What happens to the human soul when AI makes work optional?

Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has repeatedly predicted that a day is coming soon when AI and robotics will make traditional work optional in a utopian age of abundance, where humans will rely on universal high income while pursuing personal interests.

Trading the daily grind for a life of comfort and leisure may be compelling, but is it good for the human soul?

That’s the question Allie Beth Stuckey asked Stonebridge Bible Church Pastor Jonny Ardavanis, whose new book, “Get to Work: Seeing Your Daily Grind as God’s Good Gift,” explores why work is a divine gift rather than a burden to escape.

“I just think that’s going to be a horrible, horrible existence,” Ardavanis says of Musk’s AI utopia.

Regardless of one’s belief system, there’s an intrinsic understanding that work is a necessary part of the human experience, he argues, citing the oft-used expression “a job well done.”

“You mow the lawn, you see the stripes in your lawn, and you put your hands on your hips and you go, ‘There’s something Edenic about this,”’ Ardavanis says.

This sense of fulfillment, he says, can be traced back to the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve were first charged to cultivate and keep the garden as part of God’s original good design.

“Deep down, God has hardwired Eden into our souls, and we’re pining away to get back there,” he tells Allie, citing Ecclesiastes 3:11’s reminder that God has “set eternity in the human heart.”

But if AI removes the necessity of work, Ardavanis warns that the human heart, with its God-given orientation toward purpose and vocation, will wither.

“When a robot starts mowing your lawn, you know, you’re going to start to be stripped and starved of the opportunities to reflect God in that way. And I think it is going to be soul-crushing,” he says.

Work, he points out, isn’t just about doing; it’s also about thinking. When robots can think in our stead, what happens to the God-created mind?

“What does it mean to be made in the image of God? Well, it means we have a mind. It means that we are to engage that mind,” Ardavanis says. “Almost all of the instruction in the New Testament regarding the Christian life is what we do with our mind.”

“Your mind is God's gift to you, to employ it.”

This longing isn’t limited to believers. Even non-Christians recognize the irreplicable uniqueness of the human experience. Ardavanis points to globally famous actor Tom Cruise, who, in response to a question about AI’s impact on filmmaking, said, “There is nothing like human.”

“Even though Tom Cruise doesn’t know the God of the Bible, the God of the Bible has hardwired something into Tom Cruise’s heart,” he says. “We are to mirror and mimic God. When we do so, it gives us joy, and it gives us a level of purpose and meaning.”

“I’m looking into a world where people are excited about the absence of work, the three-day work week ... and biblically speaking, I think that that’s hard to reconcile with the fact that we’ve been given a mission by God.”

To hear more, watch the episode above.

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