Photo and Commentary ©2026 by Russell Jurgensen
Thursday, April 9, 2026
The thing that caught my attention with this magnolia Stellata tree was the blue sky. The flowers themselves are a little worn from a series of rain storms that came through the week before. But when the sun came out, they had a chance to shine against the blue background.
In reading about artificial intelligence this week, a topic came up about the need to program an AI with directives to ensure it does not become a danger to people. For example, Asimov’s famous three laws of robotics can be summarized as: 1. Do not harm humans, 2. Obey orders given by a human, and 3. Protect own existence.
The trained AI models we commonly use online have many directives programmed into the training process, but they don’t have robotic bodies and have only a limited ability to learn based on recent chat history. But it is heading to become more advanced.
The question arises whether it is possible to provide the perfect set of directives to an AI to cover all situations. With the previously mentioned laws, an AI might easily find loopholes to damage property but not people. A robot might find that orders given by humans are nonsensical. Any number of scenarios can come up where those three laws don’t help.
So, what are the most important directives? It turns out we find the same problem for people. We have trouble coming up with a perfect set of laws that covers every situation for human interaction.
This might be where we can look inside and find ourselves. We are our own intelligences with freedom to set our own directives. The Bible provides some great assistance with a law we can choose if we want. That law is as simple as loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves.
Even if we feel imperfect like the flowers in the image, we can set our direction towards God’s magnificent principles.