Stephen Driscoll: Made in Our Image: A Biblical Reflection On Artificial Intelligence

When Stephen Driscoll's laptop started acting up, he asked an AI agent to take a look - twenty minutes later it had tracked down and fixed a problem that had been quietly running in the background for six months. It's a small, almost funny story, but Stephen uses it to make a much bigger point: AI has moved from mimicking us to genuinely acting on its own initiative, and the theological and ethical questions are moving just as fast. In this wide-ranging conversation, Karl Faase and Stephen dig into AI-directed drone strikes, the Pope's recent encyclical, transhumanism, campus culture, and Stephen's own decade-long wrestle with doubt.

About Stephen Driscoll: Stephen Driscoll is a university minister and self-described “tech realist” who tries to avoid both blind optimism and fear-driven doomism about artificial intelligence. He won the 2025 Australian Christian Book of the Year Award for his book Made in Our Image: God, Artificial Intelligence and You. Before moving into ministry, Stephen worked on a trading floor in finance, and has been fascinated by AI since his undergraduate years.

Get a copy of Stephen Driscoll's book here: Made in Our Image: God, Artificial Intelligence and You

Key Moments & Highlights

Stephen's four-point framework for what modern AI actually is: brain-inspired, trained rather than designed, prediction-based, and radically general-purpose

“Move 37”- the AlphaGo move against world champion Lee Sedol so unconventional it stunned commentators and convinced many that AI could be genuinely creative

How reinforcement learning turns AI from a “debauched” mirror of the whole internet into a corporate “people-pleaser” with a morality borrowed from whichever company built it

The Pope's AI encyclical and its warning, drawn from the Tower of Babel, about the danger of human unity turned toward evil

The unsettling real-world stakes: AI-selected drone strikes, twelve-second human decision windows, and a strike on an Iranian school that killed around 100 children

Why Stephen is less afraid of profit-driven AI companies than of AI controlled by authoritarian governments

A working test for transhumanism: are we moving toward God's created order (like glasses or cochlear implants) or away from it (like losing our embodiment in a metaverse)?

Stephen's own faith story: growing up in an Indonesian immigrant church, drifting through doubt reading the “new atheists” in his twenties, and finding his way back by actually reading the Bible