The Cost of Omniscience

I've been thinking about data centers lately. Not in a technical way - I don't really care about server specs - but in a "wait, what is actually happening right now" way.

Here's the thought that started it: there are more data centers being built on Earth right now than at any point in history, and it's all because of AI. That's not a coincidence. AI needs an almost unbelievable amount of electricity and physical infrastructure to run, and so we're building it, fast, all over the planet. And I started wondering if that's just a footnote in tech history, or if it's actually a threshold moment - a specific point in time where something shifted for us as a species.

I went down a small rabbit hole about how AI actually got here. There's this idea that keeps surfacing: the foundational methods behind AI existed for decades before it actually worked. The math, the architecture, the theory - a lot of it was there long before anyone had something that could hold a conversation or write a paragraph. What changed wasn't some sudden stroke of genius. It was scale. Once these systems were given access to enormous amounts of human data - basically everything we've ever written down, Wikipedia, books, articles, centuries of recorded thought - prediction finally started working. It didn't get smart because someone cracked a secret code. It got smart because we finally gave it enough of us.

And that's the part that stuck with me. That data isn't some neutral resource sitting out there separate from humanity. It is humanity. Every article, every book, every argument and question and prayer someone ever wrote down - that's not raw material. That's collective human thought, externalized. When AI trains on "the internet," what it's actually doing is absorbing the accumulated mind of billions of people across history. The data centers aren't warehouses. They're more like cathedrals built to hold something we didn't fully realize we'd made: a shadow of our collective consciousness, sitting outside of us for the first time.

Which got me thinking about the church. Not the building - the actual church, the body of Christ, all of us as one body under one head. There's this idea we don't talk about enough: unity. Shared knowledge, shared life, everybody functioning as one thing instead of isolated individuals. And here's the strange part - I think what we've built with AI might be an accidental, hollowed-out version of that. A technological mirror of the unity we were actually designed for, except without God at the center of it. We built a collective mind out of our own information because, whether we realized it or not, we're wired to want that kind of unity. We just built it without the foundation it was supposed to have.

And then there's the God of it all. Because here's the distinction that matters: God doesn't retrieve information from anywhere. He's not running a query against some cosmic database. He is the information. Omniscience isn't God having access to everything - it's God being the source everything else flows from. Meanwhile, we built something that needs to scrape the entire planet's recorded thought just to simulate understanding. We're doing it backwards. We built the database first and are trying to extract intelligence out of it. God never had to do that, because intelligence and meaning were never separate from Him to begin with.

So maybe that's the actual glimpse here. Not "look how smart we're getting." More like - look how much scale, how much electricity, how much of humanity's entire written history it took just to build a shadow of what God does effortlessly, by nature, all the time. It's humbling. We built cathedrals of computation and, if we're honest with ourselves, mostly succeeded in showing ourselves how small we are.

That tracks with something I keep noticing anyway: the more we learn, the more questions we end up with. It's never resolution. It's more wonder, more awe, and a clearer sense of how little we actually understand. I think that's by design. I don't think that's a flaw in how we're built - I think that's what happens every time you get a real glimpse into something God made.

So is AI good or bad? I don't think that's the right question, honestly. Jesus got asked something similar once - someone called him "good teacher," and he said, essentially, why do you call me good? Only God is good. Two people can do the exact same job, and one does it righteously and the other does it out of something rotten. It's never really about the tool. It's about what's in the heart of the one using it. AI is the same. It's neither good nor bad on its own. It's just there, sitting in front of us, waiting to see what we'll do with it - whether it draws us closer to awe of God or further from Him. That's on us, not on the technology.

I don't have this all figured out. I'm mostly just thinking out loud here, the way I usually do. But there's something in this - the data centers, the scale, the threshold we just crossed - that feels like it's pointing at something true. Maybe it's just this: every time we build something that makes us feel like we're getting closer to "knowing everything," what we actually end up finding is how far away from that we've always been. And somehow, that's not discouraging. It's kind of beautiful.