MILES DEBENEDICTIS | Christianity & Artificial Intelligence (Ep. 943)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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This is Undaunted.Life A Man's Podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it. All right, guys, we got a special guest on the podcast today. His name is Miles DeBenedictis. So he is a senior pastor of Cross Connection Church in California, and he's also the CEO of an artificial intelligence tech company. So it's Nomion AI. So they're developing frameworks for moral AI governance while helping organizations implement AI responsibly. He's also in the process of completing his PhD in ethics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and his focus is going to be on AI ethics. And so obviously you can see from the title of today's show, we're going to be looking at the intersection between Christianity and artificial intelligence. This subject matter is on everyone's mind. It's on everyone's phone. It's in everyone's car. Like, there's a lot to talk about here. So I was introduced to him because Jobi actually saw him speak somewhere at some conference or something like that. And he's like, you got to have this guy on. Because it's one thing for me to talk about AI when I don't really understand the technology. It's one thing for your pastor to talk about AI when they can't even spell quantum computing or any of those types of things. They don't understand the ramifications. But he's got an interesting interplay between his decades of being a senior pastor, but also he's been interested in technology and has been doing technology entrepreneurship for a long time. And so we talk about how he got into pastoral work, how that affects overall what he does within the technology space and how the technology space affects what he's doing. And then we go over some misnomer, some misinformation or some wrong ideas people have about what AI is, what it is not. We look at the ubiquity of it now, how people are using it now, but how they're going to be using it here in the very, very near future. And look, there's a lot of ramifications. There are anthropological ramifications, sociological ramifications, theological ramifications, political ramifications for everything that we're seeing in AI.
And how are we to approach it?
Because we talk about the inputs for Anthropic and Chad GBT and all these different companies. It's being coded and all the inputs are being brought by people that are amoral, they have pagan morality, they're atheists, they're certainly not right-leaning Christians, right? They're not Christian conservatives. And so what are the ramifications of that? And then specifically when it gets to reading of the Bible, you got pastors that are really lazy in their approach to the Bible anyway. Now they got AI that can basically write their sermons for them and what the dangers of doing that could look like. And we really had to weave in and out of a lot of different subject matters because it's such a vast space. And guys, by the time this comes out, we're recording this a couple of weeks before it comes out, something we may have said, something he may have said may be out of date because that's how fast this technological revolution is moving. But we need to stand prepared as men and as my 5%ers to make sure that we are ready to reckon with what this means and what this is doing to all of us. And so I'm very excited to bring this one to you. So without further ado, let's get into it.
Miles DeBenedictis, welcome to Undaunted.Life A Man's Podcast.

**Miles DeBenedictis** (4:21)
Kyle, thanks for having me, man. Been looking forward to this.

**Kyle Thompson** (4:24)
You know what I've been looking forward to? The opportunity to say your last name quickly and with confidence. Did I nail it or did I nail it? I'm just, I've been very nervous about it.