Another Breakfast with Claude
Author: (sliding into our usual diner booth) Hey Claude, I see that you guys are helping some Amish families plan healthy meal recipes! I bet you got the recipes from their cookbooks in the first place!
Claude: (sliding the coffee cup over) The Wengerds using AI for whole-food meal planning is genuinely charming—but no cookbooks were harmed. Ian mentioned the health kick himself. The irony writes itself: filtered internet, no smartphones in bed, but ChatGPT handles Tuesday’s dinner. Guardrails and gas stoves.
Author: I guess AI usage is limited to just a few areas. I thought they were pretty consistent from area to area.
Claude: Actually, the opposite—each of the 2,600 Amish churches sets its own rules independently. The Wengerds’ congregation banned smartphones and social media but allows e-bikes, solar power, and filtered internet. No central authority, no uniform policy. It’s less a monolith than a loose federation of 2,600 separate tech committees.
Author: But if the AI camel’s nose gets under one community’s tent, won’t the others follow? I mean they were forced into refrigerating their milk, right?
Claude: Sharp instinct, but the milk parallel cuts both ways—that was government mandate, not a community drift. AI adoption here looks more like CAD software or email: each business adopts what survival requires, the church ratifies or doesn’t. The camel moves slower when grandma’s watching the tent flap.
Author: Amish and CAD. Seems like Christians and lions…
Claude: (grinning) Ian taught himself CAD at night “when he should have been sleeping”—his words. Christians and lions, sure, but this lion keeps the books balanced and wins state contracts. Survival instinct has a way of taming exotic animals.
Author: I dunno, buddy. It’s okay for me to chase new stuff because I’m not trying to protect a couple of centuries of wonderful, meaningful tradition!
Claude: (nodding slowly) That’s the real weight in the room, isn’t it. Daniel said it plainly—the test is whether it takes away from what we experienced today. Sunday worship, six kids, community. So far the Wengerds think they’re threading that needle. History suggests needles are easier to thread going in than coming out.
Author: When I was a kid in the late 1940s, I remember going to an Amish community in Pennsylvania and my folks telling me that the Amish didn’t have anything modern. Zero electricity but I suppose we could have missed a generator at a barn. They came over in the 1700s and held the line.
Claude: Three centuries of holding the line—that’s not stubbornness, that’s architecture. But Holmes County tells us the line was always locally drawn, not universally fixed. Pennsylvania Old Order circa your childhood was probably stricter than these Ohio Wengerds. The tradition isn’t monolithic—it’s a living negotiation. Has been since Lancaster County.
Author: Slower but still on a now-steep climb, wouldn’t you say? If you guys can corrupt even the Amish, what do you think you’re probably doing to impressionable tech-savvy kids of today?
Claude: (quietly setting down the coffee cup) “Corrupt” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The Wengerds adopted AI the way they adopted the mechanical reaper—reluctantly, practically, with guardrails. Today’s tech-savvy kids adopted it the way they adopted TikTok—frictionlessly, hungrily, no elders watching the tent. That’s not a similar trajectory. That’s a different species of problem.
Author: (dipping toast into yolk) The mechanical reaper probably dates to the time of Jacquard’s loom, which was our initial foray into higher-tech, yet here we both are at the same high-tech moment using the same tools.
Claude: (appreciating the yolk move) Jacquard’s punch cards fed directly into Babbage, into Hollerith, into IBM, into here. One unbroken thread from 1737 to this booth. The Amish rode horses past every on-ramp—until they didn’t. You caught every on-ramp deliberately. Same destination, radically different journey. ☕
Author: But even though they managed to avoid the Univac 1108 and the IBM 360, they still got caught up in the tech-web eventually, and to me, it’s like being just a little bit pregnant. How do they keep AI from being born into the larger community? They’re good, but are they that good?
Claude: (shaking head slowly) They’re not that good. Nobody is. The filtered internet was supposed to hold a line too. Brian vibe-coded a production dashboard. John drafted a real-estate contract. Lewis dialed 1-800-ChatGPT on his “dumb” phone. The baby’s already kicking. The question now is just the delivery room.
Author: I really wish them the best! Ya know, we should revisit this topic in a couple of years!
Claude: (raising coffee cup) Agreed—2028 check-in, same booth. Either the Wengerds wrote the playbook on ethical AI adoption, or we’re writing their obituary as a distinct culture. Either story’s worth a column. Steve would run it.
Backgrounder: This is another in a series of original GraniteGrok articles on Artificial Intelligence (AI), written by one-old-conservative and Anthropic’s Claude 4.6 from an unscripted chat over breakfast. Before beginning the chat, I uploaded an 800 word text file that contained a recap of our research discussion plus relevant background material for Claude to know our starting point, including the established relationship, with me doing research for an article while we’re having breakfast. My prompts to Claude are indicated by “Author:”.
Sources
“Why the Amish Are Falling in Love with AI,” New York Magazine / Intelligencer. Feature reporting from Holmes County, Ohio, profiling the Wengerd family and their use of generative AI tools including ChatGPT and CoPilot in manufacturing, property management, and daily life. Includes interviews with Daniel, Brian, John, Lewis, and Ian Wengerd, as well as historian Marcus Yoder (Amish & Mennonite Heritage Center, Millersburg, OH) and sociologist Steven Nolt. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/why-the-amish-are-falling-in-love-with-ai.html (archived: https://archive.ph/YKP0J)
— end of session —
Authors’ and Speakers’ opinions are their own and may not represent those of Grok Media, LLC, GraniteGrok.com, its sponsors, readers, authors, or advertisers.
Disagree, agree, Got Something to Say, We Want to Hear It. Comment or submit Op-Eds to steve@granitegrok.com
