Goodbye, job. And what does technology have to do with Christianity anyway?

I'm moving to Seattle next month and will be quitting this really cool job in which I get to read and write about technology news all day. One of the things I've worked on over the couple years is the newsletter for the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA). The newsletter is about software that helps design computer chips. Sometimes it's crazy technical, but still fascinating.

The semiconductor industry is really exciting. Chip makers like Intel have been advancing up an exponential technology curve that allows their products to become twice as powerful at half the cost approximately every two years. This trend is dubbed "Moore's Law" for Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who predicted such advances in 1965.

Because of technological progress in semiconductors, we have built supercomputers that compiled the human genome, simulated previously unthinkable physics experiments, created multiple industries worth billions of dollars, and carry computers in our pockets. I believe this rapid technological progress (the fastest in human history) has tremendous meaning for Christians.

For one thing, it changes the way our brains are wired. Because of my job and broadband connection at home, I'm interfacing with some sort of computer for at least one-third of my waking hours. There's a saying: neurons that fire together, wire together. This means our lifestyle changes our physiology. I've already noticed my short-term memory is really terrible because I press a button and the computer is supposed to remember for me. This has implications for how we do church services, how we study the Bible, and how we fellowship.

Then there are the philosophical, futuristic questions: what happens when humans can create machines that are as intelligent as ourselves, or vastly more so? Movies like A.I. and I, Robot try to deal with these deep issues.

Also, previously strange-sounding biblical prophesies suddenly seem eerily lucid. Revelations 13:16-17 foretells a society based on numeric identifiers (digital technology), while Daniel 12:4 says, "Many will go here and there to increase knowledge" in the end times, which certainly describes exploding store of information shared globally on the Internet today.

Just some things to think about. Please share your thoughts in the comments section!