Danella Aichele is a former teacher with the Calgary Board of Education with a Master’s of Public Policy from the University of Calgary.TIME magazine named the Architects of AI as its 2025 Person of the Year, which feels a bit like applauding Dr. Frankenstein for making his life-like monster.According to Nicole Janssen, a member of Canada’s AI Advisory Council and co-founder of Edmonton-based AI consultancy firm AltaML: “AI scaremongering in Canada has led to a lack of AI literacy, which has led to a lower rate of AI adoption.” She says it’s also earned Canada a reputation as a scold, thanks to industry luminaries like Yoshua Bengio who believe scientists have “a duty to observe current trends in our fields, warn the public and policymakers if significant risks arise, and contribute to potential solutions.”If that makes one a scold, so too then are the majority of Americans.According to a recent Pew study, most Americans believe “AI will worsen, not better (their) abilities to think creatively, form meaningful relationships with other people, make difficult decisions, and solve problems,” while simultaneously recognizing AI as “the most consequential tool in great-power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons”. One of the aims of AI architects is to create ever-more human-like chatbots, endowing them with the ability to mimic social cues and emotions like empathy, as well as the ability to flatter, manipulate, and deceive. Traits also shared by those with psychopathy, thus casting doubt that utopia is just one “Great (Technological) Leap Forward” away..Given that existing technology has already been blamed for the ongoing mental health crisis, and for causing a generation of kids to require chemical correction just so they can sustain 15 seconds of in-school concentration, I can’t help but wonder if Dr. Frankenstein is due for an intervention rather than a standing ovation.For Christians, Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus, who we believe to be the living, breathing son of the Architect of the Universe. That the mastermind responsible for designing each personalized strand of DNA took on human form himself is a claim which rings ridiculous to non-believers, many of whom are more inclined to believe in aliens than a God who entered his own creation only to be murdered for offending its pride. While Christians believe the Architect of the Universe gifted the world an in-the-flesh saviour who affirmed humanity by sacrificing himself for it, the architects of AI have built the world a wire mother and insisted humanity sacrifice itself to it (Harry Harlow’s ethically dubious social isolation experiments replaced the biological mothers of rhesus monkeys with wire ones, keeping some in isolation for up to 12 months, from which they emerged “intensely disturbed”). After decades of preaching the gnostic gospel of “put yourself first” rather than Christ’s gospel of “put others first”, it’s unsurprising that marriage and birth rates continue to decline, narcissism and loneliness have become “epidemic”, and people are willing to go “no contact” with anyone who fails to affirm them. But given that many Canadians are intent on keeping Christ nailed to the cross, going so far as to propose legislation to repeal the freedoms of the faithful while burning their churches to the ground, the only saviour left for such people to seek is a wire one. According to NPR, 1 in 5 school age children have a romantic relationship with AI or know of someone who does. Writers at The Guardian suggest that once risible romantic relationships with AI should instead be reframed as an “intelligent choice” which 28.16% of adults have already made. And findings backed by research from MIT warn that “we’re entering uncharted psychological territory” given how many people are forming “AI Attachments” to LLMs like ChatGPT, all of which is to say nothing of AI-generated pornography. So while Christians spend Christmas celebrating the birth of an incarnate saviour, the Architects of AI are celebrated for building the world an artificial one.Danella Aichele is a former teacher with the Calgary Board of Education with a Master’s of Public Policy from the University of Calgary.
