Paul Bishop

In the early 1980s, I was working my first cases as a sexual assault investigator. It would be several years before I supervised my own unit and made the decisions about booking suspects. But as a young detective, those decisions belonged to somebody else. My partner and I had been working one case especially hard. We developed a suspect who voluntarily came to the station to be interviewed. We knew he was unlikely to confess, but we had another plan.

I’m always polite to AI because, when the Terminators arrive, I want them to remember I said please and thank you. I’m joking—or at least I hope I am—but the line points toward something peculiar about working with artificial intelligence. I say please when I ask for something. I say thank you when I receive it, and I often begin a session with, Good morning, Arch. None of those social niceties means anything to AI, yet abandoning them would make the conversation feel unnatural to me.

As a police officer in an interrogation room, I asked questions designed to get an individual to tell me the truth. But Christ is celestially different. He asks questions because He wants us to tell ourselves the truth—and recognize it as such. Christ asked questions throughout His ministry. He asked people what they wanted, why they were afraid, and if they loved Him. He did not need the answers for Himself. He knew the people standing before Him more completely than they knew themselves.