Since you ask: Yes, of course Jesus would build data centers for AI workloads.

After all, the formative years of Jesus’ mortal ministry were most likely spent apprenticed to a carpenter, so it seems likely that He has an appreciation for effective tools. A hand saw, a sharpening stone, and an enterprise-scale rack of H200s each has their place.

It’s unfortunate that many of us form our first impressions of AI from the use cases – text chat and image generation – that are frequently slop. It’s easy to miss the point. But with experience, you learn that having your own personal programming assistant who never gets tired or hungry can be incredibly useful. In a lot of situations, massively parallel matrix multiplication over a neural network trained on trillions of tokens unblocks paths to human progress (or eliminates a large stack of tedious daily annoyances).

The industrial scale of data centers also seems about right. From what we can tell of God’s dealings with his peoples in many eras, He likes cities. The Zion of Enoch was a city. The Israelites’ Mount Zion was in the city of Jerusalem. An aspect of the Book of Mormon that gets overlooked is that the Nephites had an urban civilization that centered on the cities of Nephi, Zarahemla and Bountiful. When the gospel was restored, Joseph Smith and his successors undertook a decades-long campaign of city building. Cities require large-scale infrastructure to function, whether to provide water, sewage, transportation, or compute. The wilderness experience – whether the Exodus, or Lehi in the desert, or the pioneers’ westward trek – is of fundamental importance, but it is a temporary condition, not our permanent status.

In a lot of mostly invisible ways, AI is making us more productive and efficient. In the long run, increased productivity and efficiency is the only human path to conquering hunger, disease, and countless other miseries. So a technology with a lot of potential for productivity increases is as welcome as other recent advances. It’s easy to forget how poor our grandparents and great-grandparents were, and what impoverished childhoods our parents and grandparents had. Each of my parents lost a sibling in infancy to disease, and grew up in houses without indoor toilets. I was spared that. As the beneficiary of centuries of long-term growth in productivity and efficiency, I very much want the upwards trend to continue.

Can AI be misused? In too many ways to count. But that’s true of all tools. Done right, AI distills an incomprehensible amount of dearly obtained human knowledge and makes it easily obtainable. As such, AI complements the Church’s educational efforts such as the Pathways program. Access to ChatGPT doesn’t make anyone an expert, but AI can make anyone better at what they are trained to do by letting them converse with the combined expertise of their field and adjacent fields. Sometimes the AI model you’re using makes dumb mistakes or suggests impossible things because it’s just a useful tool and not a machine god, but often it suggests things you’ve overlooked, or proposes solutions you would have never thought of because it has an unflappable instinct to cheerfully solve any problem it encounters by using approaches from a field nowhere close to your own.

It is true that data centers have some drawbacks, such as causing noise and consuming water and electricity. But those are technical challenges to overcome, not reasons to shut down a once-in-a-generation breakthrough. Would I want a data center built near me? Yes! Please build them in my state. We have miles and miles of empty space where whole cities could easily fit, a climate with lots of capacity to soak up excess heat for half the year or more, and an economy badly in need of diversification.

AI has caused economic disruption and job loss. It will undoubtedly cause much more. It might be a stretch to say that AI derailed my Plan A, but it very clearly sunk my Plan B. Much of the basic daily work I did as a translator in the late 2010s was outsourced to AI by the early 2020s. Such is life. Now that AI has hobbled my career, I confess that I am less convinced that we need to protect your career from AI, and I’m more interested in gaining access to a lawyer/graphic designer/python programmer/etc. who is only 90% as good as you, but works around the clock, for pennies, without complaint.

The glory of God is intelligence, and as Latter-day Saints, we even have a certain experience with dialogic revelation as an ongoing encounter with another mind. AI is not divine intelligence, of course, and we should remember that: Just as the benefits of increased productivity do not justify the worship of Mammon, the potential of artificial intelligence does not justify praying to a rough beast born of Spiritus Mundi. But if we can avoid that (and minimize all the other ways that AI can be abused), increasing human access to greater light and truth seems like a good thing that Jesus would in fact approve of.