Cyber Cities and Cyber Clerics
Plus: Plato's burial place, just war vs. pacifism, and Christian campuses
Coffee this Friday, May 3, at the usual time and place (6:30 am, Loyal North).
(1) The Distributed City of the Future: Walter Russell Mead’s essay this month at Tablet is “The Rise of the Cyber City,” and it’s a tour de force. Mead traces the rise of the great American railroad cities—centralized urban cores built around factories and tenements—and their subsequent decline as the automobile widened the pattern of development, creating the suburb. Now, Mead says, we’re on the cusp of another major transition—from the car city to the cyber city:
The rise of the cyber city is going to be at least as disruptive as the move from rail to car cities, and many of our social and political institutions may not survive the shift. Nevertheless, for social, economic, and environmental reasons it is something to welcome.
The suburban (and increasingly exurban) car city creates what Mead calls the daily Great Migration: “Morning and evening, five to six days a week, hundreds of millions of commuters have long swarmed into and out of the world’s central business districts.” Maintaining the infrastructure to accommodate these commuters—office buildings, restaurants, public transportation networks, parking facilities—“employ[s] tens of millions of people around the world and consume[s] a significant portion of the world’s daily energy and financial expense.”
The cyber city, driven by the work from home (WFH) phenomenon, will disrupt all of this, threatening “a massive dislocation in the life of the American city, a shift that is likely to be much more far reaching than the shift between the rail and car cities that the 20th century witnessed.” Mead thinks we should embrace it:
The distributed city of the future, in which communications technology, 3D printing, autonomous vehicles, delivery by drone, and other technologies that allow the near-universal expansion of work, will largely transcend geography…. The city and the countryside will be integrated, with human beings able to live anywhere from dense urban cores to remote rural retreats while fully participating in the economic, cultural, and political dimensions of urban life.
We are not there yet, and WFH alone won’t get us there, but embracing WFH where practical is an important step with significant benefits.
Among these benefits: slashing the cost of the commuting infrastructure, less auto emissions, reducing unproductive commute time, less vulnerability to centralized catastrophes (earthquake, flood, terrorism), and most importantly, “a return to stronger communities and a recentering of human life on neighborhoods and families.” Mead elaborates on the latter:
The era of the car city was an era of bedroom communities that emptied out during the working day, and an era of rapid mobility as workers followed their careers from city to city. Loosening the power of geography over our working lives will give us more freedom to live where we choose, enabling people to put down roots without giving up the opportunities that, in past decades, came only with mobility. The distributed city will allow human civilization to synthesize the blessings of rural and urban life, and allow the reintegration of school, work, and community life in ways that strengthen the bonds connecting relatives and neighbors.
(2) Digital Defrocking: Catholic Answers, a San Diego-based ministry, claims to have “the world’s largest database of answers about the beliefs and practices of the Catholic faith.” So it created “Father Justin,” an AI chatbot-priest designed to synthesize this information and answer user questions about the Catholic faith. But as The Pillar reports, “the experiment quickly became controversial”:
Some said the priest avatar was inappropriate, misleading, or just plain creepy. Some said the priest simulated virtual sacraments — indeed, “Fr. Justin” gladly heard The Pillar’s, “confession,” before giving some spiritual guidance and reciting the words of absolution. And some said that an AI apologetics project leans too heavily into unreliable, controversial, and still-confusing technology.
The author of The Pillar report experimented with the chatbot himself:
First, I asked ‘Father Justin’ to hear my confession, and it did so, simulating a ‘virtual confession,’ all the way to giving me absolution and a penance.
Second, I asked if I could baptize my baby with Gatorade in an emergency, and ‘Father Justin’ said yes — and of course, that’s not true. I can’t baptize my baby with Gatorade.
Catholic Answers doesn’t think a chatbot-priest is too impersonal:
[W]e get tons of questions from people. We get more than 2 million visits a month at catholic.com, and a video from a Catholic Answers apologist like Trent Horn might get 50,000 views soon after it comes out — so the vast majority of our contact with people is not really interpersonal.
I would prefer that all of our work was directly personal, but we don’t have enough people. And we don’t have the money to hire enough people to answer the number of questions that come in.
So we are just looking for creative ways to help people learn more about their faith.
Since The Pillar interview, however, Catholic Answers has essentially laicized its cyber-cleric. “Father Justin” is now just “Justin.” The chatbot is still available at Catholic.com, but Catholic Answers promises to “continue to refine and improve the app” based on user input.
Other Things | Community Haps
Our next Holy Places tour will be Grace & St. Stephens Episcopal Church on Thursday, May 16, at 1:00 pm. An email with more details is forthcoming.
Paul Kingsnorth will present the 2024 Erasmus Lecture for First Things.
“Dignitas Infinita Betrays Catholic Just War Doctrine,” promoting “pacifist idealism.”
Students at Columbia are now morphing into proto-terrorists in the mold of those they openly praise. Meanwhile, something different is happening at Christian universities. At Liberty U, “there were no arrests, no anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish sentiments. Instead, the massive crowd joined together to pray, worship, and read the Bible.”