Lessons of AI in the Bible
A HEAP OF RUINS
Listen up.
God tells Abram: Get out. Leave the comfort zone. No roadmap. Just GO. Abram shows up at this place called Ai.
Hebrew for “heap of ruins.” The name is literally “ruin.” Talk about truth in advertising.
We name our cars after Greek gods and Latin buzzwords. We named the saviour of our economy as a “city of ruins”? (Hopefully, not prophetic)
Abram doesn’t conquer Ai. Doesn’t optimize it. Doesn’t A/B test it. He builds an altar. One could say that the altar is the first chatbot.
Fast-forward.
Joshua’s crew just flattened Jericho. Walls down. Total domination. Everybody’s high-fiving. Then they hit tiny little Ai. And lose. Badly. Morale cratered. Why? Not because Ai was strong.
COMPROMISED.
One guy. Achan.
Quietly pockets some silver, gold, a fancy Babylonian robe. “Just this once.” “No one will notice.” “Doesn’t affect the big picture.” Sound familiar?
That’s how big systems die. Not from evil geniuses. From small, reasonable-sounding exceptions. One corner cut here. One incentive ignored there. Everybody trusts the process because it worked yesterday.
AI doesn’t CREATE the weakness. It AMPLIFIES it.
In a world of machines that faults can be exposed. Society will have to adapt to a unified and agreed behavious or the AI will expose embarassing items. There is no gray area in a black and white era.
Later? Ai gets rebuilt. Mentioned again in Isaiah. Still standing. The point isn’t “never build.” The point is “never forget how it can break you.”
A whole army gets routed because somebody couldn’t resist a pretty robe. “I’ll just keep this.” Humans lose control in the exact same way today. Not through grand ambition. Through tiny, justifiable shortcuts, AI isn’t the threat. Unexamined incentives are. Small hidden crap defeats giant systems when integrity is missing.
Think I’m stretching this comparison to make idea fit? Well, it happened in Ghostbusters when Dan Akroyd couldn’t resist and thought of the Stay Puff Marshmallow man. We’re human.
Victory comes after accountability—not more intelligence. We’re standing at Ai right now. Overconfident after the last “win.” Ignoring the quiet compromises piling up. Stop. Build the altar. Figure out who’s really in charge before you charge ahead again . Because a heap of ruins doesn’t start as rubble. It starts as something everybody swore was working JUST FINE. We have to be mentally tough and displined
Good morning
Eric