Hey {{first_name|Conscious Church Fam}} 👋
Morning! This week AI properly stepped into the physical world. A surgeon in London used it live, mid-operation, to help save someone's eyesight. Anthropic taught Claude to run lab equipment. And a 71-year-old retired cattle farmer built a $13.5 million project management app almost by accident.
Here's what we're covering:
Claude learns to run real lab equipment
AI-assisted brain surgery saves a man's sight
A 71-year-old outbuilds most software teams
Let's dive in 👇
✍️ Josh's Musings
I’ve just got back from Manchester this evening.
I took Judah to his first Man Utd fixture (and what a game to have as a first. A 5-2 victory).
Fun fact, my first ever United game with my dad was actually the reverse of this fixture at Portman Road many years ago.
There were a lot of fruity words thrown about (as we were in between the Home & Away fans). Fortunately Judah’s only observation was, “are people allowed to boo”.
But I had me thinking about Voco again. More specifically me when I visit Mexico and sit in Church.
There is a lot I don’t understand, and it goes over my head, but I might pick up on the general theme.
The theme is good.
But when the debrief over Sunday lunch happens, that’s when I wish I knew the full context and had a greater understanding.
That’s the gift Voco gives. Inclusion in the service. Full contextual understanding and real-time live translation.
Until you experience Church in another language (without a translator) we just take ‘understanding’ for granted.
I’m not going to waffle on about it every week. But I do want to make sure those that are wanting to trial it out can do so and be helped to get it set up and understand how to operate it.
Have a great bank holiday weekend for those of you in the UK
Stay curious, stay wild
Josh
Image: Anthropic | The Conscious Church
Anthropic just gave Claude hands, sort of. They've built something called the Model Hardware Standard, a way for AI agents to plug straight into lab equipment like microscopes, robotic arms and liquid handlers, without a specialist spending weeks hand-wiring it all together.
The Details:
Setup that used to take weeks now takes hours, sometimes minutes
In one lab, Claude worked out how to align a laser by trial and error, then wrote its own script to automate the job
At a quantum computing lab, an AI agent pushed a laser recovery process from 58% success up to 99.3%
Genentech, UCL, Carnegie Mellon, Hugging Face and Raspberry Pi are already building on it
Conscious Take:
The moment AI can run a microscope or fix its own mistakes on a laser rig, it becomes more than just intelligence on an app and more like a colleague.
Image: UCLH | The Conscious Church
Surgeons in London just carried out the world's first live AI-assisted brain surgery, and it saved a man's eyesight. Rhys Hibbert, 48, had a tumour on his pituitary gland that was slowly stealing his vision. During the operation, an AI system watched the surgical camera feed in real time and flagged the nerves and blood vessels the surgeon needed to avoid.
The Details:
His tumour was found after he collapsed on a walk and had a seizure in December 2024
The AI was trained on hundreds of past pituitary surgery videos and ran on Nvidia hardware built for real-time medical use
The surgeon stayed fully in control throughout, the AI just flagged risk areas as it went
His vision was back within days, and he was walking without sticks or glasses within a week
Conscious Take:
I love that the surgeon never handed over control. The AI was just an extra set of eyes that had ‘seen’ more operations than any human ever could, and that's the version of AI in healthcare I want more of.
Image: The Rundown AI | The Conscious Church
A reader of The Rundown, 71 years old and retired from running a cattle-feeding operation, built an app to help his church manage a $13.5 million renovation. He's not a programmer. He just described what he wanted in plain English and let AI build it.
The Details:
The renovation is turning a 65,000 square foot old movie theatre into a new church building
His app reads meeting notes, emails and texts, then pulls out decisions, action items, dates and budget changes
Nothing gets added automatically, he reviews and approves everything the AI finds first
He built it in Replit with zero coding or construction background
Conscious Take:
This was a fun comment I saw on the Rundown community this week which reminded me of all of you. A 71-year-old solving a real problem for his own church because the tools finally let him.
📬 One quick ask...
If this email has been helpful, would you forward it to one person this week who might be interested? Thanks :)
"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters." : Colossians 3:23
Build with the tools. But build for the right reasons.
That's all for now
Stay conscious,
Josh
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