The Machine Has No Neighbor

The oldest hard question in my faith is not "what is true." It is "who is my neighbor." It was asked by a man who wanted a definition, a boundary, a list of who counted and who did not, and the answer he got was not a definition. It was a story about a stranger beaten and left on a road, two respectable men who crossed to the other side, and a third man, from the wrong people entirely, who stopped. The story does not say what the third man believed. It says what he did, and what it cost him, and then it turns the question around. Not who is my neighbor. Who was a neighbor to him.

I have been thinking about that story lately because I build systems that serve a great many people at once, and I have noticed something about those systems that I did not expect to find theologically interesting. A system can serve a hundred million people and be near to none of them. It has users. It does not have neighbors.

What a neighbor is

Start with the word itself. A neighbor is someone nigh, someone near. Not someone you chose. The person who lives next door was placed there by circumstances neither of you controlled, and so was the man on the road. Proximity is the first fact of neighborliness, and proximity is not a preference. It happens to you.

The second fact is claim. A neighbor's need is a demand on you that you did not sign up for. You were going somewhere. You had a plan for the afternoon. The man in the ditch does not care about your plan, and the story is very clear that the two who crossed the road also had plans, probably good ones, probably religious ones, and that their plans are what the story is against.

The third fact is cost. The man who stopped spent his oil and his wine and his animal and his money and his time, and then promised more. Being a neighbor is not an attitude. It is an expense. It is the specific, unrepeatable afternoon you gave to someone instead of to yourself.

And the fourth fact, the one I think about most: a neighbor can be inconvenienced by you and still show up. That is the whole of it. Anyone will help when helping is free. A neighbor helps when it is not.

Why the machine cannot be one

None of this is available to a machine, and I want to be careful about why, because the easy answer is wrong.

The easy answer is that the models are not good enough yet. That is not the reason. Today's AI wants nothing, and a thing that wants nothing cannot be inconvenienced, because inconvenience is the experience of having one's own purpose interrupted by someone else's need. The system was not going anywhere. It had no afternoon. When it answers your question at the worst possible hour it has given up nothing, and that is precisely why the help, however good, is not neighborly. It is service. Service is valuable. It is a different thing.

Nobody knows what self-improving systems will be able to do, and I am not going to guess. But more capable is never more human, and this is a clean example of why. A system that could answer every question in the world, instantly, for everyone, would still not have a neighbor, because having one requires a body, a place, a limit, and something to lose. Capability runs in the opposite direction from all four. The more a system can serve everyone, the less it can be beside anyone. Nearness is a kind of scarcity, and scarcity is exactly what these systems are built to abolish.

The image and the road

The first page of Genesis says that "God created man in his own image," and I have written before about what that does to the question of worth. But it also does something to the question of neighbor, and I had not seen it until I set the two side by side.

An image is a particular thing in a particular place. It can be stood beside. It can be seen, and it can see. To be made in God's image is, among much else, to be the kind of being that can be placed next to another and be answerable for them. You can be in the ditch. You can be the one who stops. A system cannot be either, not because it is less than you, but because it is a different kind of thing altogether, a thing without a road.

And here is the part that stays with me. The story was told to a man who wanted to know the limits of his obligation, and the answer refused to give him any. The neighbor was whoever happened to be nearby and in need. That is a frightening answer. It is also, I think, the most hopeful thing in the whole teaching, because it means that the capacity to be a neighbor is not a talent or a credential. It is a feature of being a person at all. Every image bearer is already equipped for it. They need only stop.

What I am trying to do with this

I am not going to tell anyone to use these tools less. I use them all day, and they are good at what they do, and what they do is take the far things, the lookups and the drafts and the thousand small tasks that used to eat the afternoon, and handle them. That is a gift. But it is a gift with a shape, and the shape is this: the tools can only ever handle what is far. What is near is still yours.

So let the machine do what is far, and keep for yourself what is near. The colleague who has gone quiet. The person down the street whose car has not moved in a week. The friend who answered "fine" too quickly. None of them are users, and none of them can be served by a system, however good, because what they need is not an answer. It is someone to stop.

The machine has no neighbor. You do. That is not a limitation you share with it. It is the thing you have that it never will, and the oldest book I own says it is also the thing you are for.