The Cost of Convenience: AI, Creation, and Our Neighbors

Between Babel and Pentecost — Article 2 of 5

By Matthew J. Skolnik

Scripture: James 5:1–6 · Romans 8:18–27 · Genesis 2:15

A congregation has been working to reduce its environmental footprint. The Session has examined utility bills, replaced inefficient lighting, and encouraged members to consider the resources they consume. These modest practices express the conviction that creation care belongs to Christian discipleship.

When someone proposes using AI to assist with congregational planning, an elder objects. Why embrace technology associated with expanding data centers and demands for electricity and water just as the church is trying to reduce its own consumption? Another elder points to the practical needs of a small congregation with limited staff. Both concerns deserve serious attention.

Then someone asks a question neither has considered: Who lives near the data centers? Who maintains the systems and supplies the electricity and water? Whose labor makes the convenient service possible, and how are those workers and communities affected?

The congregation knows how to examine the resources consumed inside its building. It has less experience considering resources consumed elsewhere on its behalf. The immediate benefits are visible; many of the costs are distant.

What responsibilities do we have toward the people and places that bear the costs of our convenience, especially when we cannot see them?

Behind the Screen

Artificial intelligence can appear almost immaterial. We type a question into a computer, and a response appears. The experience creates little awareness of the physical systems supporting it. No machine seems to be operating nearby. No visible material is consumed. The service appears to exist somewhere in what we have learned to call the cloud.

Yet the cloud is not immaterial. It consists of buildings, computers, electrical systems, cooling infrastructure, communications networks, minerals, manufactured components, and human labor. Behind a seemingly effortless interaction lies an extraordinary industrial enterprise.

The International Energy Agency estimates that worldwide data centers consumed approximately 485 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025 and projects that consumption could reach approximately 950 terawatt-hours by 2030. These figures describe data centers generally, not AI alone, but the agency identifies AI as a major driver of growing demand (International Energy Agency, Key Questions on Energy and AI, 2026).

These numbers matter, but they require careful interpretation. Not every use of AI consumes the same amount of electricity. Simple text exchanges may require relatively little energy compared with complex reasoning, image or video generation, and more demanding computational tasks. Improvements in hardware and software have also dramatically reduced the energy required for many individual operations. Nevertheless, increased efficiency does not necessarily reduce overall consumption. When services become less expensive and more capable, demand can expand faster than efficiency improves.

Water presents another concern. Some data centers use water for cooling, while producing electricity can also require water. The consequences depend upon location, climate, cooling technology, and the energy systems involved. Resource consumption that might be manageable in one community can place substantial pressure upon another. The environmental consequences of technological development cannot be evaluated through a single universal figure.

There are human costs as well. Digital systems depend upon people who manufacture components, construct facilities, prepare training material, evaluate responses, and perform other work that remains largely invisible to users. Conditions vary considerably. Some workers occupy highly compensated technical positions, while others participate in less secure forms of digital labor.

One of the workers behind that apparently effortless exchange was Richard Mathenge in Nairobi, Kenya. He and colleagues employed by the outsourcing firm Sama reviewed and classified disturbing text to help train safety systems for ChatGPT. Mathenge told TIME that the work exposed workers to serious trauma; the reporting described pay of less than $2 an hour. He later helped organize other African content moderators to seek stronger workplace protections (Billy Perrigo, TIME, September 7, 2023). This particular account does not describe the conditions of every AI worker or every AI service. It does, however, give a human voice to labor otherwise easy to overlook.

The International Labour Organization estimates that approximately one-quarter of workers worldwide occupy jobs with some exposure to generative AI. That exposure does not mean that those jobs will necessarily disappear; transformation of work is considered more likely in many occupations. Nevertheless, technological change raises consequential questions about compensation, bargaining power, training, and whose interests guide the redesign of work (International Labour Organization, Generative AI and Jobs: A 2025 Update).

We should not exaggerate these concerns to strengthen an argument against AI. Neither should we dismiss them because some applications may be beneficial. Responsible discernment requires distinguishing what we know from what remains uncertain, what can be improved from what may require restraint, and what benefits one community from what burdens another.

But information alone cannot tell us why these matters should command our attention.

For that, we must return to Scripture.

The Wages That Cry Out

James 5:1–6 offers one of the New Testament’s most unsettling descriptions of economic injustice. James addresses wealthy people whose accumulated riches coexist with exploitation. Their possessions and luxurious living become evidence against them, while the wages they have withheld from workers testify to the wrong committed.

James 5:4 is especially striking. The wages withheld from those who harvested the fields cry out, and the cries of the laborers reach the Lord of hosts.

It is not only the workers who cry. The wages themselves become witnesses.

The image is deliberately disturbing. What the landowners regard as wealth secured for their own benefit becomes evidence of injustice. The money they have retained is not morally silent. Their prosperity carries within it the testimony of people whose labor has not been honored.

James is addressing an identifiable form of exploitation: the withholding of wages from agricultural laborers. We should not flatten the passage into a general condemnation of wealth, technology, or every economic arrangement from which we benefit. Nor should we assume that every company developing artificial intelligence is guilty of the particular injustice James describes.

But the passage reveals something profound about God’s attention. The suffering of exploited workers is neither invisible nor inconsequential simply because those who benefit from their labor can ignore it. Their cries reach God even when they fail to reach the people who possess economic power.

This is a challenging biblical image for a society in which so many economic relationships have become distant and complicated. We purchase goods whose makers we will never meet. We subscribe to services sustained by workers whose names we do not know. We benefit from systems of transportation, communication, food production, and digital infrastructure without regularly considering the people whose labor makes those systems possible.

The distance may be geographical, economic, or institutional. It can also be moral. We learn to see the product without seeing the worker, the price without seeing the conditions of production, and the convenience without recognizing the relationships upon which it depends.

James insists that the people who disappear from our calculations have not disappeared from God’s concern.

There is an additional challenge here. James does not merely encourage wealthy people to feel compassion for suffering workers. He confronts arrangements in which one person’s prosperity is sustained through another person’s mistreatment. The concern is therefore not satisfied by sympathy alone. It raises questions about the structures through which wealth is accumulated, labor is valued, and responsibility is distributed.

For Christians evaluating artificial intelligence, the passage invites a different kind of attention. We may begin by asking how much a service costs or what it allows us to accomplish. James presses us to ask whose work makes the service possible and whether the people involved are treated justly.

That is not a question that can always be answered through a quick internet search. It may require listening to workers, examining credible labor research, considering company practices, and acknowledging where reliable information is unavailable.

The difficulty of obtaining an answer does not make the question unimportant.

A Creation That Groans

James gives voice to workers whose suffering is ignored. Romans 8 expands our attention toward the larger creation.

Paul describes creation as waiting eagerly for the revealing of the children of God. It has been subjected to frustration and longs for liberation from bondage to decay. In Romans 8:22, Paul portrays the whole creation groaning together as it experiences the pains of childbirth.

The image is not simply one of destruction. The pains of childbirth suggest suffering within an expectation of new life. Creation’s present condition is neither denied nor treated as its final destiny.

Paul’s purpose is larger than environmental ethics. He is describing the relationship between present suffering and the redemption God has promised in Christ. Human beings await the redemption of their bodies, and creation itself is drawn into the horizon of that promise. We should not pretend that Paul was describing contemporary data centers, climate change, or industrial resource consumption.

Nevertheless, the passage refuses to imagine salvation as something that concerns humanity while leaving the rest of creation behind. The world God has made is not disposable scenery for the drama of human redemption. Creation itself belongs within God’s redemptive purposes.

This is where Romans deepens the moral concern we encountered in James. Scripture gives us images of suffering that exceed the attention of those who benefit from existing arrangements. James describes the cries of exploited laborers. Paul describes creation groaning under the burden of its present condition.

The texts speak from different contexts and should not be collapsed into one argument. Yet they invite us to recognize that suffering may be present beyond the boundaries of our immediate experience.

James asks whether we hear the workers; Romans asks whether we attend to creation. Together, they expose a troubling possibility: our understanding of what is good may be shaped primarily by the experiences of those who receive the benefits, while the suffering of others remains outside the conversation.

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Brief Statement of Faith makes a striking connection when it confesses that human beings “exploit neighbor and nature” and threaten the planet entrusted to our care (A Brief Statement of Faith, lines 33–40). The confession does not separate our treatment of people from our treatment of creation. Both reveal something about how we understand our responsibilities before God.

The theological question is not simply whether artificial intelligence consumes too much electricity or water. Those concerns are important, but the deeper issue is whether our habits of consumption and decision-making allow us to disregard the lives and environments affected by our choices.

We cannot listen faithfully if we attend only to the people already sitting around our table.

Hope Without Innocence

Romans 8 does not end with the groaning of creation. Paul also describes human beings groaning as they await redemption. Then, in one of the passage’s most remarkable movements, he speaks of the Spirit interceding in our weakness.

Creation groans. We groan. The Spirit intercedes.

Paul does not invite the church to deny suffering or pretend that the world is already whole. Christian hope does not require us to minimize what is wrong. It begins with the recognition that the present condition of creation is not the final word and that God’s redemptive purposes are not defeated by the suffering we encounter.

This is essential for the way Christians approach environmental responsibility. Without hope, awareness of ecological suffering can become overwhelming. The scale of the problems may seem too great, our participation in damaging systems too extensive, and our individual influence too small. Despair can become a form of paralysis.

Yet there is another temptation: the desire to establish our own innocence. We may imagine that if we make the right decisions, refuse the right technologies, or distance ourselves from the right institutions, we can place ourselves entirely outside the systems that contribute to harm.

The problem is that modern life does not offer such simple separation. Even when we exercise restraint, we remain participants in complicated arrangements involving energy, labor, transportation, food, communication, and material resources. The recognition of our participation should trouble us, but it need not render faithful action impossible.

The Confession of 1967 offers a particularly helpful Presbyterian perspective. In §9.43, it describes the church as called to respond to the particular problems and crises of each historical moment, guided by the Spirit, informed by available knowledge, and humbled by recognition of its own complicity (Confession of 1967, §9.43).

That understanding of discernment is demanding. The church is not permitted to ignore evidence, but neither is it invited to imagine that it stands apart from the problems it seeks to address. Its response must emerge from a truthful acknowledgment of the world it inhabits.

Christian hope therefore offers something different from both technological optimism and moral despair. We do not have to believe that innovation will eventually solve every problem. Neither must we conclude that the complexity of our circumstances makes responsible action meaningless.

We are free to acknowledge our limitations, examine our participation in harmful arrangements, accept correction, and join others in seeking more just and sustainable practices. We may change our decisions as knowledge develops. We may discover that some practices should be limited, others improved, and still others abandoned.

Our hope is not that we will achieve perfect innocence through our choices. It is that God’s grace calls us into truthful and responsible life even amid circumstances we cannot fully control.

That is not permission to become careless. It is freedom to remain engaged without despair.

When Conviction Becomes Responsibility

In June 2026, the 227th General Assembly adopted The Algorithm and the Almighty: Navigating Artificial Intelligence through a Reformed Lens. The policy acknowledges the possibilities of human technological creativity while confronting AI’s environmental, economic, and social consequences. It calls the church to advocate for environmental safeguards and encourages church leaders who choose to use AI to do so sparingly and for limited, particular purposes (PC(USA), The Algorithm and the Almighty, 2026).

The policy offers a practical reminder that responsible stewardship begins by asking whether a particular application should be used at all. The availability of a tool does not create an obligation to adopt it, and a useful result does not automatically justify every cost associated with obtaining it.

For some pastors and congregations, faithful discernment may lead to a decision against particular uses of artificial intelligence. Such decisions deserve respect. Refusal can express serious commitments to creation care, economic justice, and the integrity of human relationships.

But there is a further question worth asking. What happens after we refuse?

The electricity consumed by data centers does not disappear because one congregation declines to use AI. Workers continue to experience changing employment conditions. Communities continue to face decisions about infrastructure, energy, water, and economic development. Members of the congregation continue to encounter AI in their workplaces, schools, and ordinary lives.

A congregation’s refusal may therefore be the beginning of faithful action rather than its completion. Its commitment to creation care might lead it to examine other forms of resource consumption, support responsible energy policies, ask questions about infrastructure development, or advocate for greater environmental transparency. Its concern for workers might lead it to support labor protections and consider how technological change affects people whose economic security is already fragile.

These responsibilities do not mean that every Christian must become an expert in technology or environmental policy. The church exercises its calling through shared gifts and responsibilities. But it does mean that principled opposition should not be confused with the completion of Christian stewardship.

The same challenge applies to those who use AI enthusiastically. Saving time, reducing administrative work, or producing useful materials may be worthwhile, but these benefits cannot become the only measures of faithful use. We must also ask whether the technology is necessary, whether alternatives exist, whether its use strengthens human responsibility, and whether we are willing to address the consequences beyond our own community.

Consider a congregation using AI translation to begin relationships with neighbors whose languages its members do not speak. The opportunity for communication may be a genuine good, and delaying that contact may have costs of its own. Yet the benefits experienced nearby do not cancel responsibilities toward distant workers, communities, or creation. The congregation can examine whether the tool is needed, when human interpretation is essential, what information should remain private, which alternatives are available, and what broader costs it can responsibly investigate. The choice need not be reduced to pretending that every benefit justifies a technology or that every cost settles the decision in advance.

Using a technology and refusing it are different decisions. Both can reflect thoughtful Christian commitments, and both require continuing attention to the world those commitments seek to serve.

Faithfulness is more than declaring where we stand. It is allowing our convictions to shape what we do.

Learning to Hear What We Have Overlooked

Return to the Session with which we began. The elders may still disagree about using AI, but perhaps they can recognize that the original question was incomplete. What would the technology make possible, what material resources would it require, and could the same benefit come through a simpler practice? Just as importantly, whose experience is missing from the discussion?

They might investigate the concerns of workers or communities affected by data-center construction, consider a more transparent provider, limit unnecessary use, support responsible public safeguards, or decide against particular applications. No single congregation can resolve the entire problem. But its discernment can become more faithful when it changes whom the church recognizes as neighbors and what responsibilities it is prepared to accept.

James confronts us with wages that cry out against exploitation. Romans invites us to hear creation groaning. Neither text permits us to dismiss suffering simply because it takes place beyond our immediate experience.

At Pentecost, the Spirit enables people from many places to hear God’s mighty works in their own languages. That gift of hearing invites a further responsibility: we must not become a church attentive only to the voices already close to us. The cries of workers and the groaning of creation are not the same as human speech at Pentecost, but both passages ask whether God’s people will attend to what they might otherwise overlook.

The work of faithful stewardship begins when we learn to count those who are absent from our calculations. We will not hear every cry or resolve every injustice, but we can investigate, listen, and let what we learn reshape our practices. Information becomes formation when it changes how we live with our neighbors and within creation.

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Questions for Reflection and Conversation

1. What remains invisible? Think of a technology your congregation uses regularly. Whose work, resources, and communities sustain it? How much do you actually know about them?

1. The wages that cry out: James 5 describes exploited workers whose suffering reaches God. What does this reveal about the moral responsibilities of people who benefit from economic arrangements they may not fully understand?

1. The groaning of creation: Romans 8 places creation within the horizon of God’s promised redemption. How does this challenge the assumption that the natural world exists principally to serve human purposes?

1. Hope and responsibility: What is the difference between believing that God will redeem creation and assuming that environmental problems will eventually solve themselves?

1. The limits of personal decisions: When might refusing a technology be a faithful response? What additional responsibilities might flow from that refusal? What parallel responsibilities belong to those who continue using it?

1. What would change? If your congregation took the well-being of distant workers, communities, and ecosystems as seriously as the needs of people within the church, what might it do differently?

A Practice to Try: Listen Beyond the Congregation

Choose one technology or service your congregation already uses. It might be artificial intelligence, online giving, digital communication, livestreaming, heating, transportation, or another familiar part of congregational life.

Before your next Session or committee meeting, identify one consequence of that technology that is not immediately visible to the congregation. Do a little investigation. Read a credible report, examine the practices of a provider, consult a community affected by the infrastructure, or listen to workers describing their experiences. Distinguish firsthand testimony from company claims, projections, and assumptions.

Bring one finding back to the group and begin with three questions:

What did we learn that we did not previously know?

Whose experience does this information help us recognize?

What responsibility might follow from what we now understand?

Allow the conversation to become specific. The faithful response may involve changing a purchasing decision, reducing unnecessary use, supporting a better alternative, advocating for responsible practices, or continuing to investigate an unresolved concern.

The goal is not to demonstrate that the congregation can solve every problem associated with a technology. It is to practice a different kind of attention, one that refuses to define the common good solely through the experiences of people who receive immediate benefits.

Conclude by naming one action and one question the congregation will revisit. At a later meeting, return to both and ask what has changed in your understanding or practice.

Christian formation is not simply learning to recognize injustice. It is learning to respond faithfully to what we have come to see.

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Sources and Further Reading

Scripture: James 5; Romans 8; Genesis 2, in the Church Commons Bible Reader, with The Shared Word Translation and Fluent available.

Presbyterian theology: The Confession of 1967, §§9.17, 9.43, and 9.46; A Brief Statement of Faith (1991), especially lines 33–40; and The Algorithm and the Almighty: Navigating Artificial Intelligence through a Reformed Lens, adopted by the 227th General Assembly (2026).

Research: International Energy Agency, Key Questions on Energy and AI (2026); International Labour Organization, Generative AI and Jobs: A 2025 Update (2025).