Reliability

In a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior, a team evaluated 118 children aged three to six and found that overall, kids were more inclined to trust machines over humans.

The study divided children into different groups and showed them videos of humans and robots labeling objects, some recognizable to the kids and other items that would be new to them.

Researchers demonstrated the reliability and trustworthiness of humans and robots by having them incorrectly identify familiar items, calling a brush a plate, for instance. This intentional mislabeling allowed researchers to manipulate the children’s concept of who could and could not be trusted. Interestingly, the children showed a stark preference for robots.

When both bots and humans were shown to be equally reliable, children were more inclined to ask robots questions and accept their answers as true. Even when the robots proved unreliable, children preferred them to reliable adults. Children also appeared to be more forgiving of their machine-friends versus their human ones. When the robots made a mistake, children perceived it as accidental. But when the adults fumbled? Children thought those missteps were intentional.

When asked who they would want to learn from and share secrets with, the majority of children chose the robots over the humans. But that preference might only last for so long: Older children were likelier to trust humans when a robot was shown to be unreliable.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Parents have a God-given responsibility of nurturing trust and educating their children. This profound duty should remain in their hands, not delegated to AI, government, or technology. Embracing this role empowers parents to shape the values and character of the next generation.

In March of 2024, aviation manufacturer Boeing announced changes to their internal processes after failing a safety audit by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The audit followed a string of negative stories involving the safety of its aircrafts, including an incident in January where an Alaska Airlines flight experienced explosive decompression when an insufficiently secured door plug popped out.

The FAA reviewed 89 aspects of production at a plant in Renton, Washington, and found that the company failed at 33 of them. That amounts to a 63% success rate, which in school would normally earn students a letter grade of D.

In a memo to employees, president of Boeing’s commercial division Stan Deal said that the vast majority of failures involved employees not following approved procedures, and promised to provide opportunities for remedial learning. “We’ll be working with each employee noted with a non-compliance during the audit to ensure they fully understand the work instructions and procedures.”

Deal also acknowledged that the problems did not solely rest on the backs of production-level employees, but that many of Boeing’s procedures were confusing and changed too frequently. He said, “Our teams are working to simplify and streamline our processes and address the panel’s recommendations.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Whether in secular work or in ministry, taking hazardous shortcuts in a responsible work position, because of laziness, inexperience, or time pressure, can lead to disastrous results. It is better to speak up and take responsibility to make sure that a trust is fulfilled (1 Cor. 4:2).

First, there was a pop. And then a big bang. Air loudly whooshed out of the side of the airplane, which was flying at 16,000 feet with an emergency exit size gash. A cellphone, a teddy bear, and a passenger’s shirt were sucked out the hole in the cabin. Oxygen masks dropped from overhead compartments.

Passengers on Alaska Airlines flight 1282—which was enroute to Ontario, Calif., from Portland, Oregon—were fearful for their lives. The flight, however, landed back at the Portland airport less than 30 minutes after takeoff, with 171 passengers and six crew members aboard, all of them alive.

One passenger said, “We literally thought we were going to die.” Bolts needed to secure part of an Alaska Airlines jet that blew off in midair appear to have been missing when the plane left the factory.

Boeing and other industry officials increasingly believe the plane maker’s employees failed to put back the bolts when they reinstalled a 737 MAX 9 plug door after opening or removing it during production.

The scenario was based partly on an absence of markings on the Alaska door plug itself that would suggest bolts were not in place when it blew off the jet around 16,000 feet over Oregon. They also pointed to paperwork and process lapses at Boeing’s Renton, Washington factory related to the company’s work on the plug door.

Separating fact from fiction is getting harder. Manipulating images—and creating increasingly convincing deepfakes—is getting easier. As what’s real becomes less clear, authenticity is “something we’re thinking about, writing about, aspiring to and judging more than ever.” This is why Merriam-Webster’s word of the year is “authentic,” the company announced in November of 2023.

Editor Peter Sokolowski said, “Can we trust whether a student wrote this paper? Can we trust whether a politician made this statement? We don’t always trust what we see anymore. We sometimes don’t believe our own eyes or our own ears. We are now recognizing that authenticity is a performance itself.”

According to the announcement from Merriam-Webster, “authentic” is a “high-volume lookup” most years but saw a “substantial increase” in 2023. The dictionary has several definitions for the word, including “not false or imitation,” “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character” and “worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact,” among others.

Sokolowski said, “We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity. What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”

Other words that saw spikes this year include “deepfake,” “dystopian,” “doppelgänger,” and “deadname,” per Merriam-Webster. This year’s theme of searching for truth seems fitting following last year’s focus on manipulation. The 2022 word of the year was “gaslighting,” a term that originated from a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton. In the play, a woman complains that the gas lights in her house are dimming while her husband tries to convince her that it’s all in her head.

Possible Preaching Angle:

As technology’s ability to manipulate reality improves, people are searching for the truth. Only the Word of God contains the absolute truth “your word is truth” (John 17:17), as revealed by Jesus, who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

The moment we’ve all breathlessly waited for is finally here: Dictionaries are announcing their words of the year. In December, the US’s most esteemed lexicon, Merriam-Webster, revealed its choice: “authentic.”

In its announcement, the dictionary said the word had seen a big jump in searches this year, thanks to discussions “about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.” The concept of authenticity sits at the intersection of what’s been on our collective minds.

Large language models like ChatGPT and image generators like Dall-E have left us uncertain about what’s genuine, from student essays to the pope’s fashion choices. When it comes to the news, online mis- and disinformation, along with armies of bots, have us operating under different sets of facts.

Sure enough, other leading dictionaries’ words of the year are remarkably similar. Cambridge chose “hallucinate,” focusing its announcement on generative AI: “It’s capable of producing false information – hallucinations – and presenting this information as fact.” Collins didn’t beat around the bush: its word of the year is “AI.”

In a polarized world, the dictionaries’ solidarity suggests there’s something we can all agree on: robots are terrifying. AI is an obsession that seems to cross generations. Whether you’re a boomer or Gen Z, OpenAI feels like a sign of change far beyond NFTs, the metaverse, and all the other fads we were told would transform humanity.

Social media feeds have become carefully curated extensions of ourselves—like little aspirational art projects. As Merriam-Webster points out, authenticity itself has become a performance. In other words, we’re getting very good at pretending to be real.

President Abraham Lincoln’s biographer, Jon Meacham argues that Lincoln's version of Christian faith was complicated. But Meacham also adds, “There is no doubt, however, that the Lincoln of the White House years became more religiously inclined, attending services with some regularity and meeting with ministers and congregants.” Lincoln became more convinced of the sovereign purposes of a God who oversees world events.

At one point. Lincoln said, “I may not be a great man. I know I'm not a great man—and perhaps it is better than it is so—for it makes me rely upon One who is great and who has the wisdom and power to lead us safely through this great trial [of the Civil War.]”

In April 2023, the social media company Twitter, under the direction of its new owner Elon Musk, eliminated its previous verification standards. Since 2009, a blue check mark next to a Twitter account signified a form of verification meant to guarantee a user’s identity. It was used to weed out charlatans impersonating famous or notable people or organizations, and gave users a reliable indicator of authenticity to counter disinformation on the platform.

But under Musk, blue check marks are now exclusively reserved for users who subscribe to Twitter Blue, a premium service. This change has created a crisis for people who tend to rely on the service for newsgathering purposes. For example, the NY Times reported that within 24 hours, there were eleven different accounts impersonating the Los Angeles Police Department.

One researcher tweeted, “This is going to be chaos for emergency services.” Because Twitter is often a source of credible information during national disasters or other forms of local crisis, the change will make it harder for people to receive emergency services.

Podcaster Josh Boerman posted a satirical tweet impersonating New York City Mayor Eric Adams. In it he claimed that the NYPD budget would be slashed by 70%. He said, “Pretty much everybody got that it was a joke immediately—I wasn’t trying to mislead anyone. The point was that this can be both a joke on the state of the network as well as an opportunity to think about the way that media is disseminated.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Without a standard by which sources are verified as being truthful and trustworthy, people are left to their own devices. Similarly, without God's Word, we have no way of arriving at ultimate truth.

One of the tourist attractions in Chicago, Illinois, is the Willis Tower and SkyDeck. It boasts of being the third tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, soaring some 1430 feet into the air. It has 108 floors and on the 103rd floor there is a SkyDeck with spectacular 360-degree views of the city. On a clear day, the visibility stretches out over 50 miles into four States!

If that’s not enough to boost your adrenaline, you can step out onto one of the glass viewing boxes, called “The Ledge.” Each of the boxes extends 4.3 feet outside the building and are made of 1.5-inch laminated glass and can hold up to 10,000 pounds of weight!

In June 2019, a woman and her two children stepped out on the ledge and the glass ledge splintered into thousands of pieces. As you can imagine the family was visibly shaken by the experience. The Willis Tower officials said that no one was in danger because the “protective layer did what it was supposed to do.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Jesus often challenged the foundations that we build our lives upon. Sometimes “life happens” and there are cracks under our feet and in those moments, we then decide whether to trust the Designer and master Engineer.

NASA’s Perseverance rover was launched on July 30, 2020 and landed on Mars on February 18, 2021. Its mission was to seek for signs of ancient life and collect samples of rock for a possible return to Earth.

It’s only reasonable to think that all the components of NASA’s Perseverance rover are new. After all, it is the successor to the Curiosity rover, and it was only launched in 2020. And so, it would be a surprise to find out that the Perseverance’s brain is a piece of technology from the late 90s. That’s right. A processor released by IBM and Motorola over two decades ago, in 1997, serves as the brain of the Perseverance rover. The question is, why?

The craft's developers were more interested in reliability than sheer power. Their solution was a G3 processor used in Apple's Macintosh starting in 1998. Apple veterans remember the G3 fondly. It smoked older Macs with a processor operating speed that topped out at a screaming 266 megahertz (MHz). Or so we thought at the time. Today's processors leave the G3 in the dust. For example, the processor in an Apple iPhone 12 runs at 3 GigaHertz (GHz).

Possible Preaching Angle:

What is old is not necessarily outdated and it can be more reliable than what is newer. This is certainly true of the Word of God. "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away" (Matt 24:35). "Your word, O LORD, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens" (Ps. 119:89).

An investigative report alleges that the New York Police Department routinely abused facial recognition software by submitting photos of celebrity lookalikes. The report from the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology noted that celebrity photos are just a portion of the so-called “probe photos” used to generate database hits, which also include stills from surveillance footage, or photos from social media profiles of potential suspects.

The report garnered widespread criticism from various community groups and privacy advocates.

"It doesn’t matter how accurate facial recognition algorithms are if police are putting very subjective, highly edited or just wrong information into their systems," says Clare Garvie, a senior associate at the Center on Privacy and Technology who wrote the report. "They're not going to get good information out. They're not going to get valuable leads. There's a high risk of misidentification. And it violates due process if they're using it and not sharing it with defense attorneys."

The report didn’t focus exclusively on policing in New York City, but also examined similar practices in Maricopa County, Arizona; Washington County, Oregon; and Pinellas County, Florida. Other routine practices included altering existing photos of suspects to make them look more like traditional mugshots, including one case where they pasted a closed mouth from a model photograph.

"These techniques amount to the fabrication of facial identity points: at best an attempt to create information that isn’t there in the first place and at worst introducing evidence that matches someone other than the person being searched for," the report says.

Potential preaching angles: God delights in both right practices and right outcomes, so going about the wrong way to do the right thing is doing the wrong thing. When we take shortcuts, we demonstrate our lack of trust in God’s timing.

In December of 2016, a ride at Knott's Berry Farm in California became stuck 148 feet in the air. There were 20 people on board, including seven children. Firefighters tried to reach the stranded passengers by using a massive ladder, but it was too short. Fire crews had no choice. They would have to lower each passenger from 148 feet in the air, harnessed to a single rope.

Fire Captain Larry Kurtz said, "It sounds scary, but … we have very, very strong ropes that have 9,000 pounds of breaking strength on them." He was building the faith of those who were trapped. He was giving them information that if believed would dissipate their fears. It was up to each person to believe what he said and place their trust in the firefighter.

Let's zero in on one of the youngsters, and say his name was Luke. He's seven years old—old enough to feel terror as he looks at the ground 148 feet below. The fire­fighter looks Luke in his eyes, and with a steadying voice says, "Trust me, Luke. I won't let you go. Your life is very precious to me, and I will have you down before you know it."

Luke listens to him and thinks about the "very, very strong rope." He believes the firefighter's reassuring words and trusts him completely. This is his only hope of getting to safety. If he doesn’t have faith, then he doesn't believe that the firefighter cares for him. He would then lose his only hope of reaching the ground. Faith, hope, and love are bound together.

Luke and all 20 passengers were lowered safely to the ground just before 10 p.m. that night.

In his book Unbelievable, Justin Brierley writes convincingly that the resurrection is the only adequate explanation for the historical evidence found in the Gospels:

Mike Licona and Bart Ehrman are both New Testament scholars who have very different takes on the resurrection of Jesus. Ehrman let go of his Christian faith after encountering perceived problems with the New Testament. Mike Licona had a similar crisis of faith in the early years of his academic career when his study of the New Testament didn't match what he had been taught about it while growing up. However, whereas Ehrman's study led him away from Christianity, Licona's research convinced him that the resurrection was the only adequate explanation for the historical evidence he found in the Gospels.

Other pieces of the puzzle fell into place as Licona began to appreciate how the New Testament accounts reflected the literary conventions of their day rather than the modern standards often imposed on them by both Christians and critics. During one of his dialogues with Licona on the show, Ehrman rattled off a list of differences between the Gospel accounts of the resurrection, such as the number of women and the accounts of angels at the empty tomb.

He argued that these differences give reason to doubt the reliability of the resurrection story. Naturally, Licona knows these differences just as well as Ehrman but he didn't find that they count against the overall strength of the account, saying:

It is a bit like the Titanic. There were conflicting accounts from survivors, such as whether the ship broke in half before sinking or whether it went down in its entirety. But no one called into question whether the Titanic sank or not. It was the periphery details that were in question. It is the same thing with the New Testament. They are all peripheral details that have no impact on the fundamental truth of Christianity.

During the 2002 Soccer World Cup, Adidas introduced their Fevernova soccer ball, which featured a new design that was supposed to make the ball follow a more predicable flight pattern than the previous generation of soccer balls. However, while the Fevernova accomplished this goal, many players complained that it was too light, making it fly unpredictably.

So for the 2006 World Cup, Adidas attempted to fix those problems with their new +Teamgeist ball. This ball had 14 (rather than 32) curved panels that were bonded together rather than stitched. This goal was to make the ball uniformly round and completely waterproof. Yet for all of Adidas' efforts in solving the water problem, some players felt that the ball flew too fast. It was too easy to score goals they said, and it made goalies look slow and ineffective.

Adidas again made further improvements for the 2010 World Cup ball called the Jabulani. They further reduced the number of panels from 14 down to eight, but they also added textured grooves to the panels intended to make the ball have the same kind of aerodynamics as a traditional stitched ball. But once again, some players complained that the new grooves made the ball fly unpredictably. Undoubtedly someone at Adidas is now working furiously on soccer balls for the latest World Cup.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Technology; Progress; Change—"Every good technology comes with a trade-off of some kind. Newer tools bring us benefits, but those benefits come with a cost. For example, mobile phones allow us to call for help from almost anywhere, but they also allow everyone else to reach us no matter where we go." (2) Blame; Responsibility; Sin—After three supposedly defective soccer balls, maybe the problem is with the players. Maybe we should stop blaming others and take responsibility for our problems.

In his book, Prayer, Tim Keller writes:

Speech-act theory makes a convincing case that our words not only convey information; they get things done. However, God's words have power infinitely beyond our own. God's words are identical with his actions … We humans say, "Let there be light in this room," but first we have to make sure the room has been properly wired. Then we have to walk across the room and flick a switch, or go to the cabinet and grab some matches so we can light a candle. Our words need deeds to back them up and can fail to achieve their purposes. God's words, however, cannot fail their purposes because, for God, speaking and acting are the same things.

Possible Preaching Angles: This illustration could also be used as an object lesson by walking over and turning on a light switch or holding a candle and using a lighter to light it.

In a recent article in The Futurist magazine, writer Laura Lee catalogues some of the worst predictions of all time:

"Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments." —Roman engineer Julius Sextus Frontinus, A.D. 100

"The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon." —John Eric Ericksen, surgeon to Queen Victoria, 1873

"Law will be simplified [over the next century]. Lawyers will have diminished, and their fees will have been vastly curtailed." —journalist Junius Henri Browne, 1893

"It doesn't matter what he does, he will never amount to anything." —Albert Einstein's teacher to Einstein's father, 1895

"It would appear we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology." —computer scientist John von Neumann, 1949

"The Japanese don't make anything the people in the U.S. would want." —Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, 1954

"Nuclear powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality within ten years." —Alex Lewyt, president of the Lewyt Vacuum Cleaner Company, quoted in The New York Times, June 10, 1955

"Before man reaches the moon, your mail will be delivered within hours from New York to Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail." —Arthur Summerfield, U.S. Postmaster General under Eisenhower, 1959

"By the turn of the century, we will live in a paperless society." —Roger Smith, chairman of General Motors, 1986

"I predict the Internet . . . will go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse." —Bob Metcalfe, InfoWorld, 1995

Aren't you glad your faith does not rest on human words but on the sure Word of God?

I am a Christian because God says so, and I did what he told me to do, and I stand on God's Word, and if the Book goes down, I'll go with it.