New Limbs

I have acquired new hands.

If these techy limbs are growing in the way I think they are, then certain vestiges of language, illustration, computation have suddenly become an accessible canvas to me.

My boss broke the dam

On a brilliant sunny day in April, I hear my boss' gait coming down the hallway. I know the cadence; it's the happy feet. He pops in, beaming. "Come look what I did!" With colors swirling around our pupils I found he had taken a rote copy-paste task — done hundreds of times a year by both himself and two of my coworkers — happens now in one click. Click! Done.

Before I could raise my eyebrow, he cut in, "The best part about this: it gives them more time to do their real job." More time to do their real work! Their real work?

Work is good

Work happened in the garden before sin. Even when it is rote copy-pasting, it is better than no work.

However, there is better and worse work. Work that allows the worker to bring dominion to his kingdom with less friction, and work that brings great friction.

It is better to be driving nails with a hammer rather than your hands.

My boss framed these efficiencies as allowing his people, including himself, not to do less or more work, but better work. Work more closely aligned with their actual competencies. "Real work."

I want to do more real work.

Spilling the brain

I have a lot of things in my head. Our day's tools have just recently crossed a personal threshold for me. In the last month, they've started to get out.

Presentations, games, frameworks, experiences, automations, art… for a hundred initiatives that have only survived in notes or dreams, I've had about a dozen "wait, I think I can do that now!" moments in just the last month.

What changed in April and May? The literal answer is that I started building things with the coding bots. The fun answer is that I've found a bunch of hammers to my proverbial creative nails.

Should I celebrate the lifting of limitations? Should I celebrate worldly technological progress? Currently, I'm arguing with my friend Luke that the answer is strangely yes. However, I'm getting the sense I'm going to agree with him the more I engage.

For now, I'm grateful for the limitations of life without the new machines. Limitations — they've shaped the incentive. I've sharpened the skill and love for language and words because my hands have not had the ability to say what I've wanted.

What's changed now is that the tools have finally seemed to catch up with many of my ambitions. I'm hoping that I hit the sweet spot, where I've been forced to refine my skills with the RGB basics, and have now been bestowed a full Crayola box to bring to the canvas.

What's coming

Here's how I'm thinking about our new techy tech:

From Tubal-cain's bronze to Christ's carpentry, the sailboat to the printing press, the wikipedia to the LLM, the tools are coming. They're here. And they're ready to bring the evils of slimy human nature more manifest than ever before.

Yet, they're ready to be stewarded. The printing press brought the Word to more hearts than ever. Today's Language Machine will be the tool by which the Word is brought into every tongue. I believe in the power of the Lord to steward any and all tools of an age. He simply has the power over any tower of Babel.

First steps

I have used my new abilities to do better work for those I lead. For example, last week I presented to my community group what it means to be a community member. I disguised it as a Google Slides presentation and then suddenly… whoosh! What are those dots?

You know how the people reacted? I'll tell you how. They responded to me with the witches' brew of novelty: delight, fear(!), awe, and confusion.

Just look at this junk. In a month, a year from now: sure, it may just feel trivial — the language machines are growing. Yet today, it's a huh?! "It feels… smooth," you say to yourself out loud clicking through my presentation. "Did… Jack make this?" you wonder, "slaving away to master the principles of .html and motion graphics? Or did the LLM effortlessly whisk his barely lucid whims into reality?"

¿Por qué no los dos?

What I mean is:

1. I would have never been able to do this on my own within any wise use of time one year ago.
2. I bashed my head at the wall with Claude, Chat, a keyboard, pen & paper for ~12–14 hours over five days and stayed up almost every night in a frenzy of flow-state problem-solving to bring an idea that's lived in my head for years to (LED) light.

Good vs. evil

I'm not saying this is any inherent good or bad. All I'm saying is that we're here and it's time to bring our following of Jesus into it. Yes, I am hoping to attempt to steward the new gifts of the age toward holiness. I've seen success in this on the front lines of video and photographs in the past. The next frontier: the computer's brain machine.

My prayer is that the Lord brings me and those around me closer to Him, rather than further from Him, as I try on my new limbs.

Let's see how it goes together; the digital frontier confronted in embodied communion.

(AKA, let's talk in real life about all this.)

— Jack