One of the funniest scenes in the classic show The Office has to be when Michael Scott (Steve Carell) mistakenly follows a GPS system by driving headfirst into a lake, despite Dwight Schrute’s (Rainn Wilson) appeals that he’s misunderstanding the AI’s dictates.

Together, the men exit the windows of the car, swim through the muddy shallows to shore, and have to call a tow truck to pull the car up out of the water. It’s a hilarious scene, and yet, serves as an apt metaphor about how our relationship with technology can go severely awry. (Ironically, the fault in this scene was Michael, not the AI, so it’s an imperfect metaphor.)

I attended a conference over the weekend hosted by the Acton Institute on evolving technologies and the nature of the human person. It was a wonderful experience hearing from scholars detail their views on new tech, AI, and how to grapple with the digital cultural moment that seems to prize efficiency above everything else. One of the speakers, a college professor who studied computer science before shifting to theology, spoke how using AI can be dangerous when we abnegate our responsibility and blindly trust it to do things we would otherwise know to be mistaken, or even immoral. He linked this idea to using AI to decide prison sentences for convicted criminals. On one hand, using an algorithm to determine such a thing might seem fair, but in certain cases, the system was fatally flawed, and didn’t account for the complexity of the situation or the particulars of the background story. Only human judgment, informed by context, moral evaluation, and a robust understanding of justice, can suffice.

I’ve never driven my car into a lake screaming “the machine knows!” like Michael Scott did, but the temptation to use technology like this loom in everyday life. How often do I trust what I read on the internet instead of carefully investigating a range of sources, testing contrasting viewpoints, and then come to my own conclusion on the issue? The internet offers an apparently easy way to acquire objective knowledge, but that doesn’t mean we are allowed to suspend our critical thinking skills and think we no longer have to try and discern truth from falsehood or realness from fakery. In addition, blindly trusting Google Maps to take me two blocks down the road means I’ve given up the ironically simpler option of walking. (I’ve never done that, by the way.)

ChatGPT might be the easiest target when it comes to handing off human responsibility to the machine. In a former post, I cited a study showing how oftentimes employees chafe at using AI because they have to constantly monitor its outputs. Suppose though that we stop fact checking AI systems and just “go with the flow”? A lot of students, bosses, lawyers, and professionals are already doing that. If I trust a computer to write a better email than me, why should I read over it? Or if an AI bot can match me with a romantic partner, why bother approaching someone in person and asking for a date? The list goes on.

Using technology responsibly in today’s digital climate certainly takes intention and discipline. I’m the first to admit that I depend on certain forms of technology in ways I shouldn’t. At the end of the day, acquiring your own set of skills, habituated through practice, and becoming a sound, relationally secure person, can perhaps be a start to putting these tools in their proper place and form.