“How much do clouds weigh? How does electricity move across hundreds of miles from Tombigbee to Tallahassee?”
As we drove through the winding, seemingly endless pines that lined the backroads of Alabama, my father would ask questions. I am not sure he always knew the answers himself, though often he did, but the questions made me curious, helped us wonder together, and gave a father and son something to talk about on an otherwise boring drive through the countryside.
Today, I could ask an AI chatbot how much clouds weigh and have an answer in seconds. That is remarkable. But I wonder what is lost in a world where access to information begins to displace the process of asking the question together.
We appear to be in the midst of one of the most far-reaching technological changes since the industrial revolution. In a deliberately sweeping claim at the Dreamforce gathering in September 2026, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang proclaimed, “With electricity, we could power everything. With the internet, you can find anything. And now, with artificial intelligence as an infrastructure layer across the planet, we can know everything and do anything.”
AI has certainly got our collective attention, bringing with it a flood of tremendous optimism and pessimism.
Last week, I took a break from the news feed and asked myself: ‘What’s got my attention?’ Attention determines what comes into focus. For humans, what we attend to is never neutral: attention shapes our desires and, over time, our loves.
Over the past year, in the company of good friends, I struggled through one of the classics of Christian literature, Augustine’s The City of God. It’s a dense work written during a time of immense cultural upheaval.
Augustine describes human history in terms of two cities, each formed by a different love: “Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self” (City of God 14.28).
Reading Augustine turned the language of attention back on me:
What does my desire for more knowledge say about what I love?
Artificial intelligence may help us answer many of our questions, and there is enormous promise in that. In his time, Augustine was hardly suspicious of knowledge; he was a lifelong seeker of truth and an avid reader. But we are challenged as Christians not simply to be enamored with how much we can know, but to ask to what end that knowledge is directed.
Put another way, how do we weigh the benefits of knowing more against the harder-won task of knowing how: how to love God and our neighbors, how to extend grace, and how, through practices large and small, to become a people marked by rightly ordered loves?
The danger in the promise that we can “know everything” isn’t the knowledge itself. It is the seductive illusion that more information can heal our brokenness. Knowing everything about a problem doesn’t always give us the power to love the person right in front of us.
Christian formation, then, cannot finally be measured by how much we know, but by the kind of people we are becoming, and by how that faith shapes the way we love. Scripture reminds us over and over again that what counts is not knowledge or giftedness or external symbols of religion, but love (1 Cor. 12-13, Gal. 5, 1 John 4, and more).
There are no simple formulas. And as Augustine observed, the City of Man and the City of God are deeply intermingled. But as I learned alongside my friends in the reading group, we are not called to navigate this alone. Augustine described Christians as pilgrims in this present age, living amid the earthly city while learning to order their lives toward God and the peace of the heavenly city. These pilgrims are to be marked by deep humility, forgiveness, and the love of one another.
If human flourishing is a matter of formation, not merely information, perhaps that’s why the communities in which we learn matter so much. It’s why we’re building Communities of Practice at Chalmers and why our tools are not simply about transferring information or teaching new skills. It’s also why our friends at HOPE International, Compassion International, Tearfund, and many others are using savings groups to foster flourishing in the Majority World. At their best these initiatives create Christ-centered spaces where relationships deepen and people learn, laugh, struggle, and worship together. In some settings, they also bring people together across socioeconomic lines, perhaps even sharing a meal with someone they might not otherwise encounter around the same table.
Fellow pilgrims, in this future world where we may, in Huang’s words, “know everything and do anything,” perhaps we should keep asking: “What is capturing our attention? What is it forming us to love? And how are the communities we belong to shaping who we become?”
I think back on those long drives with my father. The answers were not the only thing we were seeking. Our desire to know was drawing us closer to one another.
So how much do the clouds weigh?
I am not sure that I need to know the answer.
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