For years, we’ve lived with algorithmic AI tools without much noticing them. They’re just bits of technology scattered through daily life. Their ordinary, unremarkable presence seldom invites ethical reflection. I feel little moral weight when I reheat leftovers in the microwave or rely on junk-email filters to clear my inbox. The idea that I should feel a pressing ethical burden about using GPS to reach a dinner reservation feels alarmist, even silly.
But lately, something has shifted. “AI” has become like an incantation, a promise or threat made by folks you’ve only just met and aren’t yet sure whether to trust. The growing use and development of generative AI tools feeds a feeling that something truly new is happening, something like dawn. But if new light lets us see more, it also forces us to face more.
Generative tools have expanded what actions are possible and sharpened our awareness that choices are required of us. Increasingly, we face pressure to use such tools simply because they’re there. Let’s explore how we can think ethically about using AI tools in the realm of work, particularly amid its demands and drudgery.
For help, we’ll look to Christian ethicist Oliver O’Donovan. Using his schema from Entering into Rest, we’ll appraise AI tools based on how they might serve us in our work, and also how they might deform us.
What Is Work?
Have you ever tried to define “work”? It’s harder than it sounds. Gardening, for instance, is leisure for some and labor for others. We often use “work” to mean whatever earns a paycheck. Yet anyone who has kept a home running or a child fed knows how much work is involved. Work saturates our lives, but naming what it really is requires more care than we usually give it.
O’Donovan approaches the question from three angles: material, social, and personal. These aren’t separate compartments but dimensions of one integrated reality. The material dimension reminds us that every task involves our bodies. To work is to touch the world and be touched by it: to paint a wall, write a chapter, change a diaper. The material world invites our intelligence and exertion, our patience, even our love. Through this physical engagement, we discover that the world was made not only to sustain us but also to draw something out of us. We shape it, and it shapes us.
The social dimension shows us how work always involves interpersonal dependence. It’s the sphere where others rely on our exertions. That explains why one person’s play can be another’s labor. Patrick Mahomes and I may both throw a football, but no one depends on my passes. Here lies much of work’s dignity: It contributes to others’ flourishing.
“One of the measures by which good work can be judged,” O’Donovan writes, “is its capacity to give work, or resources for work.” My good, creative action was enabled by others’ and also enables yours. Your work, too, enables more people, who go on to support even more people, forming a chain of generosity that sustains human life.
Finally, O’Donovan speaks of the personal dimension. Work can be the arena where we discover who we are and what God has made us for. In our labor, we may hear vocation’s call, an invitation to do good freely and creatively.
A danger here is that we may imagine that only certain kinds of work possess meaning, and we thus despise the ordinary tasks done simply to care for ourselves and others. That would be a mistake. In the sight of God, the how of work is as important as the what. Manner, attention, patience, and faithfulness confer dignity even on work we didn’t choose. These aspects of all work shape and reveal our character.
In the sight of God, the how of work is as important as the what.
O’Donovan’s broad vision of work sets the table for our own vision of how AI tools fit into work. After all, how can we judge tools if we don’t yet understand the task? So far, we’ve only touched on the positive elements of work, how O’Donovan depicts work as a site of freedom, joy, and meaning––a harmony of body, soul, and spirit. Work can be free, joyful, meaningful, and harmonious; those promises linger.
Yet few of us experience it that way for long, and some of us rarely feel in touch with those goods in our work. Thorns and thistles still assert themselves (Gen. 3:18), though for many of us they now take the form of emails, spreadsheets, and endless meetings. To discern how technology interfaces with work, we must also reckon with its distortions.
Begin again with the material. Work can wound. Legs, backs, and necks ache; the curved “shrimp pose” of desk work cannot be God’s ideal. Some labor is truly perilous, where one misstep may cost limb or life. Alienation and distortion follow when our labor either damages creation or seems to touch nothing real, when it feels weightless, like a pile of nothingness. As our connection to intelligent, loving interaction with the world fades, we fade too.
Work’s distortions extend to its social aspects. O’Donovan names three distortions in this dimension. First, we may lose contact with those who benefit from our work, so we don’t experience how our efforts enrich others. Second, we may be isolated from those meant to work beside us. A rich community can form when people work together, exerting themselves in the same direction. To lose touch with this togetherness can be true poverty. Third, we may be cut off from those who could teach and form us. We can lag in skill, maturity, competence, and humility as a result. Each of these ruptures corrodes the cooperative good that gives work its nobility.
Finally, the personal dimension falters. O’Donovan warns, “Work may fail to provide us with a meaningful justification for the efforts it exacts.” The place meant for meaning becomes a void; the act meant to reveal freedom leaves us exhausted but with nothing to show for the fatigue.
Many expressions of work seem utterly disconnected from personality, from drawing something out of the person doing the work—disconnected from forming and shaping the person’s self. When this happens, work no longer feels like participation in God’s creative action but estrangement from it. Then, instead of joy, we experience the soul’s spent sigh beneath fluorescent light.
Hard Work: Demand Versus Drudgery
Work’s multiple textures mean there’s no single angle from which to evaluate AI tools. But if we take up O’Donovan’s multifaceted vision—work as creative and free action in its material, social, and personal dimensions, yet also fractured by sin—we begin to glimpse both the promises and the threats of AI tools.
The mention of promises is bound to agitate those who instinctively reject these new technologies. The mention of threats will agitate those who intuitively sense the wild opportunities these tools suggest. I should out myself as natively in the former group. Yet I want to both acknowledge my starting bias and use O’Donovan’s framework to come to a more mature position; I hope you will as well.
To do this, we’ll focus on a site of discernment that cuts across all three of O’Donovan’s dimensions of work, a site where AI tools can both bless and interfere: What in work is proper demand, and what in work is drudgery?
If we take up O’Donovan’s multifaceted vision, we begin to glimpse both the promises and the threats of AI tools.
“Demand” and “drudgery” capture the reality that work is often hard. But usefully, these labels also reflect different types of “difficult” that work can be. I use “demand” to describe beneficial difficulty. A classic example is weight training. Muscles can’t grow and do what they’re designed to do unless they face resistance. That resistance is surely difficult, but it reaps great benefits. By “drudgery,” on the other hand, I’m referring to parts of work that are difficult but to no real benefit, or perhaps to marginal benefit. Under this heading we might put the meme of the meeting that could’ve been an email.
A different way to capture this distinction goes back to the garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were given dominion over the world and told to subdue it, to be fruitful and multiply. This good, creative work engages all humanity across all of O’Donovan’s three dimensions—material, social, and personal. It also surely involves beneficial demand that builds from and into individuals’ and communities’ strengths, skills, and excellence.
But Adam and Eve sinned, so we all live with the thorns and thistles; pain in childbearing; and the social, personal, and material toil and trouble of work. The fall explains why we experience demand and drudgery intertwined. Work is hard because it’s demanding; this was always God’s design. But work is also hard in other in ways because of the drudgery that entered with sin and rebellion. It can be difficult to discern one from the other. Yet we need such discernment to use any tech, including AI tools, responsibly.
Technology has long promised it can remove what’s difficult, freeing people up for leisure or other responsibilities. This promise radiates around AI tools, just as it has orbited other new tech in the past. My concern is that if we don’t take stock of the difference between demand and drudgery, we may accidentally use AI tools to remove difficulty that’s beneficial. Additionally, if we don’t have a schema like O’Donovan’s for considering multiple angles of work, we may not recognize that AI tools are appropriate in one arena but not in another.
However, with these concepts, we can find wisdom for this new AI age.
Appraising AI Tools in Work
It would be delightful if I could now provide you with a clean, simple flowchart for precisely when to use AI tools and when to forgo them. But you and I both know that’s not possible. For one, AI tools are changing quickly. But perhaps more importantly, each of us pursues different kinds of work. How could I tell a car mechanic or a lawyer precisely which tools to use and when?
Instead of a rigid list, we can work with concepts and categories that will allow, I hope, for many ways of thinking about AI tools and work. For now, let’s consider the demand versus drudgery dynamic in each of O’Donovan’s three dimensions of work.
Take the material aspect. Since we’re beings created from and for this earth, materiality makes proper demands on us. When we meet those demands, we’re formed. For example, writers notice the difference between brainstorming with pen and paper and brainstorming digitally. Engaging more of our senses opens us up more. We’re physical by nature, so experiencing and expressing our physicality intentionally is good for us too.
At the same time, I’m glad I didn’t have to write this essay out longhand and mail it to my editor. I may not have used an AI tool, but I’m using tech that cuts out much of the physical drudgery of my work and allows me to focus on other aspects. Where does your work’s materiality make good demands on you that would be a loss to circumvent with technology? On the other side, what physical drudgery might an AI tool help remove?
Work’s social dimension is the second place where we can consider difficulty through the demand-drudgery scheme. As Christians, we should be especially alert to valid demands others make on us. Working with people is often hard, especially because we’re beset by sin. We let others down (and they let us down) through work that’s late, sloppy, or incorrect. I worry we’ll use AI tools to cut out people in our work. Like in C. S. Lewis’s vision of hell in The Great Divorce, we drift toward utter isolation. Work is a major avenue for the “one anothers” of Scripture; we should keep a sober eye on when we might use tech to dodge them.
Work is a major avenue for the ‘one anothers’ of Scripture; we should keep a sober eye on when we might use tech to dodge them.
Nonetheless, we can pursue the valid use of AI tools to reduce drudgery in work’s social aspects. In my work, the need to calendar meetings is drudgery. Back-and-forth emails to find free appointment times drains my and my colleagues’ time and energy. Yes, this form of communication can be an opportunity to show one another love and grace; it has its own strange dignity in that way. But I’m not sure we’d lose much if a tool could find a time for a group of five to meet; our collegiality could be expressed elsewhere.
In your work, look for the social aspects. How can you protect the difficult demands that preserve or create social bonds, and where can you cut out drudgery?
Finally, there’s the personal dimension of work, its ability to develop us and help us express who God has made us to be. O’Donovan writes, “What we have to find is what we have been given to do, answering not only the question of what work will be given us, but also the question of how that work is to be our own work, overcoming the alienations of work and discovering our calling in it.”
That is, the difficulties of our work include demands proper to it. They force us to ask, “How will we ourselves approach the task?” Answering that how inescapably forms our character. Will we give in to laziness, deception, or complaining? These threats always circle us, and we’d be fools not to realize AI tools can be used by our flesh to shortcut this aspect of our work. Just as with the social element, tech’s formative power in the personal aspect must be seriously considered.
Still, we may find certain tech and AI tools can aid us in our work’s personal aspect, too, when they’re approached wisely. I’ve read about AI tools built to sharpen certain skills like coding or language acquisition. In this way, a tool might strengthen us to do the work we need to do well. Perhaps one question to consider is whether a tool does work for me, and also which part of my work. Handing tasks to a bot may cause me to miss out on important development, stunting my growth. It may even be a way of refusing how God wants me to grow.
Way of Wisdom
My favorite Scripture passage related to technology and work is Job 28. In poetic style, we see a vision of the sheer strength and intelligence of humanity’s ability to work the earth. Down, deep down we go into the earth’s dark places. We have abilities and purposes no other creature does. We can bring the hidden thing out into light: gold, silver, ore, sapphire. We use our tools and find treasures.
Yet there are certain valuable things our tech can never find. Job asks,
But where shall wisdom be found?
And where is the place of understanding?
Man does not know its worth,
and it is not found in the land of the living. (vv. 12–13)
So begins the poem’s second half. For all our technical prowess, for all the ways we’re endowed by God to do great things, we are in other ways truly weak and lost. Work is a great and good gift. It was part of the world before sin entered, and it’s dignified by God’s own working. But let’s be watchful and admit our lack of wisdom.
AI tools can potentially take us many places. But we need to ask and answer which places we should rightly go. God is faithful to guide us as individuals and communities, so we must be faithful to seek him.
From where, then, does wisdom come? . . .
God understands the way to it,
and he knows its place. . . .
And he said to man,
“Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom,
and to turn away from evil is understanding.” (vv. 20, 23, 28)
This article is an excerpt from The AI Apocalypse: A Survival Guide for Humanity, edited by Collin Hansen and Skyler R. Flowers (TGC, September 2026). Order now from the TGC Store.
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