The Rev Canon Dr Rob Marshall

According to Professor Hannah Fry, people’s lives are enriched by artificial intelligence. It makes problem-solving easier, helps medical diagnosis, and can improve productivity. Yet as she points out in her new BBC2 documentary, AI Confidential, there are risks: that jobs will be lost to AI; that we might lose the bedside care that comes with human diagnosis as machine intelligence takes over. She also warns AI provides what she calls emotional junk food that demands nothing of us, by offering AI romantic partners. And then there’s tech grief, highlighted in a recent EastEnders storyline, when video and voice notes are used to create an avatar of a dead character to console his father. Real mourning is put on hold. But it seems to me there’s another risky aspect of AI – that it rewrites temptation. Temptation is traditionally thought to be about testing will-power. Take Lent and Ramadan, currently being observed by Christians and Muslims. If a Muslim fasting all day has a little snack at lunchtime, or a Christian giving up sweets for Lent, eats chocolate, they’ve failed in their discipline. But AI is a different, and remarkable tempter, encouraging people not to fail in some way but take the easier option that in some ways seems sensible. Why read a book, for example, when AI can give you a quick summary, or make the effort to cook for dinner guests when AI can help locate a fancy restaurant in seconds and order a takeaway. And instead of the regret that comes from conventional temptation, AI offers something else. It’s all too easy to console yourself that you have done something good. You’ve saved time. The easy option has advantages. The Desert Fathers – early Christian thinkers who retreated to the desert – did so because they believed a hard life was good for them. They believed it brought them closer to God. And with temptation, even if you give in to it but then regret it you can grow as a person by learning something about yourself. Pope Leo who has expressed concern about the impact of AI on humanity has now urged priests to resist the temptation to use the short cut of AI to write sermons. AI might be clever, but there’s something lacking in AI preaching: it doesn’t come from the heart. Perhaps this Lent and Ramadan, it might be worth not only giving up something that tests our will, but pondering something that appears helpful yet is temptation on another scale, reducing our need to think. After all, as Descartes said, I think, therefore I am. What am I, if machines have seduced me to do so much less thinking for myself?

Good Morning. I’m enjoying the warmer weather this week, and in London atleast, a bit of sun. However as we begin to dry out, there is one weather story you may have missed. Today and yesterday a plume of red-tinged Saharan dust is blowing across the United Kingdom in the high reaches of our sky, as reported by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS for short.). This is apparently not uncommon for this time of year, even if it can lead to what the over-dramatic among us call a ‘blood rain,’ actually just a dusty residue left on our cars and windows when the sun finally appears. I remember the last one in March of 2022. Today this plume of dust is likely to lead only to a more vibrant sunset for those of us with clear skies. And the so-called ‘blood rain’ is a completely normal, if not everyday thing – no need to run to doom scrolling or talk of ‘portents of judgment’. That said, people living in times of difficulty have always looked for signs not least in unusual cosmic events. In the Gospel according to Matthew in chapter 16, Jesus addressed this directly: ‘…You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.’ He meant signs that were more social than meteorological. His further point was that we shouldn’t be distracted by the sensational from what is right in front of us. Listening to the news I have become so taken up with scandalous abuse of power and the offence of some world leaders using racial epithets or national slurs, that I fail to see other ‘signs of the times’ closer to home: the continuing high cost of housing, or lack of access to timely care, the background anxiety that seems to make our day to day interactions more fraught – and my complacency in the face of these. There are other signs as well, of hope however tenuous: a child learning to read or sing or play an instrument, people willing still to give time to volunteer or vote or help a neighbour. These matter too. In an 18th century sermon John Wesley spoke about the power each of us has over our attention. He said God ‘…made you free agents; …you have sufficient light shining all around you; …be assured God is not well pleased with your shutting your eyes and then saying, "I cannot see." So today, as the red dust plume moves over our heads, maybe we can take back control of our attention, to see signs of hope as well as harm and heed them both.

100 years ago this year, on a grey January day in 1926, the very first public demonstration of a new piece of technology was given in Soho, London by John Logie Baird. Called by its inventor a televisor, it would soon become a ubiquitous presence in flats and houses across the world known as a television. It’s been reported this week that after 100 years of the device showing content designed for it, the television is now the preferred medium for people of all ages to watch algorithm-driven content on Youtube. ….. one of the biggest creators of content in the world It’s no longer the case that we, the viewers, watch only what production companies make for us. We film ourselves on our phones, upload them ourselves and watch ourselves. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has just recognised the importance of short form video as a cultural development by exhibiting the very first video uploaded onto the platform. Entitled ‘Me at the Zoo’, it’s a 19 second clip that has been viewed 380 million times since it was first posted in April 2005. The fact that we are watching, even on our traditional televisions whatever we want when we want is part of a development that has been happening for some time. It’s a development that reveals to us what we value, what we will pay for, what we will put effort into. It appears to tell us that what we want more than anything - is to maximise our ability to choose. It is one of the axioms of our contemporary culture that individual choice is not only desirable but essential for a fulfilling happy life. And that’s of course true. At the opposite extreme, a person who is not able to exercise any choice is enslaved, something that is both immoral and illegal. Freedom to choose how we live, what we eat, what we do, is a fundamental aspect of human nature not least according to Christian teaching, which insists that human beings have had free will, from the Garden of Eden onwards, made as we are in the image of God. But Christian spiritual practice will also teach us to stay alert to the illusions and deceptions that accompany the elevation of choice above all else. And what we now know is that as we’re scrolling, we’re not so much acting as a free human being, but more as an impressionable consumer, subject to the power of the algorithm. Fundamental questions are raised by an ethic that pursues choice above everything else, especially when it sits in the corner of our living space. The new tipping point we’ve reached faces us afresh with the questions we face when we choose: in whose interest, to whose benefit and, ultimately together, to what end.

24 FEB 26

Good Morning, Coming down from Yorkshire to London I usually walk through Marchmont Street. I often stop and look up at a Blue Plaque over a shop that was once a hairdressers. It’s where Kenneth Williams spent the first part of his life. I worked with him in the late 1970’s when I was a young producer with a missionary society. We were looking at new ways of getting the Christian faith to resonate with young people. I’d heard somewhere that the Ayatollah Khomeini, then exiled in Paris, was flooding Iran with messages on audio cassettes to topple the Shah. It may seem quite a leap but it prompted me to wonder if we too could use cassettes to reach out to the next generation. So we hired four famous comedians to retell the life and parables of Jesus . Soon we were in the studio with Derek Nimmo, Dora Bryan, Thora Hird and - Kenneth Williams recording a sparkling script by Jenny Robertson. Yesterday marked the Centenary of Kenneth Williams’ birth – one of Radio 4’s famous voices who knew the power of comedy to shock, to scandalise and to deflate the pompous. But he was also a sensitive man who prayed at the end of each day out of the depths of his own tortured soul. He excelled in recording these cassettes and captured the way Jesus himself used stories to cut the powerful down to size, especially religious ones. One of Jesus’ amusing stories was told against the hypocrisy of the judgmental - of two men, one with a plank shooting out of his eye trying to pick a spec out of the other’s – a comic sketch worthy of Basil Fawlty berating a hapless hotel guest! The paradox of humour is that comedy can pack a serious punch which is why the powerful, especially dictators hate being made fun of. Nor can they tolerate the freedom the media give to voice such protest. 50 years on, Iran’s latest Ayatollah, while recognising the role media played in bringing them to power , now appears to be tightly controlling the internet, in what is widely seen as an attempt to stem the flow of information about a government crackdown on protesters. Memories of Kenneth Williams today make me nostalgic for a more spacious world where the freedom to speak out and even to make fun of each other were the signs of safer times. Kenneth Williams – rest in peace and in the memory of our laughter.

21 FEB 26

Good morning. There was a time in the early 2000’s when you could not open a paper without seeing a photo of Tracey Emin at a party, glass in hand, staring at the camera. A moving interview with her in The Guardian in connection with her major new show at Tate Modern which starts next week reveals a very different Tracey Emin. She talks about the terrible cancer she has suffered, with many of her body parts being removed, so that life now is lived with great difficulty. At the time she thought she was going to die and then ‘Whoever they are’, she said to Charlotte Higgins the interviewer, glancing heavenwards, ‘they said “I don’t think she is all bad. Let’s give her another go, see what she can do”’ So she gave up alcohol and her 50 cigarettes a day and has since then thrown herself into her art - not only her own art but helping young artists and others in her home town of Margate. As she said ‘I have spent a lot of my life being sad, nihilistic and punishing myself mentally-and drinking and smoking. And then I realised: I could have my time back again.’ No wonder her new exhibition is called ‘Tracey Emin: A Second Life.’ Lent, which began yesterday is a reminder that we do not have to wait until death stares us in the face to have a second life. Notwithstanding regrets and failures every day is a new gift, a new beginning, a time to focus on what really matters to us. Tracey Emin says about those earlier years in the 2000’s ‘God, was that the shallowest level of myself that I could ever be?’ There is a shallow side and a deeper side to all of us. That deeper side brings into focus what we really want to do with our life, what kind of person we really want to be. If you visit Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral, the largest religious building in the country, built between 1904 and 1978, it is difficult not to be overwhelmed by its immense space and monumentality. But as you enter, just above the West End Doors, there is a total contrast-a permanent pink neon installation with the words ‘I felt you and I knew you loved me’ written in Tracey Emin’s own hand. Tracey Emin burst on the scene in 1988 with a work of art consisting of her unmade bed surrounded by condoms, blood and general detritus and people still associate her with this. But I like to think of her devoting herself to making new art and helping others in Margate, and that simple, pink neon installation in Liverpool Cathedral with its words ‘I felt you and I knew you loved me.’

19 FEB 26

18 FEB 26

Good morning. The worse the news gets, the closer we come to some underlying questions. Epstein, Ukraine, climate change, geopolitics – you name it. What should we do? How can we not feel powerless in the face of so many problems? One answer, which people often associate with Buddhists, is to withdraw. The world just keeps spinning – Buddhists call it samsara. So, perhaps the best we can do is to cultivate an alternative, at least within ourselves, and hope it has some kind of effect. If that seems weak, think how people across the US responded to Buddhist monks walking for peace across the country. Twenty-four monks set out from their meditation centre in Texas last October and walked over two thousand miles to Washington DC. Crowds gathered along the way, millions followed their progress on Facebook and Instagram, and thousands greeted them at the Lincoln Memorial when they arrived in Washington last week. Why did the monks stir such a powerful reaction? For one thing, they were walking through a divided country. Up north in Minnesota, violence was spiralling, the outward sign of much deeper divisions. The monks were different. They exuded peace. That’s powerful in itself, but they also had a message. The particular tradition these monks follow emphasises mindfulness, which these days is often regarded as an innocuous soothing exercise, especially helpful for getting to sleep at night. For serious practitioners, like these monks with their steady gait and bloodied feet, it means being present and giving things one’s full attention. In that way, you experience your mind’s tendency to busyness and agitation. You see the reactive patterns of your thoughts and that lets you recognise the sources of suffering right there in the mind, and maybe break the circuit. The Buddha long ago taught that we’re driven by forces we barely recognise. He named them as craving, aversion and delusion. The world – samsara - he said, is simply those forces writ large; and the news, which we can find so overwhelming, reflects them. The monks’ simple message was that it’s possible to be different, and their choice to step out of their monastic retreat into the world was just as significant. By embodying mindfulness and peace so publicly, without being overtly political, they symbolised an alternative to the challenges facing American society. I think the response showed how deeply people yearn for that alternative, and that’s another source of hope in these difficult times.