God in a World of Faster, Better, Cheaper

One way to think about technology is that its purpose is to solve problems of scarcity. More and easier access to something we need or want.

Once the scarcity is solved, tech inevitably leads to abundance, and abundance leads to faster, better, cheaper. And we as humans, we love faster, better, cheaper.

Some technologies have created seismic shifts in how we live and interact with the world. Fire, electricity, the internet.

And now AI.

Let me give you a little insight into my day as a technology worker in the age of AI. This is new in the last 3 months. The first thing I do when I start my day is see what the 4 – 9 AI agents I loaded up with work before the end of my previous day have done. Then I spend most of the rest of my day just giving them new tasks and keeping them going. They’re very needy.

In fact, I’m currently redesigning our entire software organization around a combination of people and AI agents.

It’s an ever-changing world. Our experience of life, just in our lifetime, has changed drastically. Gen-X is the last generation of humans — of humans — to know a world without the internet and without cell phones.

We as humans are always changing our world. Constantly moving toward faster, better, cheaper.

Here, from Genesis 11: “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.” Babel.

The Tower in Babel wasn’t about architecture. It was ambition toward faster, better, cheaper. It was about ego. Look at what we can do.

From Exodus 32, the people said to Aaron, “Come, make us gods who shall go before us.” The golden calf.

The golden calf wasn’t about art. It was about faster, better, cheaper. We’re impatient. We don’t like uncertainty. Look at what we can do.

A tower and a calf. Two different stories. Same human instinct. Look at us. Faster, better, cheaper.

Ecclesiastes 1 warns, “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.”

Because once scarcity becomes abundance, abundance turns to faster, better, cheaper, and look at us.

But still, through every tower, every calf, every new technology, God remains.

Before fire. Before electricity. Before AI. And long after all of it has been replaced by whatever comes next.

He says to us,

“You may want faster, better, cheaper. You may want others to look at you. You may say that the world is better today than it was yesterday. But deep down, you know. The tower will fall, and the calf will remain silent.

And still, I am here.

As I have been from the moment I laid the foundation. From the moment I fashioned you from the dust and breathed life into your nostrils.

Just say my name and I am with you.”