As the Fourth Industrial Revolution ushers into a new era of artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality, how should we respond to the societal and ethical dilemmas associated with this new age of transformative scientific power? This research highlights the need for an ethical and globally shared view on how technology affects the economic, social, cultural and spiritual aspects of daily life. An international team have compiled this book, outlining consequences of the Fourth Industrial Revolution across a broad range of issues covering business and work life, for leadership, for media and communication, for churches and for personal and family life.

In general, I try to avoid posting links to resources hosted on Google or Facebook platforms. However, I came across an exceptional, comprehensive, crowdsourced document gathering a huge range of resources for churches trying to ‘stay connected’. It is being crowd-sourced in a Google Document and is more useful to you as a live link to that document - which is still being updated

Many churches in Australasia, Europe and the US are being forced to move their services online. This is just one aspect of ‘digital church’. We want to gather some useful resources and insights, and we intend to publish some reflections on the lessons we learn. We thought this article from Christianity Today published last week, provides helpful starting point.

On February 17 2020, BBC Panorama Program explored the rise of Amazon and their strategy for growth, driven in part by ‘obsessive data gathering’. This is a powerful example of Surveillance Capitalism, and Shoshana Zuboff, Roger McNamee and Meredith Whittaker all appear on this informative and disturbing documentary.

We are citizens in God’s kingdom and members of God’s household, and we are members of earthly families and households, part of neighborhoods, communities, and nations. The way of faithfulness for us is not fundamentally different than it is for any person: seeking to love God and our neighbor with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, by repenting and believing the good news.

We very much like the work of START in the USA. START is a grassroots, community organisation which was started in Kansas City, by Krista Boan and Tracy Foster. They have been running workshops for over a year now, and have reached over 3000 people with their practical message of hope for the parents (and grandparents) of digital natives.

We live in times that are reshaping the nature of work, communication, even humanity.

Many call this the early stages of the fourth Industrial Revolution – this time powered not by steam power but by digital innovation. How can we ensure that our contributions to this exciting journey are positive and reflect God’s glory?

Interactions with apparently human-like and ‘emotionally intelligent’ AIs are likely to become commonplace within the next ten years, ranging from entirely disembodied agents like chatbots through to physical humanoid robots. This will lead to new and troubling ethical, personal and legal dilemmas.