daily Quaker Message, as read by Kent Laturno

Kent Laturno  

Isaac Pennington, 1675 give over thine own willing, give over thine own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything and sink down to the seed which God sows In the heart and let that grow in thee and be in thee and breathe in thee and act in thee. And thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that and loves and owns that

Zack Jackson  

to get Quaker wisdom in your inbox Every day, go to dailyquaker.com that’s dailyquaker.com.

Hosted, produced, and edited by Zack Jackson.

Original music and sound design by Jon Watts (Listen to more of Jon’s music here.)

This season’s cover art is by Todd Drake

Supported by listeners like you (thank you!!)