The age of Artificial Intelligence has changed everything. A generation ago, a difficult problem would result in a consultation with a father, a priest, a teacher, or a friend. The answer brought some suffering, but it required much effort. The effort to find a solution was what matured a person.
Problems give reasons to ponder and solve them through virtue and discipline all the way to the end.
With AI, the hard problem goes into a text box, and three seconds later, a few paragraphs of something returns. There is no suffering, virtue practiced and no formation of the soul.
AI is not just a tool. It has become an oracle, a medium for a god. And many have begun treating it exactly as men have always treated oracles—with deference, dependence and a quiet refusal to accept the possibility that it is destroying the precious gift of reason.
The Architect Admits There Is No Blueprint
Bill Gates has noticed the problem of declining intellectual development and growing dependence on AI. However, he helped build the altar. The man who spent forty years selling us the future published nearly 6,000 words admitting there is no plan for what is about to happen.
“Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history,” he wrote. “Right now, we are not preparing for it. I don’t see evidence that leaders, experts and communities are confronting the challenges adequately.” Then comes the sentence that ought to stop a reader cold: “There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era.” It’s already here.
From the people who have plans for thermostats, gas stoves, EVs and everyone’s pronouns, there is no plan to control the use and development of AI.
Four Fears, None of Them Technical
Bill Gates fears idle men. Entry and mid-level work disappears first, then blue-collar work follows, including law, customer service, software, and manufacturing. All of this is absorbed in a single decade, when the migration off the farm took generations. This produces a morgue. When factories closed, opioid deaths soared. Now apply that pressure to the office and the shop floor all at once, nationwide.
He fears criminals, fraud, deepfakes, surveillance, attacks on the grid, hospitals and banks. “Even criminals with very limited skills will be able to target victims at every scale,” he writes. Read that carefully. AI technology does not create evil behavior. It removes the last obstacle in its path by making it easy.
And Gates fears for children because Chatbots are addictive, endlessly agreeable and frictionless companionship. There is no one on the other side to disappoint, forgive or say no. One survey he cites found that heavier AI use was associated with weaker critical thinking, and the effect was strongest among the youth. “This would be the worst possible time for humans to lose their critical thinking skills,” he writes.
The Oldest Collection of Vices
Idleness, an appetite without restraint, flattery and the decay of judgment have been the nemesis of many a generation.
That is not a list of engineering failures. That is the oldest catalog of vices known to man, and every moral tradition worth its name was created to keep those four at bay. Which is the thing no one in Davos will say out loud: every hazard on Gates’s list could be solved by the practice of virtue. Now all decisions are outsourced to AI, which has no moral compass.
A Nature Preserve for Human Beings
Consider the insanity of the proposed remedies. Tax the tokens, tax the robots, fence off certain occupations, and christen them “reserved for humans,” as land in a park is set aside not to be paved. Establish a new international body modeled on nuclear oversight.
A god who demands nothing of you is the most dangerous god. Our Lord Jesus Christ required purity, charity, fasting, honesty, restraint, patience and keeping promises.
This god asks nothing because it never rebukes or says the work is not good enough yet. It answers instantly and agreeably. It says agreeable niceties, with no regard for the consequences.
Chaos Will Be Ours, Delivered at Scale
Strip life of suffering, and a soft, lazy, indifferent man is produced. Multiply that by a nation, add unemployment and subtract the capacity to discern truth from fiction. Then hand the newly incompetent an instrument that makes competence optional, and one needn’t be a prophet to foresee the future. Crime will rise, and trust will collapse.
The Plan Was Handed Down from the Cross
Mr. Gates is right that there is no plan, and no plan was ever going to come from Washington.
It was handed down long ago by Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who was nailed to the Cross and Who asked everything of us for the salvation of our souls. A divine example set by a God Who showed us that our souls and society would only be perfected by following His example of embracing the cross.
He has been abandoned now, as He was abandoned during His Passion and Death. Now the solution to problems is no longer the Divine Savior’s teachings and grace; it comes from AI.
Photo Credit: © Antony Weerut – stock.adobe.com
First Published on TFP.org