Category: Technology

After the Crossroads: Artificial Intelligence, Place-Based Ethics, and the Slow Work of Moral Discernment

Over the past year, I’ve been tracking a question that began with a simple observation: Artificial intelligence isn’t only code or computation, but it’s infrastructure. It eats electricity and water. It sits on land. It reshapes local economies and local ecologies. It arrives through planning commissions and energy grids rather than through philosophical conference rooms.

That observation was the starting point of my November 2025 piece, “Artificial Intelligence at the Crossroads of Science, Ethics, and Spirituality.” In that first essay, I tried to draw out the scale of the stakes from the often-invisible material costs of AI, the ethical lacunae in policy debates, and the deep metaphysical questions we’re forced to confront when we start to think about artificial “intelligence” not as an abstraction but as an embodied presence in our world. If you haven’t read it yet, I would recommend it first as it provides the grounding that makes the new essay more than just a sequel.

Here’s the extended follow-up titled “After the Crossroads: Artificial Intelligence, Place-Based Ethics, and the Slow Work of Moral Discernment.” This piece expands the argument in several directions, and, I hope, deepens it.

If the first piece asked “What is AI doing here?”, this new essay asks “How do we respond, ethically and spiritually, when AI is no longer just a future possibility but a present reality?”

A few key parts:

1. From Abstraction to Emplacement

AI isn’t floating in the cloud, but it’s rooted in specific places with particular water tables, zoning laws, and bodies of people. Understanding AI ethically means understanding how it enters lived space, not just conceptual space.

2. Infrastructure as Moral Problem

The paper foregrounds the material aspects of AI, including data centers, energy grids, and water use, and treats these not as technical issues but as moral and ecological issues that call for ethical attention and political engagement.

3. A Theological Perspective on Governance

Drawing on ecological theology, liberation theology, and phenomenology, the essay reframes governance not as bureaucracy but as a moral practice. Decisions about land use, utilities, and community welfare become questions of justice, care, and collective responsibility.

4. Faith Communities as Ethical Agents

One of my central claims is that faith communities, including churches, are uniquely positioned to foster the moral formation necessary for ethical engagement with AI. These are communities in which practices of attention, patience, deliberation, and shared responsibility are cultivated through the ordinary rhythms of life (ideally).

This perspective is neither technophobic nor naïvely optimistic about innovation. It insists that ethical engagement with AI must be slow, embodied, and rooted in particular communities, not divorced into abstract principles.

Why This Matters Now

AI is no longer on the horizon. Its infrastructure is being built today, in places like ours (especially here in the Carolinas), with very material ecological footprints. These developments raise moral questions not only about algorithmic bias or job displacement, important as those topics are, but also about water tables, electrical grids, local economies, and democratic agency.

Those are questions not just for experts, but for communities, congregations, local governments, and engaged citizens.

This essay is written for anyone who wants to take those questions seriously without losing their grip on complexity, such as people of faith, people of conscience, and anyone concerned with how technology shapes places and lives.

I’m also planning shorter, reader-friendly versions of key sections, including one you can share with your congregation or community group.

We’re living in a time when theological attention and civic care overlap in real places, and it matters how we show up.

Abstract

This essay extends my earlier analysis of artificial intelligence (AI) as a convergence of science, ethics, and spirituality by deliberately turning toward questions of place, local governance, and moral formation. While much contemporary discourse on AI remains abstract or global in scale, the material realities of AI infrastructure increasingly manifest at the local level through data centers, energy demands, water use, zoning decisions, and environmental impacts. Drawing on ecological theology, phenomenology, and political theology, this essay argues that meaningful ethical engagement with AI requires slowing technological decision-making, recentering embodied and communal discernment, and reclaiming local democratic and spiritual practices as sites of moral agency. Rather than framing AI as either salvific or catastrophic, I propose understanding AI as a mirror that amplifies existing patterns of extraction, care, and neglect. The essay concludes by suggesting that faith communities and local institutions play a crucial, underexplored role in shaping AI’s trajectory through practices of attentiveness, accountability, and place-based moral reasoning.

After_the_Crossroads_AI_Place_Ethics_v2Download

Stats from 2025

This is a little self-indulgent, but I wanted to share some of the interesting stats from my blog in 2025. I was rather surprised to see the site have one its “best” year (numbers-wise with page views, likes, and comments… I won’t apply that label to my own content) since 2016 and reaching levels it was hitting at the height of blogging on the web in the mid 2000’s (though I do think we’re seeing a return to blog culture as more people realize the attention engines of social media are turning us all into wretched creatures).

  • Total posts in 2025: 234 (now up to 3,973 published posts since 2006)
  • Total words written in 2025: 58,300 (don’t tell my PhD advisor)
  • Most popular post time: Thursday 5:00 PM (21% of views… I always tell clients that Tuesday mornings and Thursday afternoons are the times when people consume content on the web… still holds true)
  • Total page views in 2025: 90,434 (2016 had 120,469 and 2011 saw 100,081 views for comparison)
  • Total views all time: 1,002,067
  • Total unique visitors all time: 570,862
  • Best month ever: December 2025 (yep, last month the blog saw its record 37,000 views, which beats out January 2007’s 34,000… crazy!)

All told, I really don’t care that much about these sorts of stats these days as I know I’m writing for a niche audience. I don’t monetize this site (or your visits, data, or viewing habits in any way beyond simple page views… no Google Analytics, etc. here). However, it is endearing to see new people find and interact with my ramblings here, but especially to see all of you who come back as repeat visitors that like articles, leave comments, and (yes) even share sometimes on social media outlets. I deeply appreciate your engagement, and definitely reach out if you ever have questions about my writing, opinions, or work!

Elon Musk’s Intent by Substituting Abundance for Sustainable in Telsa’s Mission

Worthy read on Elon’s post-scarcity fantasy of robots and AGI that relies on the concepts of Superintelligence and trans-humanistic ethics that lack any concept of ecological futures and considerations… a future that, quite frankly, we should not pursue if we are to live into our true being here on this planet.

Elon Musk drops ‘sustainable’ from Tesla’s mission as he completes his villain arc | Electrek:

By removing “sustainable,” Tesla is signaling that its primary focus is no longer the environment or the climate crisis. “Amazing Abundance” is a reference to the post-scarcity future Musk believes he is building through general-purpose humanoid robots (Optimus) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

In this new mission, electric cars and renewables are just tools to help build this hypothetical utopia.

South Carolina’s Data Center Decision Time

I have grave concerns about the speed at which this is happening all over the state, with little regard to integral ecologies (City Council is debating two new data centers here in Spartanburg as well)…

9 new data centers proposed in Colleton County:

“I think South Carolina really is at a decision point: what do we want our state to look like 20 years from now, 30 years from now?” resident and Climate Campaign Associate Robby Maynor said. “Do we want a lot of gas plants and pipelines and data centers? Or do we want to protect the things that make South Carolina special and unique? The ACE Basin is at the very top of that list. This is the absolute wrong location for a complex of this size.”

In the application for the special zoning exception, the proposed data centers and the substations show the potential impact on this land, especially the wetlands, but some say the impact is even greater.

What is Intelligence (and What “Superintelligence” Misses)?

Worth a read… sounds a good deal like what I’ve been saying out loud and thinking here in my posts on AI futures and the need for local imagination in steering technological innovation such as AI / AGI…

The Politics Of Superintelligence:

And beneath all of this, the environmental destruction accelerates as we continue to train large language models — a process that consumes enormous amounts of energy. When confronted with this ecological cost, AI companies point to hypothetical benefits, such as AGI solving climate change or optimizing energy systems. They use the future to justify the present, as though these speculative benefits should outweigh actual, ongoing damages. This temporal shell game, destroying the world to save it, would be comedic if the consequences weren’t so severe.

And just as it erodes the environment, AI also erodes democracy. Recommendation algorithms have long shaped political discourse, creating filter bubbles and amplifying extremism, but more recently, generative AI has flooded information spaces with synthetic content, making it impossible to distinguish truth from fabrication. The public sphere, the basis of democratic life, depends on people sharing enough common information to deliberate together….

What unites these diverse imaginaries — Indigenous data governance, worker-led data trusts, and Global South design projects — is a different understanding of intelligence itself. Rather than picturing intelligence as an abstract, disembodied capacity to optimize across all domains, they treat it as a relational and embodied capacity bound to specific contexts. They address real communities with real needs, not hypothetical humanity facing hypothetical machines. Precisely because they are grounded, they appear modest when set against the grandiosity of superintelligence, but existential risk makes every other concern look small by comparison. You can predict the ripostes: Why prioritize worker rights when work itself might soon disappear? Why consider environmental limits when AGI is imagined as capable of solving climate change on demand?

How I Use Obsidian at CIIS: A Relational Workflow for Reading, Reflection, and Writing

Obsidian has become my living archive since I first dove in back in 2021 as a classroom teacher where I organized teaching notes, conversations, and todos as a Dean of Students… and now it has become the place where course readings, dissertation ideas, phenomenological field notes, theological insights, Canvas posts, and draft papers all meet in a shared relational space. It’s less a filing cabinet and more a garden. What I’m really doing in Obsidian is tending connections by letting ideas compost, cross-pollinate, and eventually grow into papers or long-form reflections. Here’s the core workflow I’m sharing with you.

Two places where I’d start before you dive in to Obsidian:

1. Book Notes as Living Conversations

When I read, whether it’s Merleau-Ponty, Edith Stein, Whitehead, or a text for PCC/ESR, I take notes into a Book Notes template that pulls in metadata automatically:

  • Author / Title / Year / Course
  • Core quotes (copied directly, tagged with #quote and citation)
  • My reflections in first person
  • Connections to other thinkers or my ongoing concepts: [[Ecological Intentionality]], [[Cruciform Consciousness]], [[Empathy (Stein)]], [[Flesh of the World]], etc.

Each book note ends with a section called “Where does this want to go?”

Sometimes the answer is a future paper, a blog post, or a concept node. That question keeps the note alive instead of archived.

2. Canvas Posts → Permanent Notes

I write most of my Canvas responses in Obsidian first. This lets me:

  1. Draft freely
  2. Link concepts as I’m thinking
  3. Keep a permanent, searchable archive of every class discussion

Each module prompt gets its own note in my Canvas/ folder. After posting, I create 1–3 “permanent notes” distilled from the response—short, atomic ideas written in my own voice.

For example, a Canvas post on the chiasm leads to permanent notes like:

  • Perception as reciprocal touch
  • The ecological thickness of the visible
  • Relational openness in the phenomenology of nature

These then link outward into ongoing clusters such as [[Phenomenology]], [[Embodiment]], [[Nature as Intertwining]].

3. Writing Papers Through Connected Notes

When a paper is due, ecological theology, phenomenology, ESR or PCC research, I never begin with a blank page. I begin with a map of notes already in conversation.

The workflow:

  1. Create a Paper Hub note as a central node for the project:
    • thesis draft
    • reading list
    • list of relevant permanent notes
  2. Pull in linked notes Using Dataview or simple backlinks, I gather every relevant piece of thinking I’ve already stored.
  3. Assemble the argument The writing becomes an act of weaving connections rather than inventing from scratch.
  4. Export to Word/PDF Once the draft is complete, I move into Word for Chicago-style citations and final formatting.

This lets my academic work grow organically out of months of lived reflection rather than rushed, isolated writing.

4. Daily Notes as Phenomenological and Ecological Anchors

Every morning’s Daily Note includes:

  • weather + sunrise/sunset
  • tracking notes on the black walnut
  • dreams, moods, or somatic impressions
  • any quote or insight from my reading

These small entries, over time, become a longitudinal phenomenological dataset—especially helpful for my ecological intentionality and process-relational work.

5. The Vault as an Ecology

Obsidian mirrors how I’m thinking about the world in my CIIS work:

everything is connected, everything participates, and meaning emerges through relation rather than isolation.

My vault has three organizing principles:

  • Maps of content (big conceptual hubs)
  • Atomic permanent notes (ideas per note tagged well)
  • Ephemeral notes (daily, in-class, or quick captures)

The magic is not in perfect organization… it’s in the interplay.

6. Why This Works for Me

This workflow keeps my scholarship:

  • Ecological: ideas grow from interaction
  • Phenomenological: grounded in lived experience
  • Process-relational: always evolving
  • Practical: every note has a future use

It’s become the backbone not only of my life and coursework, but of my dissertation path, Tree Sit Journals, Carolina Ecology posts, and even sermon writing.

AI Data Centers in Space

Solar energy is indeed everything (and perhaps the root of consciousness?)… this is a good step and we should be moving more of our energy grids into these types of frameworks (with local-focused receivers and transmitters here on the surface)… not just AI datacenters. I suspect we will in the coming decades with the push from AI (if the power brokers that have made and continue to make trillions from energy generation aren’t calling the shots)… 

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says we’re just a decade away from a new normal of extraterrestrial data centers:

CEO Sundar Pichai said in a Fox News interview on Sunday that Google will soon begin construction of AI data centers in space. The tech giant announced Project Suncatcher earlier this month, with the goal of finding more efficient ways to power energy-guzzling centers, in this case with solar power.

“One of our moonshots is to, how do we one day have data centers in space so that we can better harness the energy from the sun that is 100 trillion times more energy than what we produce on all of Earth today?” Pichai said.

Artificial Intelligence at the Crossroads of Science, Ethics, and Spirituality

I’ve been interested in seeing how corporate development of AI data centers (and their philosophies and ethical considerations) has dominated the conversation, rather than inviting in other local and metaphysical voices to help shape this important human endeavor. This paper explores some of those possibilities (PDF download available here…)

Artificial Intelligence at the Crossroads of ScienceDownload

The Problem of AI Water Cooling for Communities

It’s no coincidence that most of these AI mega centers are being built in areas here in the United States Southeast where regulations are more lax and tax incentives are generous…

AI’s water problem is worse than we thought:

Here’s the gist: At its data centers in Morrow County, Amazon is using water that’s already contaminated with industrial agriculture fertilizer runoff to cool down its ultra-hot servers. When that contaminated water hits Amazon’s sizzling equipment, it partially evaporates—but all the nitrate pollution stays behind. That means the water leaving Amazon’s data centers is even more concentrated with pollutants than what went in.

After that extra-contaminated water leaves Amazon’s data center, it then gets dumped and sprayed across local farmland in Oregon. From there, the contaminated water soaks straight into the aquifer that 45,000 people drink from.

The result is that people in Morrow County are now drinking from taps loaded with nitrates, with some testing at 40, 50, even 70 parts per million. (For context: the federal safety limit is 10 ppm. Anything above that is linked to miscarriages, kidney failure, cancers, and “blue baby syndrome.”)

The Solution to Being Locked In

Seth describes his situation with LinkedIn posts here, but the refrain is something I’ve been saying for 20 years now… own your own work and have a canonical place for it. Don’t rely on Facebook/YouTube/LinkedIn/X/Etsy, etc., because of the allure of cheap eyeballs and “traffic”… it’s never been easier to have your own domain on your own server and control of your online expressions.

The Hotel California (and subscriptions) | Seth’s Blog:

The alternative is to own your own stuff. To build an asset you control, and to guard your attention and trust carefully.

The best way to read blogs hasn’t changed in twenty years. RSS. It’s free and easy and it just works. It’s the most efficient way to get the information you’re looking for, and it’s under your control. There’s a quick explainer video at that link along with a reader that’s easy to use.

Who Says Blogging is Dead?

My site is having its biggest month in almost 20 years (and its best year since 2007, when I was selling sponsorships and made a decent income from them). I’ve not done much to promote things here besides writing, but I do appreciate the tens of thousands of visitors (not bots) that have stopped by.

We’re about to enter a new age of personal and professional blogging that will swing the pendulum back from the horribleness of social media coalesced around a few corporate platforms. These types of surprising numbers (for me) help convince me that my thoughts are accurate.

OpenAI’s ‘ChatGPT for Teachers

K-12 education in the United States is going to look VERY different in just a few short years…

OpenAI rolls out ‘ChatGPT for Teachers’ for K-12 educators:

OpenAI on Wednesday announced ChatGPT for Teachers, a version of its artificial intelligence chatbot that is designed for K-12 educators and school districts.

Educators can use ChatGPT for Teachers to securely work with student information, get personalized teaching support and collaborate with colleagues within their district, OpenAI said. There are also administrative controls that district leaders can use to determine how ChatGPT for Teachers will work within their communities.

ChatGPT and Search Engines

Interesting numbers for Google, etc…

Are AI Chatbots Changing How We Shop? | Yale Insights:

A very recent study on this topic was conducted by a group of economists in collaboration with OpenAI’s Economic Research team. According to this paper, most ChatGPT usage falls into three categories, which the authors call practical guidance, seeking information, and writing. Notably, the share of messages classified as seeking information rose from 18% in July 2024 to 24% in June 2025, highlighting the ongoing shift from traditional web search toward AI-assisted search.

Lignin instead of OLED?

Fascinating… more things like this, please.

Scientists turn wood waste into glowing material for TVs and phones:

An eco-friendly substitute has been developed for the light-emitting materials used in modern display technologies, such as TVs and smartphones.

The new material uses a common wood waste product to create a greener future for electronics, removing toxic metals and avoiding complex, polluting manufacturing methods.

Researchers from Yale University and Nottingham Trent University have designed it.

Boomer Ellipsis…

As a PhD student… I do a lot of writing. I love ellipses, especially in Canvas discussions with Professors and classmates as I near the finish line of my coursework. 

I’m also a younger Gen X’er / Early Millennial (born in ’78 but was heavily into tech and gaming from the mid-80’s because my parents were amazingly tech-forward despite us living in rural South Carolina). The “Boomer Ellipsis” take makes me very sad since I try not to use em dashes as much as possible now due to AI… and now I’m going to be called a boomer for using… ellipsis.

Let’s just all write more. Sigh. Here’s my obligatory old man dad emoji 👍

On em dashes and elipses – Doc Searls Weblog:

While we’re at it, there is also a “Boomer ellipsis” thing. Says here in the NY Post, “When typing a large paragraph, older adults might use what has been dubbed “Boomer ellipses” — multiple dots in a row also called suspension points — to separate ideas, unintentionally making messages more ominous or anxiety-inducing and irritating Gen Z.” (I assume Brooke Kato, who wrote that sentence, is not an AI, despite using em dashes.) There is more along the same line from Upworthy and NDTV.

OpenAI’s Sky for Mac

This is going to be one of those acquisition moments we look back on in a few years (months?) and think “wow! that really changed the game!” sort of like when Google acquired Writely to make Google Docs…

OpenAI’s Sky for Mac wants to be your new work buddy and maybe your boss | Digital Trends:

So, OpenAI just snapped up a small company called Software Applications, Inc. These are the folks who were quietly building a really cool AI assistant for Mac computers called “Sky.”

Prompt Injection Attacks and ChatGPT Atlas

Good points here by Simon Willison about the new ChatGPT Atlas browser from OpenAI…

Introducing ChatGPT Atlas:

I’d like to see a deep explanation of the steps Atlas takes to avoid prompt injection attacks. Right now it looks like the main defense is expecting the user to carefully watch what agent mode is doing at all times!

Amazon’s Plans to Replace 500,000 Human Jobs With Robots

Speaking of AI… this isn’t only about warehouse jobs but will quickly ripple out to other employers (and employees)…

Amazon Plans to Replace More Than Half a Million Jobs With Robots – The New York Times:

Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn’t need to hire.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas Browser

Going to be interesting to see if their new browser picks up adoption in the mainstream and what new features it might have compared to others (I’ve tested out Opera and Perplexity’s AI browsers but couldn’t recommend at this point)… agentic browsing is definitely the new paradigm, though.

OpenAI is about to launch its new AI web browser, ChatGPT Atlas | The Verge:

Reuters reported in July that OpenAI was preparing to launch an AI web browser, with the company’s Operator AI agent built into the browser. Such a feature would allow Operator to book restaurant reservations, automatically fill out forms, and complete other browser actions.