The AI Wave Is Coming. What Are You Building?

Andy Crouch doesn’t come across as an alarmist. He’s measured, he’s charitable, he’s the kind of person who’d rather ask good questions than score rhetorical points. So when he admits, midway through a recent Good Faith podcast conversation with Curtis Chang, that what he feels most when he thinks about AI is grief, that should stop us in our tracks.

Not panic. Not technophobia. Grief. The kind that knows something real is at risk of being lost.

The conversation between Crouch and Chang is worth sitting with, not because it resolves anything, but because it frames the AI moment in human terms rather than market terms. The central metaphor Crouch reaches to help us understand what’s happening? It isn’t a chatbot or a productivity tool, it’s the interstate highway system.

Bear with him.

The interstates were a marvel. They connected a nation, enabled commerce, gave Americans freedom of movement on an unprecedented scale. They were also, Crouch argues, one of the most damaging technologies of the 20th century, not because they were built, but because of how they were adopted. Without asking what kind of human life they were organizing us toward, we built car-dependent communities that separated us from walkable neighborhoods, from neighbors, from our own bodies. The downstream costs were metabolic, relational, spiritual … and are still compounding.

So the question for our moment, Crouch argues, isn’t whether AI is coming. It’s whether we’ll make the same mistake again.

And, in fact, what Crouch and Chang are really asking is something older than Silicon Valley: How shall we then live? And their answer, perhaps counterintuitively, doesn’t start with the technology at all. It starts with a kind of anthropology, a reckoning with what it means to be human, and what we’re afraid to lose as the AI era dawns.

One data point that surfaces in the conversation is quietly devastating: 43% of American men under 35 say they’re seriously interested in having an AI girlfriend or boyfriend. That number isn’t a punchline. It’s a symptom. Young men in this country are, by most measures, the loneliest demographic in our culture. And loneliness, as anyone who has stared down a 2 a.m. phone screen knows, doesn’t wait for the best solution. It reaches for the nearest available comfort. If that comfort increasingly comes in the form of frictionless, customizable, always-available AI companionship, the damage done to the already-fraying fabric of real relationship could be profound and irreversible.

The word Crouch keeps returning to is friction. Real love is friction-full, he says. Every wave of technology promises to reduce friction and relationships are among the most friction-producing things in our lives. The genius and the danger of AI is that it could make the substitute feel close enough to real that we stop fighting for the real thing.

But Crouch doesn’t leave it there. The same flexibility that makes AI dangerous also makes it genuinely redemptive, but only if we choose to make it so by insisting on technology that builds its awareness of human relationships into scheduling algorithms. By building technology that scaffolds learning rather than replacing it. By supporting technology that helps us move through the world as embodied children of God rather than chains us to a screen. 

The fork in the road is real and Crouch is calling us to pay attention.

The prescription, then, is less about what AI will do and more about what we decide to do now, before the wave breaks. Crouch suggests something almost laughably small in scale: think about who has a key to your house, and give one more person a key. Move one step closer — literally — to the people you’re called to be in relationship with. 

For those of us who follow Jesus, there’s something else underneath all of this. Crouch closes with a theological move that I’ve been turning over since I heard it: AI is, at its core, a prediction machine. It absorbs the past and extrapolates forward. It cannot envision a reality not already present in the data. But the biblical writers — moved by the Holy Spirit, not a data set — named a Messiah who would die and rise before such a thing had ever happened. No training set predicted that. No algorithm extrapolated the Resurrection.

Which means that if you believe human beings are made for relationship with a God who acts outside the data, then the most important things about you — arguably your capacity for genuine love, for sacrifice, for hope in what hasn’t happened yet — are precisely what AI cannot replicate or replace. Not because we’re smarter, but because we’re called. Given a vocation. Breathed into.

So whether or not you share that faith, the question Crouch leaves us with is worth sitting with: If the most powerful technology ever built can only ever predict the future from the past, what does it mean that you can imagine something genuinely new, and then go build it?

The wave is coming. But we still get to decide what we’re building on the shore.

Before you go, consider:

1. The interstate highway reshaped American life for generations before we understood the cost. What’s the thing about AI you’ll wish, twenty years from now, you had pushed back on sooner?
2. Andy Crouch says we need to “work on our dreams” before the market decides them for us. So: what kind of life do you actually want? And have you ever said it out loud to anyone?
3. If AI can simulate companionship well enough that millions of people prefer it, what does that tell us about the quality of the human connection we’ve been offering each other?