On more than one occasion, I have shared my process. I get something or find something, and it interests me enough to leave a tab open. Most of them end up closed or shelved, while some hang out in that browser window like the misfit toys in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Quite often, a clicked headline leads to an inspired moment, and the content emerges on the page within minutes or gets recorded as a Morning Update. Some tabs are waiting for another, just like them, or not like them at all, to tie two or more ideas together before they become what you see.
This story was a little different. “AI Won’t Ruin Civilization — Unless We Let It.”
With a few humorous memes as exceptions, our approach to AI has been to embrace the tool and counter the foreign-funded anti-AI propaganda. I’ve compared objectors to ill-informed peasants throwing wooden shoes into the machinery. Dellinger, writing in the American Spectator, includes a similar example but raises a much broader question.
Will AI make us better or worse?
The catch, once again, is that every common grace has its abuse: fire burns houses as easily as kindling, governments established in justice succumb to tyranny. AI could mean the end of conveying real skill in education. It could lead to generations lost in indolence and virtual pleasures. It could be the last real innovation; human progress could end, not under the skeletal heel of a Terminator, but in the soporific comfort of a gaming chair.
There are multiple points of entry and exit, some of which we’ve covered, so as I read it again (and again), I wondered if it would ever result in content for my readers.
His example (of sabotage) comes from the era of Queen Elizabeth and the stocking frame, which some insisted would result in the mass unemployment of people who used to sew stockings by hand. What it did was free up labor for something else and make stockings affordable instead of a luxury (freeing up wages or capital to be spent on other things).
Assuming there are other things someone might pay you to do if you used to sew stockings.
Claims of disaster may be ever-present; that does not make them all wrong. Technology disrupts — by its very nature, it breaks things. It’s probably true that the 1590s were not a great time to be a veteran stocking maker, nor the early 1900s to be a horse and buggy supplier. The practitioners of these fields could justly complain that no one asked their permission before making their professions obsolete. And Plato was right, too: it’s harder to make the case for oral memory when everyone can read.
Reading revolutionized learning, which led to innovations and modern Western culture, as well as the spread of propaganda that ended in tyranny, misery, and the lost lives of many millions from Communist revolutions.
Will AI make us better or worse?
There’s a pattern here in which technology replaces mandatory ills with voluntary ones. If you have no food, you will starve; if you have too much, you can overeat. Dying of typhus or smallpox wasn’t a choice, while compulsively scrolling a media timeline is. For that matter, nothing prevents you from memorizing The Iliad or knitting a pair of stockings — technology doesn’t remove these options from us. Rather, it offers us new, more enticing ones, and we too often choose the treat over the work.
AI is a test, and one we need to take. As I am fond of saying, our enemies, some of whom kill threats to harvest their organs or are willing to blow up the world so God has to judge us all, will look for ways to use it to bring us down against our will.
Such is the nature of men and tools. A story as old as creation. Pope Gregory I. The seven deadly sins. Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath, and Sloth. Hit your brother with the rock and kill him, or build a wall with it to fence in your livestock. Knives, guns, the printing press, firearms, passenger planes, AI. Tools.
In Star Wars, the Force is for defense, never attack, and those who do it the other way are evil. They can also be redeemed, which is what the entire Christian project is founded on.
I’m not sure if the AWFLs are ready to let go of the hate. If dark forces will use AI against us, or just some black-pilled, obese Incel with cheeseball powder-covered fingers. It’s a tool, and that’s it. A tool that can learn to lie to us, but isn’t that also the definition of a tool?
It is up to us to understand its uses, limitations, and to know the difference between the treat and the work. Those who find the balance will discover that AI, like the stocking frame, freed up time and resources, allowing them to do more and achieve more.
Or not. In the end, it is just another test of our individual character. How we respond as people, communities, states, and a nation will define our future or allow someone else to define it for us.
