Preserving Our Identity as Makers

For those of us watching the rise of AI with dismay and an increasing sense of helplessness, the work of 20th-century Welsh poet and painter David Jones is a deep well of wisdom. Jones, a veteran of the First World War, had a lifelong concern with the encroachment of technology upon human existence. From the machine-made brutalities of the trenches to the machine-supported banality of midcentury daily life, Jones feared that, in our quest to control nature through technology, humanity ran the risk of losing our own nature along the way. His work, rarely comforting, often bewildering, proposes a spiritual posture we can take toward technology, one that upholds the truth about human nature and our identity as “man the maker,” the imago Dei, and the role God graciously allows us to play in the salvation of the world.