There’s a lot of chatter about the relative value of work these days, particularly as large language models and generative pretrained transformers start taking over more and more of what used to be the jobs of recent college grads. Given agency, the most advanced models can handle almost any formerly white collar task. They can code better than we can code, which is one of the reasons why in 2026, tech companies like Amazon and Meta have so far shed nearly a hundred and fifty thousand jobs.
But it goes further. Agentic AI can work a project through to completion, it can create and manage customer interfaces online, it can manage your appointments, and it can do all of that and more if you pay the corporation that owns it a mere $100 a month.
These systems can also write and edit, create music in any genre and theme, and create images and videos and movies.
And people say, hey, why are we doing this? Shouldn’t we have them do the things we don’t like to do and that don’t pay well? According to that way of thinking, we want robots to clean our houses and mow our lawns and scrub our toilets and do our dishes, some say. Let them work in the warehouses and let them drive us around and let them deliver our packages and pizzas, let them plant and harvest the crops from our fields.
Just leave the important work to human beings, the meaningful and truly creative work, or so goes the chatter of the chattering classes.
Simply replace physical labor with humanoid machines, ones that would step into the joyless place of countless grim factory shift-workers and itinerant farm laborers, all of whom are little more than cogs in an industrial machine.
I watched with fascination recently as the algorithms tried to pitch me that very idea.
It was a livestream from a robotics company called Figure, in which a small team of androids worked sorting packages onto a conveyor belt. Every package had to be sorted and placed label-side-down onto the conveyor, which they did without blinking or talking or doing anything but that mindless task. Because we love our anthropomorphization, each had name tags, and “Frank” ran in the background for an entire day, stopping only to go charge up while “Gary” the robot took over. Those humanoid robots worked nonstop for one hundred and ninety one hours, handing nearly two hundred and forty thousand packages. Not a single complaint, not a bit of gossiping about their programmers, and not a single worry about health care if they tweaked a muscle in their back.
Why not automate all such tasks, the moving and sorting of objects from one place to another?
Surely there’s no particular gift or blessing that such a blindly simple action can express, no reason God would look on that kind of action and say that it was very good. I’m sure there are countless underpaid factory workers around the world who would concur that, given the option, they might prefer to spend their time doing something else.
On the other hand, I’m not sure that is always true. I mean, can we think of a time when we move things from place to place, that we sort and measure and prepare with hands and arms and backs, that might have positive moral weight?
I can.
I think of the souls from my little church filling community garden beds with dirt, and filling backpacks with food for kids. I think of the simple labor of stocking shelves with food for our Little Free Pantry. I think of the folks who assembled the playground that now memorializes a child of the church. I think of the care that keeps our facility hospitable to those we are hosting, like painting walls or repairing a broken lock? All of those actions, simple and physical and real, are part of God’s good work.
Any action, done with gracious purpose, is part of God’s work. That our culture values meetings and accounting and finance more than harvesting and repairing, caring and making things? It's just a mark of our fallen and sinful nature.
As we act and move and do things in the world, there is work that…for the well-being of our souls…we shouldn’t look down on, or set aside for our ease or convenience.
I think of the souls from my little church filling community garden beds with dirt, and filling backpacks with food for kids. I think of the simple labor of stocking shelves with food for our Little Free Pantry. I think of the folks who assembled the playground that now memorializes a child of the church. I think of the care that keeps our facility hospitable to those we are hosting, like painting walls or repairing a broken lock? All of those actions, simple and physical and real, are part of God’s good work.
Any action, done with gracious purpose, is part of God’s work. That our culture values meetings and accounting and finance more than harvesting and repairing, caring and making things? It's just a mark of our fallen and sinful nature.
As we act and move and do things in the world, there is work that…for the well-being of our souls…we shouldn’t look down on, or set aside for our ease or convenience.
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