Even the Hairs on Your Head are Counted

A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on June 21, 2026 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Matthew 10: 30

I want today to talk about artificial intelligence. It evokes confusion to some and deep anxiety to many. I’m going to explore what it’s saying to us about society, about humanity, and about God.

Let’s start with society. AI has many huge benefits. It helps with early disease diagnosis. It’s great for climate modelling. It speeds up research. It cuts through mundane tasks. It personalises recommendations and travel routes. But there are two kinds of worries. The big one is the least specific. It’s the underlying anxiety, never dominant but ever lurking, that humankind may be unleashing the source of its own destruction. Once the moment is reached that AI can reproduce itself without human direction, we cross the threshold from where we control the technology to where the technology controls us. And there’s no going back. In his 1797 narrative poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Johann von Goethe tells of an old sorcerer who leaves his apprentice to look after the workshop. The apprentice grows tired of fetching water by bucket, and enchants a broom to do so for him. The floor is soon awash with water. The apprentice can’t stop the broom. He cuts the broom in half with an axe. But each of the two pieces becomes a whole new broom, lifting up a bucket and fetching water at twice the speed. Every time the apprentice splits a broom the same thing happens. Eventually the old sorcerer returns and reverses the spell, warning the apprentice about the dangers of invoking powers beyond his control. It’s a parable for our time.

But there is a more practical danger. AI is a massive consumer of data, and basically a colossal averaging machine. This has two major downsides. Quickly anything that can’t be translated into or represented by data is diminished in cultural value; and anyone who sits outside the mainstream of averaging gets ignored, excluded or rejected. It may be true that some people of a certain ethnic group have a propensity to particular kinds of cancer; but in the hands of AI, rapid generalisations distort the data and fail to render the complexity and diversity of human society. The apparent objectivity of AI masks the way it reflects the cultural assumptions of those who feed it. Meanwhile the voracious appetite for data hoovers up everything to public or private actors that really should remain restricted to individuals themselves. Sophisticated tech tycoons become incredibly powerful not just through engineering genius but by access to and ownership of vast quantities of information about the public at large. Before our eyes, the whole global structure of power is changing.

Harvard Business School professor Ron Hefeitz argues that the authority structure of an organisation is the one that survived the last crisis. He describes a pack of silverback gorillas, where the alpha gorilla is the one able to coordinate food gathering and to defend against a leopard by surrounding the predator and nullifying its threat. But when along comes a human with a machine gun, those skills aren’t up to the task, and the social structure of the gorillas changes accordingly. Likewise, the authority structure of civilised societies has been that which required those in power to provide a high standard of service. What’s happening in the world right now is a threshold moment equivalent to the appearance among the gorillas of a human with a machine gun. Power is being transferred from elected governments to those controlling digitalisation, artificial intelligence and robotics, and the authority of conventional leaders is being evacuated. The only thing that could limit the overreach of the tech bros is regulation. But AI has no regard for national borders. So we have a paradoxical situation that at the very moment we need global consensus like never before, the rise of populist movements asserting narrow nationalist identity has shifted the political mood away from any such common vision.

So that’s the change in society. Let’s move on to the change in humanity. Here again we have two dimensions. One is perhaps the big tidal wave our society is most mindful of right now. That is, how rapidly the nature of work is being transformed. Earlier industrial revolutions obliterated blue-collar jobs. AI is hitting white-collar roles. If you’re in computer programming, customer service, language translation, finance and investment, journalism or proofreading, you may be living on borrowed time. One AI CEO is saying that most white-collar work will be automated within 12 to 18 months. The eradication of entry level jobs is inhibiting a new generation from reaching the first rung on the ladder of meaningful employment. Two hundred years ago machines started to do the physical things less educated people had always done; now robots are doing the thinking highly educated humans thought was their domain, and a university degree starts to feel like a vanity project. Work has always been a necessity for society, a necessity for individual income, and a fulfilment of human creativity and sociality. What happens if it stops being a necessity for society, no one really knows. Attention focuses to human dignity: what does it mean when people become dispensable and all that matters is the accumulation of wealth and power for the ultra-rich? It’s as if after 200 years of emancipation, half the world’s population risks lapsing back into slavery.

But there’s more than one kind of enslavement. When people latch on to what AI can do, two things start to happen. First, they ask AI to do things they can perfectly well do themselves. This may be writing essays at university; or it could be working out a recipe with what’s left in the fridge several days after the last grocery shop. The less we use our brain cells, the less our brain cells work. The more we let AI colonise our imaginations, the more we impoverish ourselves, and cooperate in our own enslavement. Meanwhile second, the more AI comes to dominate our lives, the more we come to value only what AI can do. AI has no awareness of joy or pain, love, friendship, or conscience, empathy or understanding: to the extent that it comes to dominate our world, these most precious things about existence may cease to matter. I don’t know if you’ve had the experience of trying to remember a conversation with a friend and what they said that seemed so profound and true; your instinct might be to google it, because google tells you the answers to everything you want to know: but it can’t tell you the answer to this one. And you feel bewildered and let down and powerless. But what you really need to do is to work your memory harder. The danger is, the more we become addicted to AI, we won’t need a memory; until we don’t have one. We won’t need friends; until we don’t have any. We won’t need an imagination; until it’s gone forever. We won’t need creativity; until we’ve lost it. We’ll be enslaving ourselves.

In his recent encyclical, Leo XIV points out that technology can either foster participation and justice or exacerbate inequality and exclusion. The question is, does it help us become more humane and fraternal, while respecting our common home and future generations? This is the question facing society and humanity.

Which brings us to what AI is saying about God. While AI presents a new threshold, in the most profound ways it maximises questions that have lingered at least since industrialisation, even since the start of civilisation. What we observe are two stories of creation. For story one, creation is incomplete and flawed. We die, we grow old, we get sick, we suffer, we fail, labour, we are disappointed, we are impoverished, we are ignorant. But behold: here is technology. It can overcome every limitation. It can make us live longer, address disease, provide limitless information, endless diversion, amazing wealth, extensive knowledge, perpetual leisure. The human project is to overcome all these limitations and achieve mastery over our environment. It’s an attractive story, and it’s important to recognise and appreciate its blessings. The Holy Spirit is certainly at work in this story, leading us to the fulness of life.

But in story two, we have a different notion of creation. Limits are part of the design. Addressing restrictions is fundamental to being human. Compassion and generosity arise from awareness of the suffering of others; endurance and character emerge from experiencing hardship; solidarity and initiative grow in facing enmity and strife. Wisdom, imagination, adaptability and humour all grow when facing adversity. But there’s more than that. Christianity is founded on a conviction that the essence of all things is a relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that the universe came into existence in order for that relationship be extended to human beings. Humans find their ultimate fulfilment in relationship: with the natural world, with one another, and most completely with God. Relationships are flawed, fragile and sometimes fail: but they are the closest we get to the purpose of the universe and the heart of God. When Christians worship, they are letting the Holy Spirit engage their souls in the wonder that God seeks relationship in the context of beauty, truth and goodness, but also of sorrow, sin and suffering.

Which brings us to the difference between story one and story two. The technological dream, story one, is a vision that we can replace relationship with something more reliable, and ultimately dwell in a world that doesn’t need love. For story two that heaven is a hell. For story two, love is the reason we exist, and trying to bypass it with something more durable and predictable and commodifiable and transferable is a hideous parody of our created glory, that seals us off from God and denies who we truly are.

In Matthew chapter 10, Jesus describes the depth of the Father’s love for us. ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?’ he asks. ‘Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.’ The Father observes us minutely and cares for us intensely. You could say the Father receives infinitely more data than any present or future AI. But, to our periodic exasperation, that love is not habitually expressed in fixing our lives and undermining our human dignity. But Jesus assures us this because we are precious, honoured and loved – not because we are not. ‘Even the hairs of your head are all counted.’ God loves each one of us, and loves each one of us as if we were the only one, and each tiny particle of us as if it were the only part. In the end, the only thing that matters is whether we matter: and we matter utterly to God. AI is promising to create a world in which we don’t need love. It’s not a dream; it’s a nightmare.

I began with a parable. Let me end with one. There was once a computer engineer. He thought the most exciting things in the world were waterfalls, sunsets and mountains. And the most wonderful thing in his life was to share the discovery of such things with his loved ones. So he went into his workshop to amass all the images and descriptions and data on waterfalls, sunsets and mountains from the beginning of digital documentation. And he became fascinated with what he was seeing and the knowledge and learning he was developing. Eventually after 80 years he emerged from his workshop to announce to his loved ones his amazing findings. But his loved ones had dispersed or died. And he was now too old to enjoy the waterfalls, sunsets and mountains. All he had was his data.

The gifts of creation already take us more than a lifetime to appreciate. The relationships that surround us offer us texture and depth and truth and wonder. We can make life simpler, quicker, more sophisticated and more effective with AI. And much good will result, although we’ll need to rethink power, democracy, work and equality. But one day, perhaps one day quite soon, we may wake up and realise in the process we’ve obscured, undermined or destroyed the things that life is really about.