What’s the point of making art when a machine can do in seconds what it takes a human years to learn?
That question sits at the heart of this Silicon Spiritualities episode with Brett McCracken, senior editor at The Gospel Coalition and a perceptive writer on faith, media, technology, and culture. In our conversation, he helps us see that AI threatens not only jobs or industries but also something deeper: our sense that the process of making, wrestling, waiting, and learning might actually matter. Great art, he argues, is never just about the polished final product. It’s also about praise, patience, formation, and the personal gift one human being offers to another.
We talk about why wisdom is more than information; why AI can imitate emotion without sharing in human suffering; and why boredom, solitude, and even daydreaming may be among the most important human habits to protect in an age of constant optimization. Brett also reflects on the attention economy and the subtle ways our desires are being shaped by technologies designed to keep us looking, clicking, and consuming.
Resources Mentioned:
- The Wisdom Pyramid by Brett McCracken
- Scrolling Ourselves to Death by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa
- Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
- The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
- Resonance by Hartmut Rosa
- The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen
- On the Death of Daydreaming by Christine Rosen
- The Wisdom of Sleep by Brett McCracken
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