This past week, a newsletter from Sandeep Swadia (the MIT Monk, whose videos I have mentioned before on my other blog site bitsbytesandbricks.blogspot.com) stopped me in my tracks. It opened with a plane crash. I read it, closed it, and then kept thinking about it for days, the way you keep turning over a stone in your pocket. By the time I sat down with my journal, two other flights had joined it in my mind, along with a tennis player and two little boys chasing plastic cups. This reflection is my attempt to put them all on one page and listen to what the Lord might be saying through them.
Three Flights
June 1982, over Indonesia. British Airways Flight 9 is cruising through the night from Kuala Lumpur to Perth. Strange lights begin to dance across the windscreen. A faint smell of smoke drifts into the cabin. Then, one by one, all four engines go silent. Unbeknownst to them, the crew has flown straight into a cloud of volcanic ash from Mount Galunggung, invisible in the dark and invisible to radar. A Boeing 747 with 263 souls on board has become a very large glider.
Captain Eric Moody picks up the microphone and, in the most understated British fashion imaginable, tells his passengers: "We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped." He assures them the crew is doing everything they can to restart them. Then he goes back to work. Over and over, the crew runs the restart procedure as the plane sinks thousands of feet toward the mountains below. Finally, one engine coughs back to life. Then another. They land in Jakarta with a windscreen so scoured by ash that Moody can barely see the runway. Every single person walks off that plane.
January 2009, New York City. Barely two minutes after leaving LaGuardia, US Airways Flight 1549 flies into a flock of Canada geese. Both engines fail. Low altitude, no power, and one of the most densely populated cities on earth below. Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger has seconds to decide. He judges that he cannot make it back to any runway, turns toward the Hudson River, and about three and a half minutes after the bird strike, sets the plane down on the water. All 155 people survive.
June 2009, over the Atlantic. Air France Flight 447 is cruising at 35,000 feet. A little ice forms on the small tubes that measure airspeed; the readings go haywire, and the autopilot does exactly what it was designed to do. It switches off and hands the airplane back to the pilots. The plane is still flying perfectly well. All the crew has to do is hold it steady. Instead, they pull the nose up and keep it there. The plane stalls and falls for more than four minutes while three trained pilots try to understand what is happening. All 228 people on board are lost.
My friends, sit with that for a moment. Flight 447 had the best airplane of the three. Two crews saved crippled aircraft, and one crew lost a working one.
Investigators named several causes: frozen sensors, confusing alarms, and gaps in training. I don't want to lay all the blame at the feet of three men who can no longer speak for themselves. But the report's hard truth was this: years of letting the autopilot fly at cruising altitude left the crew without the hands-on practice they needed when it mattered most.
The difference between those three flights was not the machine. It was what the humans had practiced long before the crisis came.
Agency: The Skill Behind All Three
Sandeep uses the Air France story to make a point I have not been able to shake. In the age of AI, the skill that matters most is agency: your capacity to think, decide, and act for yourself. Be the pilot of your own choices, not a passenger along for the ride.
Moody and Sullenberger had agency. When every system failed, their judgment remained, trained over thousands of quiet, unglamorous hours. And according to Sandeep, that very capacity is being stolen from most of us by three thieves.
The First Thief: The Screen
Most of us already know this one. Sandeep cites Nielsen data estimating that Americans spend around 70 hours a week consuming media across their devices. That's about 10 hours a day, which is more than a full-time job. And what does this job pay? Quick, cheap hits of dopamine, served up by some of the most sophisticated algorithms ever built, all designed to do one thing: capture our attention and keep it.
The screen steals our attention.
The Second Thief: The Machine That Thinks for Us
The second thief is younger, smarter, and much harder to spot. AI doesn't just take our attention. It can quietly take our thinking.
Microsoft Research surveyed more than 300 knowledge workers about how they use generative AI. The more confident people were in the AI, the less critical thinking they reported putting into their own work. They checked less. They questioned less. For many, a tool that could have sharpened their minds was standing in for them.
Sandeep has a name for what this produces: "deepfake mastery." The output looks polished, confident, and complete, and it is so tempting to copy and paste. But it isn't mastery, because it isn't ours.
Earlier this year, I wrote about John Eldredge's warning in Walking with Jesus that our age has turned us into disciples of the Internet, and now of AI, training our souls for instant answers. I lead technology for a living. I use AI every day, and I genuinely believe in what it can do. But I also feel the pull. It is so easy to let the tool draft the thought before I have done the thinking. And when everyone has the same AI and the same polished output, what separates a leader from an autocomplete? Judgment. Discernment. The ability to sit with a hard problem, notice the detail that doesn't fit, and make a call.
The Air France crew did not lose their skill in one dramatic moment. They lost it one uneventful flight at a time. That is the real danger for us too. Not that AI will fail us spectacularly, but that we will slowly forget how to fly.
The Third Thief: Comfort, and Its Twin, Pride
The third thief doesn't live in our devices. It lives in our hearts, and leaders are especially vulnerable.
It first comes as comfort, which steals the will to do the hard thing at all. It's the gentle voice that says, grab the nearest cup. You're tired, you've earned it, no one will know. Amos had a word for a people at ease: "Woe to you who are complacent in Zion" (Amos 6:1, NIV).
Then comes pride: the belief that we already know. The crew of Air France 447 were trained professionals, not novices. That's what makes their story so sobering: expertise, left unpracticed, can quietly fade while our confidence stays exactly where it was. "Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall" (Proverbs 16:18, NIV).
Comfort says we don't need to do the hard work. Pride says we've already done it. Together, they turn skilled people into passengers without our ever noticing.
The Hard Way Is Often the Fast Way
I have been a fan and admirer of Rafael Nadal for well over a decade. I followed Rafa's career match by match, and as I watched his Netflix documentary, two things stood out.
The first was his willingness to go through the hard things. He pushed his body to its absolute limit, again and again. He navigated pain that would have ended most careers, and he played through it. The second moved me even more. After more than two decades at the top and 22 Grand Slam titles, he still went back to the practice court and drilled the basics. The greatest clay-court player in history, hitting the same fundamental shots over and over like a teenager still trying to earn his place.
That kind of dedication humbles me. If I am honest, and I am trying to be, I often want the shortcut. I want the result without the pain of the learning. And once I have learned something, I am tempted to believe I am past the basics. Rafa never believed that. Maybe that is why he stayed great for so long.
Paul knew this about athletes too: "Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training" (1 Corinthians 9:25, NIV).
Then, the other day, I saw the same lesson in a much smaller package. It was a simple video of two kids playing a common game. A line of plastic cups stretches out along a path, and each boy has to carry the cups back to a basket, one at a time.
The first boy starts with the cups closest to the basket. Quick trips, quick wins. For a while, he looks like he is running away with the game. The second boy does the opposite. He runs all the way to the far end of the path to grab the farthest cup first. It looks slow, even a little foolish. You watch him run, and he seems to be falling behind.
Then the game turns. The first boy has used up all his easy cups, and now every trip is the long run to the far end, as his legs get tired. The second boy did his hard runs while he was fresh, and now his cups are
right beside the basket. They disappear one after another. The boy who took the hard way first finishes first.
I watched it twice. That little game has a deeper lesson, and it's about how we think. The hard part never disappears when we put it off. It simply waits for us, usually at the end, when we have the least strength left to face it. The easy early progress was never really progress at all. It was borrowed time.
That is exactly the temptation AI sets before us. Letting the tool do my thinking feels like grabbing the nearest cup: fast, easy, visible progress. But the long runs are still out there. The skill I didn't build, the judgment I didn't practice, the problem I never actually wrestled with- all of it is waiting at the far end of the path. And like the crew of Flight 447, we tend to discover that at the worst possible moment.
Scripture is honest about the cost: "No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it" (Hebrews 12:11, NIV).
Moody, Sully, and Rafa all chose the long run early. That is why, when it counted, they were ready.
Trained by Constant Use
This is why the verse from Hebrews at the top of this reflection has been convicting me. Discernment, the writer says, belongs to those who have trained themselves "by constant use." It is not something we download. It is a muscle, built by repetition, in the ordinary days long before the crisis.
And Paul gives the other half of the charge: "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Romans 12:2, NIV). The pattern of our world right now is to hand our attention to the screen and our thinking to the machine. Renewal means taking both back, deliberately, and offering them to God.
So here is what I am trying to practice. I call them my manual flying hours.
Think first, then prompt. Before I ask AI for help with anything important, I write down my own answer or outline first, even if it is rough and a little embarrassing. Then I let the tool challenge and sharpen my thinking instead of replacing it.
Question the polish. When AI hands me something that sounds wonderful, I ask what it assumed, what it left out, and whether I actually agree with it. If I can't explain it in my own words, it isn't mine yet.
Do some things the hard way on purpose. Working a tough problem through on paper. Writing the first draft myself, like this one, which began in ink in my journal. Sitting in a difficult conversation without a script. These are my practice court hours.
Guard the attention that agency depends on. I can't exercise judgment about something I never truly paid attention to. Putting the phone away isn't only about focus. It is about keeping my mind free enough to think, and quiet enough to hear the Lord.
The Takeaway
The autopilot is not the enemy. On most days it flies beautifully, and AI is a remarkable gift I am grateful to have. But the autopilot always hands the plane back eventually, and usually at the worst possible moment. When that moment comes, whether it's a crisis at work, a hard decision at home, or a question with no ready-made answer, the only thing that will matter is whether we kept practicing.
Moody kept his head. Sully trusted his training. Rafa kept going back to the basics. None of them were passengers.
A Closing Prayer
Lord, You have given us minds to think and hands to work,
and hearts that were made to discern Your voice.
Forgive us for the shortcuts we have taken,
for the times we grabbed the nearest cup
and called it progress.
Guard our attention from the thief that scrolls,
and our thinking from the thief that thinks for us.
Train us by constant use, in the quiet and ordinary days,
so that when the autopilot clicks off
and the engines go silent,
we will not panic, but trust You, and fly.
Renew our minds, and keep our hands on the controls,
and Yours over ours.
Amen.
Shalom,
Dr. Sam Kurien
