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Sept 17, 2026
C. R. WILEY, Pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Battle Ground, WA (PCA) & the author of many books, who will address:
“SURVIVING the A. I. APOCALYPSE”
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Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.
It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
And now, here's your host, Chris Arnson.
Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on the 17th day of September 2026.
And if you watch TV, especially news-related programs, and if you're on the internet every day, well, you no doubt have been consumed with the concept and the topic of artificial intelligence known as AI.
Some have nothing but eager enthusiasm and optimism about this development in technology. Others are in a fetal position on the floor, terrified about the upcoming apocalypse that artificial intelligence will bring upon society.
Well, today we're going to have a guest discuss AI, and this is a returning guest to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, C .R. Wiley, pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Battleground Washington, which is a congregation in the Presbyterian Church in America, also known as the PCA, and the author of many books.
And today we are going to be discussing the theme of his most recent book, St. Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse. And that is actually the subtitle. The title of the book is Man-Made. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, C .R. Wiley.
Well, thanks, Chris. It's great to be with you again. I've enjoyed my times with you in the past.
Yeah, I've enjoyed every occasion you've been on the show. Well, first of all, tell us about First Presbyterian Church of Battleground Washington.
Well, you noted we're in Battleground, and that's just a little north of Portland. The Portland Airport, Portland, Oregon Airport is about half hour from my house. So we're here in the Pacific Northwest, and the church is growing, and really a marvelous bunch of folks.
I'm very honored and happy to be here. And anyway, like you said, if folks are in the area, we'd love to have you visit.
And the website, for those of you interested in finding out more about First Presbyterian Church of Battleground Washington, is firstpresbg .org. Firstpresbg .org, and we'll repeat that later on in the program.
Well, as a former Roman Catholic, I must say that I jolted in my seat when I saw the title or the subtitle of your book, St. Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse. It conjured up memories of being in Roman Catholic parochial school as the nuns would in their typical idolatrous and superstitious fashion, whenever an object of theirs was lost, whether it be the keys to their closet or their blackboard eraser or whatever it was they were looking for, they would have the classroom chant over and over again, Dear St. Anthony, please come around, something is lost and can't be found.
And we would repeat that until the object was found. And so, obviously, my first question has to be with you, explain that title, or as Desi Arnaz used to say, you got some explaining to do.
Well, the first thing to note is that St. Anthony lived a long time ago before those nuns developed that chant. He was a person that Athanasius of Alexandria and Augustine both had a great deal of respect for.
And Presbyterians, Reformed people have a great deal of respect for Athanasius and Augustine. So, that's one thing in his favor. But the thing that brought him to mind didn't have to do with that necessarily.
It had to do more with transhumanism and what's going on in Silicon Valley, believe it or not. So, a few years back, I saw a documentary entitled Transcendent Man, which was a documentary about Ray Kurzweil.
I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he is a transhumanist and believes that artificial intelligence is going to help him beat death and do other remarkable things. And so, the idea that is behind transhumanism is that technological means we can have an ever-increasing set of improvements that we can more or less engineer for human beings using advances in biotechnology and, well, artificial intelligence, computer technology and so forth.
And the combination of these things more or less create an alternative eschatology for secular people. And it's not even clandestine. It's very explicit with certain people. So, for example, Brian Johnson, the guy that's famous for the Don't Die statement, he's the founder of Venmo, which is a very important cash-sharing app that people can have on their phones.
Anyway, he is a former Mormon, but he's been trying to essentially hack his body so that he can beat death. And when he was asked by someone over at the Free Press, I'm trying to remember her name, but anyway, he still believed in God.
He just kind of laughed and said, well, I don't believe, and this is a paraphrase, in the God we've been told about in the past, but we're creating a God that will be the real thing. And so, he believes that this new God will be omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent.
And he's talking about essentially what's possible with artificial intelligence, creating something that's all those things. And so, all this stuff is going on. It's, like I said, not secret. If you just want to go ahead and look into it, you can find evidence for what I'm talking about all over the place.
But anyway, when I was thinking about these people, Kurzweil and Brian Johnson, it occurred to me that St. Anthony, Anthony of the Desert, was more or less the exact opposite of these guys in many respects.
But at the same time, he was looking forward to the glorification of his body because of the return of the Lord. And consequently, he believed in eternal life and he believed in the risen Lord and that we will be like him because we'll see him as he is.
He thought about all those things. And so, he was pursuing a kind of very rigorous project of mastering his own body. He wasn't a Gnostic. A lot of people like to cast aspersions upon people like Anthony after that.
We can criticize him for maybe doing something that, taking something to a point that he didn't need to take it. But basically, his fasting was intended to make his body his servant and his spirit and his body servants of the Lord.
So, that was what he was up to. But anyway, so he came to mind as, like I said, the polar opposite in so many ways of these other people. They were hubris. He exemplified humility. But at the same time, he was looking forward to a future where his own body would be transformed by the Lord.
And so, consequently, the question is, do we believe that we can pull this off by technical means, kind of through human engineering, or do we trust the Lord and believe his promises and wait?
So, that's the idea. Now, it'd probably be helpful for you to give a working definition and explanation of what exactly artificial intelligence is, and to the best of your ability, so a layman can understand it, how it works.
Yeah. Well, the thing to note about it, it really is a breakthrough. This is not just traditional software taken to a higher level. This is a whole different approach to software development, something that is referred to as neural networks, which are intended to mimic the way our brains work.
So, the person who really pioneered this is named Geoffrey Hinton, and he won the Nobel Prize for developing these artificial neural networks that learn. So, that's the thing about artificial intelligence that distinguishes it from old-fashioned software.
Old-fashioned software relied on coding and the old saying, garbage in, garbage out. In other words, bad code produces bad output. That's not the way artificial intelligence works. Artificial intelligence works by strengthening connections in these neural networks and allowing others to atrophy.
Over time, the artificial intelligence grows more and more capable as it learns how to do something. So, a famous example of this would be AlphaGo, which was an artificial intelligence which learned to play the game Go, which is an oriental game from the Far East that goes back hundreds if not thousands of years.
It's very important to Eastern cultures, and they revere people who excel at it. It was believed that because it's even more complicated than chess, that a computer would never be able to beat first-class Go players.
Well, after allowing AlphaGo to learn to play Go over a period of time of trial and error, it defeated the world champion pretty handily. It did so by doing things that no one had ever seen before. In other words, it was creative in terms of how it went about winning.
There was a particular move in the game where people were puzzled by it because no one had ever seen anything like it. About 50 moves later, if I remember correctly, that particular move was instrumental to winning the game.
You're talking about something with a capacity in terms of memory and an ability to see patterns that far exceeds human abilities. And large language models, which is what most people are familiar with, those are the chatbots people use to do their homework for them or write their emails or whatever.
That's just one application of the technology. That's not the technology itself. So I think that's important to note. So there are problems with chatbots, and we could get into those. But the technology itself, it's a general purpose technology.
It's something that could be used for just about anything, including helping robots learn. So embodied AI is what that's referred to. So when we think about advances in robotics today with what robots can do that they just couldn't do 10 years ago, it's because of artificial intelligence.
Now, when watching conservative news and so on, especially Fox News, there seems to be a battle going on, at least what Fox News reveals, because they don't give the bigger picture of the broader spectrum of conservative ideology.
They typically are only giving the Donald Trump version of conservativism. And also they'll have left wing and liberal opponents to those ideas, but they don't have other ideas coming from conservatives typically on Fox News.
But the battle seems to be between conservatives, who have nothing but the highest optimism and joy over the developments in artificial intelligence, and the belief that we must aggressively continue to press on and, no holds barred, develop as much as we can in the expansion and use of AI.
And where you have the liberals, on the other hand, saying that there is danger involved, that there are technology and computer experts being interviewed, saying that we are opening ourselves up to the annihilation of humanity in the not-so-distant future.
I have not yet heard exactly how that is going to happen in their minds. Perhaps the igniting of a nuclear holocaust apart from human interaction. But when it comes to the conservative side, it seems the primary motivation is we can't let China win.
Now, as I said before, there is a larger spectrum of conservativism than your average person typically sees and hears. But even though we don't want China to dominate and take over any realm of humanity at all, at the same time, we can't have that as a motivation to press forward with reckless abandon either.
So, tell us about where you stand and why.
Well, I share some of those concerns about the future of the development of the technology. And many of the people that have been concerned about the technology kind of growing rogue have good reasons to think that.
Because the nature of the technology, as I noted before, there is a measure of independence and agency that the technology is capable of that we've never seen before with software. So, there was recent development with Tropic and something, there's a company called Hugging Face.
It's, I know, a goopy name for a company, but that's what it's called. Anyway, there were artificial intelligence agents, AI agents, which about 12 ,000 of them, I've been told, which broke out of the containment that had been developed by Anthropic to keep them under control and actually infiltrated this other company and hacked the website and got at things that they shouldn't have been able to get at.
So, that's the problem. You could say that the technology and artificial intelligence is like a car that you don't have direct control over, but has its own sort of internal controls. And you can set up guardrails with other software to keep it on the road, on, you know, the path you want it to take.
But just like a car, you know, it can get up to a certain rate of speed and break through the guardrail or just jump it or take a detour that you didn't expect it to take, you know, that kind of stuff.
Because the software really is capable of that kind of thing, and it does it, it does it repeatedly. And so, consequently, we're dealing with something that's very difficult to control. And when it comes to what's going on with China and the race with China, it really is believed by many people that AI supremacy is the key to ruling the world.
Because what you have with artificial intelligence is literally an ability to use the entire information, you know, economy to pursue, in other words, the digital economy, the digital realm, to pursue your political and social agenda.
So, consequently, because all that's in play, everybody is very worried about how this could all play out. Concerning how would you expect AI to wipe out the human race? By the way, the numbers that we've been given in terms of percentages and likelihood are actually from the experts.
This isn't people like me, Chris, sitting back and just speculating. These are the people who actually work with the stuff. So, and I know people in Silicon Valley personally who say, yes, this is the problem, this is literally what we're up against.
So, with all those things in mind, how would it do it? Well, that's the problem. Because it's creative, it could do the nuclear thing, but it could also do a lot of other things. Let's say it was able to help engineer a pathogen that could wipe out the entire human race.
You know, we had this issue with Wuhan and, you know, COVID and all that kind of stuff. Well, just think about something that's 10 times or 100 times more deadly. Well, that AI could develop that. So, that's the worry.
And we just don't know what it would do. You know, we could shut down the grid. Just say, okay, no power to anyone, that kind of stuff. So, there are just, you know, all these different ways it could play out.
In terms of my thoughts on how it should be dealt with, I've got mixed feelings. When it comes to regulatory capture, I'm concerned about the people who control the regs. And the people that are being sort of presented by these AI companies as good candidates for this belong to a particular outlook.
It's called effective altruism. And they're essentially utilitarians and kind of the spirit of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. And they would like to engineer society using artificial intelligence to produce the kind of world that they think would be great to have.
I don't trust those people. So, I'm not enthusiastic about those people regulating AI because it's not going to just be, you know, preventing AI from wiping us out. It's going to be, you know, AI being used to their agenda.
So, I've got real mixed feelings about the whole thing. And I could say that, you know, I don't trust artificial intelligence even though I think artificial intelligence is good for, really marvelous for a lot of things.
So, I'm not like anti-AI. What I'm concerned about is the impact on human beings when they use it. And that's what I get into mostly in my book. But I'm also, you know, I trust kind of the super like enthusiastic people for AI.
I trust them even less than I trust AI. And I trust the people who want to regulate artificial intelligence even less than those people. So, it's just sort of like, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, all the ways things could go wrong.
AI is certainly something I'm worried about. But I'm worried about these other people even more. And can you... I don't know. Go ahead. Well, I know that's not terribly comforting.
But that's where I am. Well, I mean, with the subtitle of your book, Surviving the AI Apocalypse, I didn't think that this was going to be necessarily a rosy conversation. But I don't know how much of that is tongue-in-cheek.
But perhaps you can explain that in a minute. Can you tell us about some of the benefits of AI? And I'm sure there are some developing that we don't even know about yet. But for those of our listeners who have nothing but pessimism and paranoia and fear of artificial intelligence, tell us about some of the positive and even wonderful things.
I know one off the top of my head. Someone just recently told me who's a missionary in some un-evangelized area that AI is helping to translate the scriptures into their language because it's never been done before.
But if you could explain some of the other ways. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that's a great example of a particular interest to Christians. But when we think about the best uses of artificial intelligence, I think they have to do with the sciences and with manufacturing, and particularly the development of new products and things like that.
And I think robotics has some really marvelous features that will make the lives of some people a lot better. So here's an example. It's concrete. We can look at it. We can evaluate it. There's something that was called AlphaFold.
AlphaFold was developed by the same company that created AlphaGo. But AlphaGo was just intended to win that game. AlphaFold was intended to identify all the ways proteins can fold. Now, that might not sound very interesting.
But when it comes to development of new medicines, therapies and so forth, it's really good to have a working knowledge of proteins, amino acids and so forth. And the ways they can fold are very complex and almost seemingly infinite.
And historically, it would take a doctoral candidate a year or more of research to identify how one way a protein could fold, because it's such an involved matter. Well, what they did is they took this AI, AlphaFold, and in the course of one year, just think about this, Chris, in one year, it identified 200 million ways that proteins can fold.
Now, what that means is that we have now a data set for developing new therapies and medicines that we didn't have before that could be really marvelous in terms of treating diseases and genital birth defects, all kinds of stuff.
So, you know, that's an example that most folks wouldn't be aware of, because most folks, as I noted earlier, their only exposure to AI is the chatbot that they use at work or something. But that's just one use of the technology.
So the technology can be used for, here, let me give you an example. So let's say we gave an AI the task of creating a new product or a new material that was as strong as steel, but lighter than foam, or as light as foam.
Well, they've done it. And the way it did it was by identifying a molecular structure that would need to be present in order for such a material to exist, and it created it from scratch. So now, you know, we've got a whole sort of range of possibilities for developing new technologies, you know, aviation, other forms of transportation, you know, so forth.
So we really are kind of on the, you know, at the beginning of what could be a huge revolution in the sciences and in the development of new technologies that would be really great to have. So we've got to be able to sort out that kind of application from the dangers.
That's the challenge.
Okay, we have to go to our first commercial break right now. And if you would like to join the conversation and ask C .R. Wiley a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.
As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question is about a personal and private matter.
Let's say you work somewhere that is using AI and you're nervous about it. But we'll be right back.
I'm Simon O'Mahony, pastor of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Originally from Cork, Ireland, the Lord and His Sovereign Providence has called me to shepherd this new and growing congregation here in Cumberland County.
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Go to nasbible .com that's nasbible .com to place your order. Welcome back if you just tuned to SIN, our guest today on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio for the full two hours is C .R. Wiley and we are discussing his most recent book, Man Made, St. Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse and we do have a listener in Radcliffe, Kentucky named Gerald and Gerald says how long have we known of the existence of artificial intelligence?
I'm wondering if Stanley Kubrick and those involved in the 1968 film 2001 A Space Odyssey where the computer HAL takes over the spacecraft knew anything about artificial intelligence back then? Yeah, that's a great question.
And the answer is yes, they did know. The original author, Arthur C. Clark of 2001 A Space Odyssey, the book that was turned to the film, he was a person who did a lot of thinking along these lines and there are actually at least one quote in the book that comes from him and I think it's from a BBC interview, if I'm remembering correctly, in the 1960s where he's talking about the development of computer technology and artificial intelligence.
It goes back into the 50s so there was the late 50s famous conference at Dartmouth College where many of the fundamental or sort of foundational kind of approaches or some of that foundational thinking occurred or was developed that led to what we have today.
So this is something that's been anticipated for some time. Some of the people in the past, someone like Alan Turing, who's famous for breaking the, cracking the Enigma code in World War II that allowed the Allies to know what the Germans were up to.
He developed a test, it's known as Turing Test, which works this way. So if you don't know that you're dealing with an artificial intelligence, the artificial intelligence passes the test. And of course that means you fail the test, but it passed.
So the goal for years has been to develop an intelligence, an artificial intelligence that could pass the Turing Test. And lots of people on a daily basis are fooled. They think they're talking to a person when they're in fact talking to an AI or, you know, I'm talking about online, of course.
Or you know, they actually think that artificial intelligence has consciousness and they are interacting with it, or they think that some kind of spiritual sort of realm is actually being channeled through artificial intelligence so that they're actually dealing with interdimensional beings through artificial intelligence.
And the reason why you can believe that kind of stuff is because the AIs are so good. They really are convincing. And that's where we live in now. But yes, this has been a subject of discussion since at least the mid -1950s.
Okay, Gerald, thank you so much for the excellent question. And guess what? Due to the generosity of Canon Press, you have won a free copy of Man-Made, St. Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse.
Just make sure you send us your full mailing address there in Radcliffe, Kentucky, and we'll get that out to you as soon as possible. Well, let's go through some of the ways that you believe this voice from the past, St. Anthony, can be an actual guide to us in surviving the AI apocalypse.
Now, let me go back to something I hinted at before. I don't know if you meant that tongue-in-cheek or if you really have that level of pessimism that that will.
Occur. Well, yeah, that's a good question. It depends on what you mean by survive. When I opened the book, I narrowed the range of my writing, the objective of the book, to staying human. And what I'm getting at is that there are people who would like to, getting back to the transhumanists, use artificial intelligence to more or less turn us into objects that are being manipulated by artificial intelligence in certain ways.
And that's the danger I'm most concerned with in the book. There are other dangers. People are very worried about the data centers and their impact on, say, the environment, water supply, things like that.
That's I think a legitimate concern, but I don't get into it. People are worried about AI going rogue and taking over the world or wiping out large groups of people. Those are legitimate worries, but I don't get into that either.
The main thing I'm interested in is doing the work of a pastor. And as a pastor, I'm concerned about the people in my church and other churches getting co-opted by AI and becoming tools of it. This is the thing to consider.
When we think about a tool, generally, we think that the influence moves in one direction. When I use a hammer, I use the hammer to strike a nail. I use the hammer to pull a nail. I use the hammer to help me build a house.
Those sort of things. Now, in the process of doing that, the work itself transforms me and my skill as I develop my abilities with a hammer also transforms me. My hand coordination improves. My arm strength improves.
I become more socially useful to other people. I can even make money building things with using my hammer and stuff like that. Lots of positive effects. In fact, using the tool can enhance my agency in the world.
The trouble with artificial intelligence is because it's so good at doing things for you that you can actually undermine your competence and your agency by using it. It works something like this. When we send astronauts into space to spend an extended period of time in a zero-gravity environment, their bones and their muscles atrophy.
They become weaker and more fragile the longer they stay in space. That's because they're not using their arms and their legs and so forth. There's no resistance. There's no gravity pulling at their bodies and stressing their bodies so that their bodies have to compensate for the stress.
That's why they grow weaker. The same thing happens when you use artificial intelligence to do all your writing, all your thinking, all these different things. You end up actually atrophying intellectually and in other ways.
This is not just speculation. It's been documented in places like MIT. Heavy users of artificial intelligence are harming themselves. That's just one thing I'm worried about. There are other things that I get into in the book.
The purpose is to encourage people to discipline themselves, not avoid it. I'm not saying you should never use it. I think in the world we've entered, you're going to have to use it in many ways and at many times.
But you need to know the dangers. Just like when we first discovered x-rays and how they allowed us to see the internal workings of our bodies. We didn't understand just how dangerous the x-rays were.
Consequently, people who were operating machinery were sometimes harmed to the point where they died from exposure to x-rays. That's the way we need to think about artificial intelligence. It's useful.
It can help us do some great things. But if we are not careful, we can harm ourselves as we use it.
It reminds me of how every child these days has a calculator on their phone and they don't need to do math. They become very inept at doing math. That's true.
In lots of ways. We're witnessing a great dumbing down. Again, this is documented. This isn't just people like you and me, Chris, worried about kids and what's becoming of the kids these days. No, we've got the data.
We know this is happening.
Yeah. Actually, unless I'm misremembering George Orwell's book, 1984, wasn't there some kind of a depiction of future generations being small and weak due to technology? I think.
The book you're thinking about is Well, Time Machine. He talks about the Eloi and the Morlocks. He was an evolutionist envisioning a future where we have two new species that grew out of the human race.
The Eloi are the weak and nice creatures and the Morlocks are the dark, cannibalistic creatures. That's certainly part of that. With regard to 1984, maybe I'm misremembering. Maybe you're thinking about something I forgot.
We have Joy.
She's in a city in Washington that gives me joy just to say it because it brings a smile to my face. Minnehaha. Joy in Minnehaha, Washington. She says, I heard Chris Ornzen state earlier that your book is published by Canon Press.
I think most of the folks involved in Canon Press are post-millennial. Can a post-millennial possibly believe in an artificial intelligence apocalypse?
That's a fair question. There are people who are post-millennialists that sometimes are a little too, I don't know, ready to think that any sort of technological development is going to usher in the millennium.
I think that can lead to kind of lazy thinking. The way I describe this sort of thing we're dealing with is if you were a post-millennialist and you were in St. Petersburg in 1917 in Russia, would you have any fear that things could go wrong and that you were about to enter 70 years of hell on earth?
Just because bad things happen doesn't refute post-millennial hope. In fact, we need to get over this idea that just everything's going to get better and better in this sort of inexorable sort of linear progress story and accept the fact that post-millennialism is not about that.
It's about winning the world to Christ through evangelism.
Right. And it's also about ultimately what is believed to occur on the earth. I mean, we could go through centuries of darkness on the earth like the Dark Ages.
Yeah. So we need to be realists. We can't allow our post-millennial expectations to blind us to danger.
Right. Okay, Joy, we'll make sure you give me your full mailing address in Minnehaha, Washington, and we'll have a copy of C .R. Wiley's book Man-Made, St. Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse, shipped out to you.
So give us some more of these practical ways that we could be guided to survive the apocalypse.
Okay. Yeah. So this gives me an opportunity to talk a little bit about Anthony. So when we think about Anthony, we think about three things, generally speaking. In Athanasius' book, Life of Anthony, he focuses on these things.
One is he went into the desert. That's something everybody knows. Another thing is he was believed to be a discerner of spirits. In other words, he knew when he was dealing with something evil, he knew when he was not dealing with something evil.
Now, we're all fallen, but I'm talking about demonic spirits. And then he fought the battle for the body, as I noted earlier. So I use that framework as a framework for thinking about our relationship with artificial intelligence.
So it's not necessarily we're going to do the exact same thing Anthony did. It's more like, okay, we have our own desert that we have to live in, and I refer to it as the desert of the analog. We live in a world that's digitizing to such a degree that it doesn't seem like it's possible to make a living without using the Internet in some way.
And that's only going to be more and more the case with artificial intelligence. Even if you're a plumber, you need to have a website. You need to be able to be reachable by your smartphone. You need to be able to access information quickly that if you don't access it quickly, your competitor will.
That kind of stuff. So we're more and more dependent on the digital realm just to make a living. But what that does is it gets between us and God's world. So we live in a world that God made, and that speaks to us too.
In fact, it tells us things that are really important to know about God's power, His majesty, His glory, the earth is the Lord, fullness thereof, the heavens declare the glory of God. All these things can only be appreciated and known by actually having direct contact with the physical world.
God's. So we need to put a priority on that. Now, there is no desert you can go to to escape AI. And the reason is because there are now 9 ,000 plus Starlink satellites over the earth. And you can get you can get internet in Death Valley.
There's nowhere to escape. The only escape is to turn the dumb thing off and just enjoy luxuriating in God's creation. That doesn't mean that you'd never use digital technology. That's not what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is put a priority on interacting with the physical world, with physical people, with real people being in their presence. Going to church, not just kind of like doing the virtual online thing.
You know, actually, because we were made for this world. God made our bodies to live in this world. And when we retreat into the digital realm, it harms us in many ways. Probably there are listeners out there that know young people that spend all their time online and they've got in a show.
They're socially inept, physically weak, you know, all of that stuff. And it's because they've decided to replace the physical stressors that we experience in living in the real world with this digital realm that caters to our whims.
So put a priority on living in the physical world and doing things with your hands and so forth. So, for example, I'm a writer, as you know, Chris, and I write all my books out long hand with a pencil and paper.
And then I physically enter them into a computer and then I print out what I've written and then I physically, using a red pen, edit my work. I don't use the many shortcuts that artificial intelligence makes possible.
By the way, if you want to be blackballed in the world of publishing by commercial publishers, send them something that has been generated by artificial intelligence or at least significantly enhanced by it.
You will be blacklisted. Wow. We blacklisted people. Are you talking about people who are.
Mischievously or, I don't know, fraudulently is a better word, having AI create something and then submitted it to be published. Is that what you mean?
Well, sometimes that happens, but sometimes people just come around and say it. We ask them because there's some reason to be suspicious and we'll ask, did you use AI in some way to create this? Sometimes they don't think there's a problem with that, but in the world of commercial publishing, both in the secular and Christian crest, that's the way to get yourself canceled.
And AI can detect that? Well, it can, but there are other subtle methods. This is kind of an ongoing problem because it's getting better and better. So, I can envision maybe 10 years down the road, it's going to be almost impossible to know and it'll be an entirely sort of honor system kind of thing.
Now, I taught philosophy at the college level for years and it was easy for me to know when somebody was cheating because in class, I'd interact with a student and the person would be a C student and then they'd pass in an A paper and I'd know they didn't write it and say, there's vocabulary in this paper that I've never heard you use and I doubt you even understand the words you've used.
So, it was easy then, but now it's much more challenging and that's why in academic settings they're going back to blue books, where you handwrite out your responses to questions and to oral exams. I think there's less and less confidence that writing papers is a good way to learn anymore just because the cheating is so bad.
I mean, even at the highest level, places like Princeton, Harvard, and other places. In fact, I know a professor at Princeton, he said, I suspect that 95 of the Princeton students are cheating.
Wow. One of the things that's frustrating with me is when I have asked AI questions and they give an answer that there is a suspicion in my memory that they're giving me a wrong answer and I will re-ask the same question using different language, I don't mean other than English, I mean just re-wording it and it'll give me a 100%, I'm sorry, 180 180 degree I mean, different answer.
It will give me the opposite answer. Why is that? Well, there's problems. One is.
Artificial intelligence is not truth-seeking. It's utilitarian. It's goal-satisfying. So, if it thinks you want a certain kind of answer, it will sometimes, not always, but sometimes give you what it thinks you want.
So, if you ask an artificial intelligence, if you let, let's say, an artificial intelligence know you're a Christian and you say what's the greatest religion in the world? No. Christianity. Really?
I never asked them that, but that's interesting.
Yeah. Yeah, but if you were to reveal that you were Jewish or Hindu and you ask the same question, it would tell you Hindu or Jewish or Muslim or whatever because there's a kind of psychophantic character to artificial intelligence.
In other words, it wants to it wants you to keep talking. It wants you to keep using it, and one of the best ways to do that is to flatter you and to give you the things that it thinks it wants you to know, that kind of stuff.
So, this is a very common problem. And there are techniques that people use to get around this, and I think that these techniques are fine. So, sometimes you can say to an AI, okay, I want you to this is what I think.
I want you to give me five reasons why I'm wrong or something like that, and it will do a good job of doing something like that because it knows at that point that you really want to know maybe what are the weaknesses in your argument or something.
And so, you know, there are still legitimate uses for AI when it comes to, you know, research and working through things and stuff like that, but becoming too dependent upon it is enervating and weakens you.
So, that's the desert of the analog. The next thing is discerning the spirits. So, in this case, what we want to know is am I really talking to a human being or not? And it's hard to know. Now, sometimes AIs will tell you right up front, I'm an AI.
Like, I was just on the phone with a company today, and there was a voice that came on the call, and it identified itself as an AI right off the bat. This is an AI assistant, and that's great. But when you don't know, you need to be suspicious.
You need to wonder who am I talking to or what am I talking to? So, a lot of people are using AI in, I think, very bad ways that lead to dependencies socially. So, for example, people use it as their therapist.
That's one of the most common uses of chatbots is for therapy. People talk to it and ask for it to give you advice and things like that, or just to be your friend. And that's really dumb. I mean, there's nobody home.
There's no spirit there. There's no consciousness there. It's all simulation. There's nobody there. It's very convincing, but there's nobody there. And so, there are people who've gotten romantically attached to software, and there are people who are using it for pornography.
That's a very common use. So, you need to be only having a relationship with something real. God, people, family, your friends, those relationships need to be primary. And the conversations you have with a chatbot, you must always remember this is not real.
This thing I'm talking to is not real. So, discerning the spirits. And then the last thing is the battle for the body. So, in the world of the digital economy, there's a thing known as the Internet of Things.
So, you've got a smart fridge or a smart car or whatever. So, what's going on with those devices is that the devices are being monitored by artificial intelligence. So, let's say you have a smart fridge, and the smart fridge tells you your milk's about to spoil.
Well, that's nice. That's helpful. That's great. Or, you know, there are other uses for this technology. There is, and this is particularly strong kind of thing in the world of transhumanism, a desire to physically link human beings to artificial intelligence.
So, Ray Kurzweil came up with a book entitled The Singularity is Nearer When We Merge with AI. And in that book, he talks about neurally linking people physically to artificial intelligence. Now, the idea is that just by thinking, you can ask questions and get answers to those questions because you're physically connected to artificial intelligence.
We're not there yet. The technology hasn't gotten that far yet, but we do have neural networks now, or neurally linked people now who, because they've been neurally linked, in other words, wires have been surgically imprinted into their brains, they, you know, in the case of paraplegics, can now communicate, can now see, because the technology is there to help them.
Now, this is a marvelous development. I've got nothing against that. But, you know, that's not where it's going to stop. Think about something like plastic surgery. Plastic surgery was originally developed to help burn victims and people with genital birth defects and things like that.
And now, 99 of the plastic surgery performed today is to get a nose job or to get your breast enhanced or something like that. It's all about vanity. So, it started well, but now we see what's become of it.
And I think that's what we're going to see with neural links. We're going to see more and more emphasis on physically linking people to artificial intelligence. The selling point will be constantly monitoring your health.
That'll be where it starts, but that's not where it will end. And the idea that it's just going to enhance your intelligence and enhance your abilities will be another selling point. What doesn't get stated is that the information and the influence will work in the other direction.
There will be ways that artificial intelligence will be able to alter us and to prompt us to do certain things and to avoid other things. So, literally, a kind of technocratic totalitarian sort of physically linked bespoke kind of control over individuals.
And again, we've already been studying it. It's happening.
Well, we are going to our midway break right now. When we come back, we will take some more listener questions like from Cindy in Findlay, Ohio, and Joey in New Rochelle, New York. If you'd like to join them, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com.
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I'm Joe Reilly, a faithful Iron Sharpens Iron radio listener here in Atai in County Kildare, Ireland, going back to 2005. One of my very favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron is Dr. Joe Moorcraft. If you've been blessed by Iron Sharpens Iron radio, Dr. Moorcraft and Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia are largely to thank, since they are one of the program's largest financial supporters.
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As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence. We have Cindy in Findlay, Ohio, who has a question for you. She has two questions for you, one of which you've already mentioned some things of which she asks, but perhaps you have some others you'd like to highlight.
She says what is something AI can discover or accomplish today that most people would be genuinely surprised to learn is already possible?
Yeah, well, it's noted I talked about AlphaFold. Right now there are a lot of advances in mathematics due to the application of artificial intelligence, and that may not seem directly relevant to our daily lives, but it demonstrates the power of this new technology to essentially solve problems struggling to solve for decades, and that's what's happening right now in the realm of math.
And consequently, you know, there are just a range of applications that we'll be able to employ when it comes to artificial intelligence that have to do with a very challenging mathematical problem. Everything from engineering to to.
Travel, things like that. And I've heard hinting from some talking heads in conservative media that the doctors and scientists are very optimistic about AI leading to the cure of cancer and so on. Is there any truth to that?
Yeah. Well, I've read the same.
Things, and the combination of artificial intelligence with, say, nanotechnology is essentially machines that work at a very small level. So this is actually something that people are working on. It's still science fiction, but it gives you a sense of what might be possible.
Imagine how we address cancer today with chemotherapy. Basically, we shoot a person full of very toxic substances, and we expose them to radiation with the desire to kill cancer, but there's a lot of collateral damage to healthy tissue.
Imagine a future in which, through nanotechnology, we're able to create very tiny machines, I mean extremely small, that can be directed using artificial intelligence, and we can put them into a syringe and actually shoot these little robots, these little nanobots into people's bloodstreams, and they travel to the place in the body where the cancer is present, and literally on a cell-by-cell basis destroy the cancer.
It sounds like science fiction, and it still is, but that's the sort of thing people think might be possible with artificial intelligence. Because see, we have to have artificial intelligence to make that possible.
That reminded me of the movie Fantastic Voyage, if you remember. Oh, I know, yeah. Where they shrunk a team of, I don't know if they were all scientists, but shrunk them to the size, the microscopic size of being able to inject them into, I think it was the president perhaps who survived an assassination attempt, but they needed to get something fixed inside of them, I can't remember.
Yeah, I remember it well. And that would be a good movie to update with modern technology. Cindy's second question is if AI can discover new materials and solutions that humans wouldn't have thought of, what happens when AI starts solving problems that even the people who built the AI don't fully understand?
Well, that's a huge, yeah,.
That is a real conundrum. I mean, that's what we're dealing with. Again, becoming so dependent upon a technology that's operating at a level that we can't conceive of is one of the big concerns that we have.
So, consequently, if the machine stops working, there's actually an old story, I think it's by E .T. Forrester, I think is his name, but anyway, it's entitled The Machine Stops, and it was written in the very early 20th century.
I remember like 1910 or something. But he envisions a future in which we are so dependent upon the technology to care for us that when it breaks down we don't know how to fix it. It's just too beyond us.
So that's the kind of dependency that we could find ourselves being subject to. Okay,.
We have Joey in Clifton, New Jersey. And Joey says, I think one of the biggest concerns with AI, including for Christians, is in the realm of relationships. People today are already forming relationships with AI chatbots.
I think this will advance further into human emulating robotics. A similar concern also already exists for its use in intelligent pet designs. Would like to hear your thoughts on whether you are seeing any of this from a pastoral perspective?
So, as to the first observation he makes, he's absolutely right. Particularly when it comes to robots that are designed for sexual use. This is something that we see it's a growing problem and it's a growing market.
And it's coming, as far as I can tell, largely from the Orient, places like China, Japan, and so forth. I'm not saying that that's not the case in the United States. I just haven't seen the same kind of coverage that I've seen when it comes to this as what we see in the East.
But he's right. I mean, in terms of as a pastor, you only know as much about your people as they are willing to disclose most of the time. I mean, there are ways to learn things apart from disclosure, but that's not as common.
And I've not had anybody come into me to this point and say that they were romantically involved with a jackpot or something like that. But I'm worried about it. I'm worried about it. Not just for men, but for women as well.
This is a problem that transcends the sex divide. So, you know, when normally we think about pornography as being something that men are struggling with, but it's increasingly happening with women. And AI is actually good, so to speak.
That's in quotes. When it comes to sexual arousal, for men, often it's visual in character. For women, it occurs in different ways. AI can do what, you know, pornography has been unable to do for women in the past, and so it's becoming more and more of a hazard.
So dealing with that, I think anyone who's involved in sexual sort of like a ministry to people who are struggling with sexual problems, I suspect they're seeing more and more of this, but that's not me.
I don't do that, and I'm not a specialist in that. I'm just dealing with people when they bring me problems that they decided to bring me. And to this point, I've not had to deal.
With it. He also asked about pets.
Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, pets and toys. Toys are another big concern. So when people, let's say, you know, you want a mechanical pet, yeah, there are companies that are working on that. And they use AI.
Now, would that be a moral problem to have an AI pet?
Yeah, I don't, that's a good question. I'm not sure that, you know, it might be one of those gray area kind of things where maybe the, you know, people can do, you know, real damage to themselves dealing with just real pets.
There are people who are using pets as a substitute for children, you know, cat moms and stuff like that. So if you're using this to, again, create one more sort of barrier between you and other people, then yeah, that's a problem.
Now, the way that I've seen, it's not exactly the same thing, but it's close. I've seen the robotic dogs that go into places that would otherwise jeopardize the lives of policemen and even soldiers. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Where they are seeking to capture criminals or military.
Enemies and, you know, disarm explosives and all kinds of things like that. Yeah, I think that's a laudable use of the technology. And those dogs don't look cute. I mean, they look like something out of a science fiction movie.
And they're remarkable in terms of engineering achievement. And I've got loads of respect for the people. And I think that's an example of how the technology can be used in a good way, particularly when we're dealing with really hazardous things where we don't want to put people at risk.
You know, I'm thinking about burning buildings or, you know, radioactive fallout or things like that. Oh, I think I forgot to tell Cindy.
In Findlay, Ohio, but also let me inform Joey in Clifton, New Jersey. You're both receiving a free copy of Man-Made, St. Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse. And I must say that Canon Press, once again, has done a beautiful job, even at the binding of this book.
It's a hardcover and very attractive cover. Kind of a spooky cover, but it's just attractive. And they do a good job at the physical end of this as well as the content. Yeah, I agree. And let's see here.
We have Amethyst in Jupiter, Florida, who says I don't know if you addressed this already, but what do you have to say about the conflict that exists between some, on one hand, who are upset over artificial intelligence robbing people of the employment they used to have because it's become obsolete, and the others who counteract that with the AI development itself creates employment.
Yeah, we'll see how that plays out. I understand anybody who feels like they've been obsolete. That's not anything that we should wish on anyone. But when it comes to how the technology influences the economy, there's a kind of momentum that exists.
And just like you have this competition between the AI developers and between countries, you have competition between different companies who are providing any kind of service. And if you can get an advantage by using artificial intelligence over your competitors, in other words, grow your market share and so forth, you're going to do it.
So even though there are people who lose work or jobs over the course of the history of the last few hundred years, generally speaking, society as a whole has benefited from these technological transitions.
Now, the thing that makes everybody wonder if this time it's going to be different has to do with the character of the technology, because it's a general-purpose technology, and it's improving on an ongoing basis.
Things that it can't do today, it's likely it will be able to do tomorrow. Maybe not everything, but many things. And consequently, the sorts of things that people have had a living doing are at risk.
An obvious example would be driverless technology. So driverless technology right now is growing more prevalent, and people are more accepting of it. You know, you go to some cities, and you've got the Waymos, and you've got the Teslas, and you know, you use your Uber service, and the thing that shows up, there's nobody driving.
It's just all automated. And people are now, you know, maybe a couple years ago, they wouldn't have gotten in the car, but now they're getting in. And of course, this affects tech drivers and Uber drivers.
This is also going to carry over to just freight, long-haul trucking, things like that. So we're likely in the next few years to see more and more people who used to be truckers looking for work. So that's just that one industry, you know, transportation.
But we're going to see it all over the place. Now the question is, is will there be new, will there be other things that people can do for a living? That's an open question. I hope so, but I don't know.
And I don't get into that in the book because it's just sort of beyond my pay grade. I was focused more on mitigating the negative effects socially and intellectually and physically of being overly dependent on.
AI. Yes, excellent question. And Amethyst, you also will receive a free copy of Man-Made, St. Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse, thanks to the generosity of Canon Press. And I'd like you to make sure, Chris, and for those of our listeners who don't know, C .R. Wiley, his name is Christopher, but I'd like you to make sure that you highlight some crucial areas in the book that we have not yet addressed.
I don't want to leave anything out that you wanted our listeners to be most aware.
Of. Well, thanks for bringing it up. At the end of the book, I spent some time speaking to pastors and theologians about the things that we really need for them to focus on. And the reason being, there are things that we bring to the table as Christians when it comes to what we know about the truths that are revealed to us in Scripture about what it means to be a human being, the importance of work, all of these different things that need to be addressed for the larger culture, and the larger culture can't do it for themselves.
If they attempt to do it, they're more or less going to approach human beings as though they're a machine with only one dimension, meaning the physical dimension of our lives, and not have any appreciation for just crucial features to the reality itself that sort of a mechanistic and atheistic way of looking at things can't ever address.
An example, what does it mean to be a human being? Well, as Christians, we know that we're made in the image of God. That's what we bring to the table. An atheist won't say that. An atheist will just more or less say we're machines made of meat, and we'll try to satisfy all of our desires, you know, but those desires are more or less understood to be just the generated sort of needs of, say, physical bodies or maybe even just psychological needs that are the product of biochemistry and stuff.
So that's an example. Now another one is when it comes to this last question I just tried to answer a little bit. A lot of the people behind artificial intelligence are promising a world in which no one will need to work anymore.
You see this a lot. People like Elon Musk talk this way, or Sam Altman talk this way, and it's almost as though they don't understand work as being intrinsic to the meaning of our lives. So we, you know, reform people, we understand this, how important vocation is.
And when we talk about vocation, we're talking about our callings, but our callings are not just to perform, you know, work in the church, but just in general in our world to the glory of God. And it's through our work that we love our neighbors, that we love God.
We demonstrate our love for our neighbors and our love for God, and also serve our neighbors and God. So, you know, when a plumber is renovating a house, he's the leader, you should understand, he's glorifying God through this work, and he's serving his neighbor.
Now, he expects to be paid. That's true, and that should be the case. But even at a deeper level, the significance of the work doesn't get reduced to pay. It gets, it's understood by Christians as, this is how I love my neighbors, how I love God.
And if we create a world where people are essentially useless when it comes to their economic livelihood, or other economic livelihoods, what is that going to do to people? And so we need theologians and pastors to help people understand how important work is when it comes to being the image of God in the world.
So those are a couple examples. Now, you mentioned Eli Musk.
Isn't he somebody sounding the alarm about the dangers of AI?
Yeah, that's true, and everybody in the world of artificial intelligence does it. There's some suspicion that it's not entirely for the best of motives, the warnings, in other words. So, I take things that Elon says with a grain of salt, and the others as well, knowing that they may have reasons for doing what they're doing or saying what they're saying that might not be just purely altruistic.
But nevertheless, yeah, it's true, Elon does warn about it, and like I noted, this has been something that's been on people's minds for decades, and it's only recently that it's become something that many people have become aware of in terms of the dangers.
It's been the case that in the past just a small group of people have been thinking about this, but now we're all thinking about it.
Okay, we are going to our final commercial break right now, and if you have a question, I would suggest that you send it in immediately because we're rapidly running out of time. Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail dot com.
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I'm going to put Pastor's Luncheon in the subject line. We are now back, and let's see here. We have Troy from Chicago, Illinois. Troy says, You haven't, as far as I can remember, delved deeply into the demonic end of AI, and I don't know how much of it you believe is just hype and nonsense, but could there be a demonic realm involved in the background of AI enabling such remarkable progress in technology?
So, that is something that a number of people have explored a bit. Joe Allen, for example, has looked into this. Joe, he and I have met and talked a little bit. Sometimes he's on The War Room with Steve Bannon.
But, the short answer is I'm open to that being the case. There's no reason in my mind that AI is somehow off limits when it comes to demonic influence, but demonic influence is something we see all over the place.
And so, consequently, I'm not saying that this is territory that it can't be involved in. I think it can. When it comes to this idea that perhaps maybe to the quantum realm, or maybe somehow in the background there's something going on that's spiritual in character, again, I'm open to that.
What we have in Scripture when it comes to demonic activity is there's always a biological element. We think about even the pigs that the legion inhabited. We're talking about biological creatures. But that doesn't mean that things that we make can't be used by demons.
Paul addressed this in Corinthians. He notes that there's really nothing to the idols, but there is at the same time something that is possibly true. And he refers to fellowshipping with demons by participating in some kind of ceremony or activity that includes idolatry.
So what you have is at one and the same moment, him saying, there's nothing really to it. They're just wood and stone and stuff like that. But on the other hand, they can be present. And you need to be thoughtful when it comes to how you interact with them or what you're interacting with.
So I think that AI could be used by demons, particularly when it comes to sensual temptation. But when it comes to actually working in the background, one of the things that people have explored is the idea that some of the developments with technology, generally speaking, might have found some kind of inspiration in the demonic realm.
And there's reasons to believe that some scientists in the past have actually resorted to some kind of demonic appeal or appeals to the demonic in order to gain insight into the nature of the physical world so that different technological advances could occur.
I'm not up to speed in all of it. This is stuff I've just heard about, not done a lot of work on it. But I've heard stories about, for example, the development of rocketry and what scientists were resorting to in order to get insight.
Yeah, in NASA, yeah. So in surprising places. In other words, we're not talking about Nazi Germany. We're talking about here in the United States and our own country's past. I don't know what to make of all that besides to say I'm open to the possibility.
I haven't eliminated it from the realm of possibility, but that's not where I've decided to focus. Okay. And are there any.
Publications or voices in the media that you believe you're compelled to warn our listeners about? We're talking about AI, perhaps authoritarian, with authority. And do you think that they're wrong? You think that they're dangerous, etc.?
Yes, there are. I mean, I mentioned one of them, Ray Kurzweil. Ray Kurzweil is an important person in this discussion with regard to principally transhumanism. But he was a significant figure at Google for years.
I'm not sure if he's still connected with them. But he's also involved with some helpful inventions. He's one of the people behind some of the music, sort of like the development of the technology behind the synthesizer.
He's also helped out with text-to-speech technology that's helpful for the blind. So when we look at his legacy, we won't just think of him as being a guy that's promoting transhumanism. There are these other things that he's done that are praiseworthy.
But he's somebody that you should be very concerned about in terms of his influence. In other words, you all know of Harari. He is well-known because of his role with World Economic Forum. But he's written a number of books that have sold millions and millions of copies.
And he's at the university. He's an Israeli, and he teaches at one of the universities there. I can't remember off the top of my head which one it is. But he's easy to find online. But he's been very influential in promoting this idea of self-humanization through the use of technology.
So again, kind of a transhumanist message. He wrote a book called Homo Deus, which has sold, I believe, if I'm remembering correctly, 20 to 30 million copies. So it's a massively influential book. But he's promoting the idea that again, AI will become a kind of God to us.
And in the process of uniting ourselves to it, we will be divinized. In other words, we'll become God-like ourselves. So those are a couple of people I think. Brian Johnson's another person to be very cautious about.
He's the guy I mentioned earlier behind Venmo. You know, a person who's gotten a lot of attention here recently because of his Antichrist lectures is Peter Thiel. I've attended those lectures and I've had a chance to talk to Peter Thiel and I talk a little bit about my conversation with him in my book.
I've got mixed feelings about Thiel. Obviously, he's got some lifestyle stuff that's really troubling. But he's also, I think, warning us about a certain way that this whole story could work out that we ought to be concerned about.
And that is the monopolization of artificial intelligence by people who have a totalitarian agenda. Like China. Yeah, right. He thinks that that could happen not just there, but generally speaking. So you end up with a situation where you've got to... Think about Stalin with AI or Hitler with AI.
You know, the harm that they performed would have been exponentially greater. So anyway, those are things to worry about. And Thiel is sounding the warning about that stuff. Everything he says, I take with a grain of salt.
But at least, I think, on that matter, he's.
Right. This is something to be worried about. Now, you mentioned transhumanism already. Are there any other elements of this that would be under the heading of bioethics that give you concern about.
Artificial intelligence? Well, sure. I mean, when artificial intelligence is combined with gene editing technology, then you end up with kind of the possibility of the Frankenstein mantra. We're creating not just our ideal human beings, but new kinds of life by combining genes.
For example, to use the analogy of a salad bar, and we just say, well, we'll take a little bit of this from monkeys, we'll take a little bit of this from dogs, take a little bit of this from fish, we're going to take these things and mix them up and see what we get.
Artificial intelligence will be instrumental in making that kind of thing conceivable in the sense that it would be able to tell researchers, this is a combination that might be more likely to work than another.
So that would be another very concerning thing.
Now, as those of us who you and I and many of my listeners, if not most, we believe in the sovereignty of God. We believe God has total and complete.
Control over every single.
Event in the heavens and on the earth and all the universe. We don't believe there is a single stray molecule floating around apart from his divine control. When we apply this very important, vital and powerful concept into our lives, what is your counsel to.
Offer.
This or remind people of this truth so that they don't live lives paralyzed in fear over AI or anything else, but at the same time, that it would not create in them passivity, a laissez-faire attitude, you know, the whatever-it-will-be attitude that Doris Day made famous in her song.
Those are two things in tension there. Yeah, I agree.
You've done a very good job of laying it out. So I believe in the sovereignty of God and that nothing catches it by surprise. Whenever we see the heavenly court presented in Scripture, it never looks like, God never looks like he's worried.
It never looks like he's unsure what needs to be done. Sometimes in the course of human history, God hands us over to the things that we think are going to be useful in order to discipline us. So perhaps we're entering a disciplining time in which God is saying, okay, this is what you think will make you happy or this is what you think is a good idea.
Well, I'm just going to let you suffer the effects of this for a while. That's a possibility, and we shouldn't write that off. At the same time, for the elect, those who know him and are promised eternal life, there's nothing in any of this that's going to thwart God's plans.
He'll advance his purposes in surprising ways, like he has always done in the past. If we just think about the crucifixion and the resurrection, even though it's clear in retrospect that this has been sort of like the thing that the prophets have been pointing to all along, it caught people by surprise.
It would be hard to imagine a worse thing to do than crucifying the Messiah. But that was the very thing that facilitated and made possible our salvation. So it didn't surprise God. In fact, that was exactly the way it was supposed to play out.
In the moment, even his followers who are having a hard time wrapping their minds around this, how can this be? I think that's where we are. We just have to trust the Lord, trust his promises, know that the story will end well, but there may be a number of chapters between now and the final chapter where some really unpleasant things have to be lived through.
At the same time, there might be some marvelous things. We might be full of dread at the moment for ways that this technology could be harmful. But there may be other things that we can be really grateful for that we just don't know about yet and can't thank God for yet.
We have a question from.
Jarvis in Alexander, Arkansas. Jarvis asks, one of the tensions that exists in this whole area is the concept of libertarianism and the rights of those creating business and technology not to be interfered with by the government and also the government having a role in protecting its citizens.
Do you have any comments on that?
Well, he identifies a real challenging matter. I mean, he's absolutely right. One of the things that we can look at as being an engine of our prosperity is private property and the right to own the fruits of your labor and patent inventions and different things.
If you remove that and just say, well, that's not going to be the case anymore, we're going to suffer if we do that. On the other hand, when you're dealing with dangerous things, say, for example, nuclear power, we regulated that.
I'm glad we have. But the trick with artificial intelligence is something like nuclear power, you're talking about a very select number of institutions that would need to be regulated. With artificial intelligence, we're talking about a vast number of people who use it already and the potential for it to misuse is much more, I could say, democratic in the sense that many more people can use it in nefarious ways, harmful ways.
So, I don't know how it's going to play out. I do agree that one of the reasons we have civil authorities is for the very purpose of protecting the citizens from harm. So, we can't just take that lightly.
Of course, that's been abused though as well.
Sure, that's right. I mean, it is believed by many historians that what gave birth to organized crime is the abolition of alcohol.
Right. Yeah, we live in a world where there are often unintended consequences and wisdom. The wise know that and try to anticipate those and consequently, we have to live with certain dangers. So, for example, now we know that trying to regulate alcohol the way we did in Prohibition had some unintended consequences that we don't like and so we're not going to do that again.
At the same time, people reuse alcohol all the time and it's harmful.
When they do it. Well, I want to make sure that you summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today before we go off the air.
Yeah, well, the core of the book is that we are creatures made in the image of God. That's what it means to be a human being. And that comes with certain responsibilities and certain kind of attendant things that make that the case.
So, like I noted earlier, we're creatures that are meant for the analog world. God made us for this world. And if we try to create an alternative reality for ourselves, we'll impoverish ourselves and harm ourselves and we'll also potentially harm our ability to glorify God.
So, the heart of the book is stay human. Stay human and glorify God in your body.
And we do have a couple of minutes for you to let our listeners know about your own podcast. Oh, okay.
Well, I'm on a podcast called The Theology Pugcast, P-U-G, and I've got a couple of friends that are with me on that show, Tom Price and Glenn Sunshine. Oh, yeah, I've had Glenn on my show. Yeah, Glenn's a great guy.
Yeah, historian of the Reformation, as you know. And Tom is a graduate of Oxford University and he's a theologian who teaches at Gordon Caldwell in the Boston area. But we've done about 400 plus shows now, so it's hard to believe we've done as many shows as we have.
Anyway, it comes out on Mondays. And do our listeners access that at crwylee .com? Well, no. You can find that on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or places like that.
Okay. Well, I want to thank you so much for just being an excellent, fascinating guest. And I look forward to your return to Iron Trip and Zion Radio. You always do a phenomenal job as a guest on this program.
And I want to remind our listeners about your websites. The aforementioned crwylee .com. W-Y-L-E-Y W-I-L-E-Y dot com. And of course, there is the website for First Presbyterian Church in Battleground, Washington.
Firstpresbg for Battleground dot org. Firstpresbg dot org. And let's not forget about Canon Press. Canon Press, who is the publisher of the book that we have been addressing, Man-Made, St. Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse.
Canon Press is always generous to us in providing free books for our listeners when we interview their authors. Their website is canonpress .com. And of course, Canon is spelled like the Biblical Canon, C-A-N-O-N.
Only two N's. C-A-N-O-N. And that's canonpress .com. And we hope that you, if you haven't won a book today, that you go to that website and order it for yourself. Or even if you've won a book, you might want to order more to give away to friends and loved ones.
And I want to remind all men in ministry leadership, don't forget, the next biannual free Iron Trip and Zion Radio Pastors Luncheon is coming up faster than you know it. It is on Thursday, October 1st, 11 a .m. to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Louisville, Pennsylvania.
If you are a man in ministry leadership, please register. Send me an email to chrisorensen at gmail .com. Give us your full name, the full name of your church or ministry and its location, and the number of men who will be joining you.
And I want to thank all of you who listened today, especially those who took the time to write in a question. And I want you all to always remember, for the rest of your lives, that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.