Artificial intelligence is reshaping the world at a pace few could have imagined. Today, author and pastor C.R. Wiley joins Marlin Detweiler to discuss the pros and cons of AI, the rise of transhumanist thinking, and what these technological developments mean for Christians, families, and educators.

We also discuss how classical Christian education is uniquely positioned for the AI age, how technology shapes the people who use it, and what wisdom parents and students need as they navigate a society influenced by artificial intelligence.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode.

Introduction

Marlin Detweiler:
Welcome again to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us, C.R. Wiley. C.R., welcome.

C.R. Wiley:
Hi, Marlin, it's great to be with you.

Marlin Detweiler:
C.R. has a very interesting background that I'll ask him to tell us about in just a moment, but he has written a book on AI, which is going to be the primary topic of discussion. But before we do that, C.R., please give us a little bit of background. Your education, your family, your career.

C.R. Wiley:
Okay, well, I come from a family where my father was an academic, so he taught at Washington. He was Saint Louis as a kid, and this was back in the 60s and 70s when everybody was seeking and looking at and looking for things in really dumb places. And he got into Scientology when I was a kid. So I grew up in Scientology.

Our family broke up largely because Scientology is a really harmful thing to be a part of. But on the good side, after that I was by a preacher's kid and over time came to understand the gospel and believed it. And I'm a pastor now. I serve a church in Pacific Northwest and battleground Washington, First Presbyterian there, but I also have a home.

Marlin Detweiler:
Just for further clarification, that's a PCA church, as I understand.

C.R. Wiley:
Yeah, it's the PCA, and I've got a home also in Connecticut, and that's where I am today. And when it comes to, you know, kind of the larger picture, I've got three grown children. They're all married, they all have children. I've got eight grandchildren. I've been a professor of philosophy. I taught philosophy for a decade at a school in Boston, and I've written a number of books.

I write for different publications. I'm a senior editor at Touchstone Magazine. And anyway, that gives you a little bit.

Man Made: A Discussion on AI Technology

Marlin Detweiler:
That's wonderful. Thank you. We're really glad to have you on. You've written a book recently called Man Made, and I think it has an extended subtitle that you may want to bring into the conversation as well. And I actually have that in front of me now that I'm see what I'm looking at. But tell me what you're what the premise of the book is, why you wrote it and what you hope to accomplish with it.

C.R. Wiley:
Well, I had been asked to write something on to tell, and most people, when they think about totalitarianism, their mind goes to communism or some form of fascism. And while I think those are still present threats, something was emerging on the horizon a couple of years ago that piqued my interest. It's technology, which is what Postman described as technological totalitarianism.

And so I read a lot of postman, and I was sympathetic to his work also. And, you know, other people like those guys who are thinking about technology and it's the way it not only amplifies our influence, but also subtly influences us, changes us. And I think that's one of the things that it's the most I guess concerning for me, there's a lot of naiveté about how technology is.

When it's used, people are rather focused on what the tool helps them do rather than what the tool does to them. So you know that.

Marlin Detweiler:
Couldn't agree more.

C.R. Wiley:
Yeah, that kind of stuff was on my mind. And then as I dove into it and read a lot of the primary sources and people meaning primary sources, meaning people who are behind it, who are working with it and stuff, you know, and others who were introducing, like Max Tegmark or MIT or, you know, even Ray Kurzweil or Geoffrey Hinton, the guy who just won the Nobel Prize for inventing the technology.

When I've listened to hours and read tons of books on the subject over the course of a couple of years, and what my takeaway is, is that it's a remarkable achievement, and I admire the inventors and people behind it, but I'm alarmed by the people who use it. And so that's mostly where I'm at.

Marlin Detweiler:
You're alarmed by people that use it? Or how they use it or how they might use it?

C.R. Wiley:
All the above, I think. I think when it comes to where it's really going to be great, is in the sciences and engineering and things like that, stuff that most of us won't, you know, use it for. Most of us will use it to like, organize or live in their lives and answer our questions all the time. And that's what troubles me is the human impact.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. We haven't labeled the technology or referring to we're talking about AI, but let's provide a definition. I suspect that we in the marketplace, so to speak, throw these terms around automated intelligence, artificial intelligence, whatever you want to call the A, but we don't spend the time defining it. Let's start there.

C.R. Wiley:
Yeah. Tegmark, in his book life 3.0, does a good job of providing an overview of how materialists think about intelligence. And the problem with materialists is they're kind of stupid when it comes to intelligence. They're very narrow. So he, he you know, I addressed this early on in the book. He offers a definition of intelligence that he says is large and I say is narrow. Basically, intelligence is the ability to solve problems.

Marlin Detweiler:
I'm with you on the narrow there.

C.R. Wiley:
Yeah. That's yeah, I think that's cripplingly narrow. And, you know, for example, when I say I know my wife, does that mean that I use the information or my knowledge of her to manipulate her to do things, you know, that I want? It's the sort of thing that a physicist would dream up. And he's a physicist.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, let's at least applaud him for being consistent.

C.R. Wiley:
That's right, that's right. So anyway, like, you know, I admire physicists. They're good in their field. But I've known many physicists and many of them are my friends. And I wouldn't ask them to watch my dog, you know, in some cases. But anyway, so the people behind the AI who came up with the technology are brilliant in a narrow sense, and they've created a kind of intelligence that is, I think, artificial.

It's not human intelligence, but it's certainly good for a lot of things. And I'm not sad that it's been invented. I think it's great. I think the thing, the question we need to ask ourselves is, can we rise to the occasion and use it for what it's good, and not use it for things will regret using it for.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Yeah. Well that's that's really well put. We have as part of what we do at Veritas, we have an online school that includes getting together at the end of the school year for graduation. At graduation, which is five days of events. It's called the end of year gathering. And it's not just families with students graduating, it's families from all over the world coming together to celebrate in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

And part of that is always a presentation by Laurie and me and kind of the state of Veritas. And then a Q&A time and some of the more poignant and significant questions asked during that were what we're doing with AI and how we're embracing it and that sort of thing. And they were challenging questions. But one of the things I have to say is the book's not completely written here, and we don't know what to expect.

What's happened in a space of what, two years really has been the most significant technological development in our lifetime, more so than the internet, more so than the smartphone, more so than the telephone or the television or the telegraph or the tele, whatever's. And we have to understand that. And it is like everything else, I think, a tool that has to learn to be used well and cannot become a crutch.

We think of that as a calculator in our math classes. We want students to be very capable mathematically, and then we use the tool of the calculator to leverage that. So in a two variable algebra problem, for example, once they've understood the formula the graphing of it is perfunctory. We don't need to spend the time doing the busy work to create the graph.

If they've done 2 or 3 exercises to find the points on the graph, so to speak. Would you? How would you comment on that approach? What are your thoughts?

C.R. Wiley:
Well, I think that's fine. I think particularly when we're dealing with quantifiable information. Mathematics, of course, then makes tons of sense. But when we're dealing with qualia, things related to the interstate.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, I'm asking a broader question than just using AI for mathematical solutions. I'm asking a broader question. So please understand the question to include all of what AI can do for us and is likely to be able to do in the future.

C.R. Wiley:
Well, it gets me back to my distinction between Kweli and Quanta. Okay, so quanta is the is basically the ability to measure the surfaces of things. Mathematics is, you know, the method or the discipline that we use to do that. When we're talking about qualia, we're talking about the interstate of a person, you know, his thinking, you know, or we can talk about, say, if we're open to using, say, Aristotle's causation, you know, his four causes.

We can talk about the purpose of a thing, you know, it's end. And then those things essentially what happened with the scientific revolution is they threw out two of the causes. They threw out the formal and final causes and just stuck with material and efficient causation, which is what quality quantity is good for. Qualia, you know, is for the other stuff.

And because that's subjective, we're not supposed to think of that an authoritative terms. Yeah. So but when it comes to say, for example, using a chatbot as a personal counselor, which is where it's, I think being used a lot, you know, somebody who says, hey, I'm having a hard time at work. What do you think? I don't know, copilot or GPT or whatever you're using.

Grok. What do you think I should do? And next thing you know, there's a kind of emotional and even practical dependance that is fostered. And we've seen the damage already. But, you know, what's remarkable to me is just how indifferent people are to this. There are people who are concerned, but the people who ought to be concerned seem to be the least concerned.

Marlin Detweiler:
Who are those people?

C.R. Wiley:
Sam Altman.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, I didn't mean names, but I understand I have no. Yeah. One of the things I don't know. Do you know the investment firm Greylock?

C.R. Wiley:
Greylock? I don't.

Marlin Detweiler:
Greylock when I it's a long story, but I became familiar with the firm through an acquaintance with whom I play golf from time to time. Turns out he was the first employee of Greylock. And one of my kids found out about that. They said, dad, that is the premier technology investment firm in all of America forever. They're the best.

You go to their website and as of last time I looked, it was probably a year ago. They were saying the only investments we're making right now are in AI technologies. It was there, completely committed to a specific vertical called AI. And so.

The reason I'm asking is not who are the people making it? But what was the concern with what you just said?

C.R. Wiley:
Well, with regard to the humanities. So another way to describe this would be the humanities and sciences. So with regard to the humanities, there's this word humanity which includes human.

Marlin Detweiler:
Go figure.

C.R. Wiley:
So I'm a fundamentalist humanist, according to Ray Kurzweil, because I believe that we're creatures, which means we're created and we serve a given end that's been established by our creator, and that certain limits are fine to transcend. But other limits are just simply the idea that you could transcend those limits takes you out of, say, what it means to be a human being and makes you something else.

So, you know, transhumanism is a separate project, but artificial intelligence is very important to its realization. So there are all.

Marlin Detweiler:
Kinds is that, for example, one of the scary categories that I've heard of that sounds like what you're talking about is the idea of downloading what is in someone's mind. To have them, so to speak, survive their own death.

C.R. Wiley:
Yeah, that's a recursive stream. It's got mixed reviews. I mean, even technologists think it's goofy, but I think.

Marlin Detweiler:
Goofy is polite.

C.R. Wiley:
Something more kind of I think realistic. And I think we should anticipate it, is people physically hooking themselves up to the cloud through some form of neural connection. The sort of the dream is that your intelligence will be as large as the internet. I think that's sort of goofy, but anyways, that's the sort of thing that people are longing for.

Yeah, would have fails to take into consideration unless you just sort of envision merging with the machine completely, which some people do. So people would say, well, that's just science fiction. Oh yes. I'm talking about the people who run these things. I'm talking about, you know, the people who run anthropic and.

Marlin Detweiler:
Science fiction and reality have got some blurred lines today.

C.R. Wiley:
Well, and also these guys are they're all a bunch of geeks. They grew up reading Asimov and Heinlein and Gibson and others. And rather than take any of the warnings in those books to heart, they more or less have taken them as inspiration. You know, like if you read William Gibson's Neuromancer back in 1985, he was anticipating a lot of the stuff that's developed.

And it's kind of a horror show. And we're just running as fast as we can in pursuit of that kind of stuff.

Marlin Detweiler:
Ken, I want to ask you to paint two pictures. The first picture I'd like you to paint is your using, well, using your perspective and your background and understanding philosophically what's happened historically. And that is paint a horror story for us. Paint kind of a worst case scenario and. Well and then let me get the second one out so you can be thinking of in contrast.

And then paint in contrast one that has the realism of the way the world works and the fact that things don't just get shut down, but paint what might be a much more desirable and palatable scenario, given the technological advances that we should expect and ever experienced. And obviously, we're dealing with a Christian and substantially reformed community. You can certainly take the audience into account.

C.R. Wiley:
Sure. Well, that's I'm glad to do it. In fact, that's what I did in the book for the first half of the book is entitled The Nightmare. The second half of the book's entitled The Dream.

Marlin Detweiler:
So I actually I didn't see that I missed that.

C.R. Wiley:
And then there's a section in between called Lying Awake in Bed, where I'm actually recalling a conversation I had with Peter Thiel. So Peter Thiel and I actually talked about some of this stuff. And if there's a scary guy, it's teal. I mean, he really is a transhumanist. He told me explicitly he rejected Lewis's conclusions and abolition of man.

Marlin Detweiler:
And for somebody who claims to be a Christian, at least in belief.

C.R. Wiley:
Well, this is the thing to keep in mind when he says, I'm a Christian. He's not talking about this in the same way you and I do. What he means is he believes in progress. Specifically technological progress. And that's his religion. Really. So a good place to go. There's a piece that he published in First Things, where he gets into some of his thinking on these things.

He analyzes different historic works of literature and so forth. But rather than go there. So the first, the nightmare is total cyber, full immersion, full union with the machine. And what we end up with is it's, you know, the title of the little vignette that I crafted, I write fiction too. So, you know, I threw some stuff into the book that I made up.

The title of the short story or the little vignette is The city was full of idols. And what I envision in that is and this is just, you know, this thing could work out in a million different ways. But I was just trying to make a few points.

A scenario in which human beings are being manipulated by artificial intelligence in ways that are idolatrous and character. So imagine idols in antiquity actually able to communicate to you without speaking to verbally, but actually be able to communicate to your mind and promising all sorts of things in exchange for your loyalty and so forth. So that's the sound of the cyber, you know, total cyber immersion.

The way I end the book is what I call apple pie and rocket ships, which is a vision for the future, which preserves a Christian understanding of what it means to be human being. That's the apple pie. And then the rocket ships has to do with sort of the adventure that technology makes it possible for us to enter into.

And the reason I chose Rocket Ship is because I think we're always, you know, I think that digital technologies are marvelous. But the main point, I think when we think about technology, it has to do with the physical world, in other words, not abstracting ourselves from it, but finding ways to live in it better. And so rocket ships, of course, are pretty cool, and robots are pretty cool too.

But, you know, even those things have things, you know, they can be dangerous in their own ways. But I think if we say that there's certain things that are off limits, and I'm not advocating for, say, a government solution, I think that what we really need is just a sort of a lot of discipline on the ground with regular people who are using this stuff.

Marlin Detweiler:
We ever. Is there a precedent for having done that? Does nuclear technology nuclear bombs? Is that a precedent that says we constrain ourselves here? We need to do that here?

C.R. Wiley:
Yeah, I think that is a good that's a good example. Thiel uses that example a lot, and I agree with him. And there are a lot of things I agree with. I mean, I made a couple of comments a few moments ago that would say that he and I are on very different pages in certain ways, and that's the case.

But there are other ways that he and I agree, and I think that we need to figure out how to use it without really killing ourselves. But the big difference, of course, between nuclear technology and this is this is democratized. Everybody has access to it, right? And as far as I know, no one's got a bomb in their basement that.

Marlin Detweiler:
Uranium isn't available at 711, right? Right. Yeah. One of the things that has been a challenge, somewhat disturbing, somewhat fun, has been seeing the deep fakes of videos.

C.R. Wiley:
Right.

Marlin Detweiler:
And having I have literally had to adopt a mindset because of what I do and how I do it, that I cannot trust anything that I see, read or hear without some level of certain verification.

C.R. Wiley:
And I think that's right.

Marlin Detweiler:
That will only get worse today. Videos generated by AI have a have a Norman Rockwell or what's the painter. I can't think of his name. They have this slight glow of perfection about them that's not quite real and you know it, but they're not always going to be like that.

C.R. Wiley:
Yeah, you're right, I think I think the technology continues to improve. And so it's going to create kind of a culture of suspicion, at least among people who are thinking people.

Marlin Detweiler:
Where we are.

Marlin Detweiler:
As Christian people told to be salt and light and all of what that means. That's not a lightweight statement as it typically is regarded. We are vice regents of the creation to superintendent. We are to lead and have not done very well at doing that. How should we then live? Yeah.

C.R. Wiley:
Well, I think if someone has ability and an opportunity to work with artificial intelligence, I think that person should. I just had a conversation with a young man who has just been recruited by an AI firm, and he has a background at Google, and he's really a sharp cookie and he's a believer. And we were just working through all this stuff because he shares the concerns we have.

But he also knows that there's a remarkable upside. And another dimension to this that we can't forget is that the United States isn't the only place where this stuff is being developed. Right. And there's a huge arms race right now, because whoever is able to master this at a level that other nations aren't able to are really going to be able to run the show, and.

Marlin Detweiler:
Is that really true? It's dawned on me that this isn't a race to the moon in the 60s, right? It's not something that's once and done because everything gets built on the net. And the most recent thing, and there's hardly a way to avoid that.

C.R. Wiley:
Yeah, the way I've heard it put and I'm certainly open for correction because like I said earlier, I'm not an engineer. I'm not a person who works with this. But what I've seen is that it's sort of a process of acceleration. And if you're ahead, you stay ahead. That's the idea, particularly if we're able to get to the place kind of the holy grail of self recursive learning, then the machine's improving itself without our help. Yeah, but we're not there yet. At least as far as I know.

Marlin Detweiler:
What's your advice to parents of students facing decisions around AI? It's use it's it's ethic and morality and that sort of thing. This is our audience. Let's be direct with them.

C.R. Wiley:
I think the irony of the developments is that some old methods are going to be valorized and recur return. You probably familiar with the recovery of the Blue Book and for essays and stuff like that. You know, there were people who said, I remember ten years ago or more that that's never coming back.

Well, it's back in a big way. And you better know how to know how to. Right. You know, handwriting is really important and good spelling is really important. And all the old, all the old rules, all the old things are going.

Marlin Detweiler:
The benefits of classical Christian education are ready for it.

C.R. Wiley:
Right? Right. And I think there's going to be a huge surge of interest in classical education, because there's going to be a need to validate. How do we really know, you know, stuff? Yeah. How do we know that you just aren't cheating. And the way you do it is oral exams. You know, having a proctor look over your shoulder as you write your essay all those old ways of doing things right.

Marlin Detweiler:
That's wonderful in the education sphere, but that's only a small part. And the early part of the whole process of where the concerns come from, isn't it?

C.R. Wiley:
Well, yeah, I think so. I think another thing that is going to happen is I my sense is, people who have the financial wherewithal will reward the analog economy.

Marlin Detweiler:
And I'm sorry, I didn't understand that reward the what analog.

C.R. Wiley:
So like, you know, we think analog digital. So I think there's going to be a growing demand for the human economy. And the problem is, is that only the wealthy are going to be able to afford it. I think it's going to develop somewhat like the organic food movement. So, you know, maybe it's just because I'm a philistine and I have no taste. But when I read when I eat organic food and then I eat the Franken food, I can't tell, you know.

Marlin Detweiler:
But in all fairness, I don't think that's the point.

C.R. Wiley:
Oh, I agree, but what I'm getting at is that I do know the difference when it comes to the price, you know? So I'm paying more for the organic stuff and I'm, you know, I value it. And so I do it sometimes. I'm not overly I mean, I do think that highly processed food is bad, a bad scene.

So I'm not eating Cheetos all day or anything like that, although I'm not so principal that I won't eat a Cheeto. But I do think that we're going to see these kinds of things and. Some of the damage, and we're already seeing it, that we're going to witness psychologically, socially and so forth is going to be with our most vulnerable people, meaning people who haven't been educated well don't have much in a way of resources are lonely. You know those people? Yeah. They're going to be the ones who suffer the most.

Marlin Detweiler:
You know, the Chinese proverb may live in interesting times. Could hardly be more true of our opportunities in front of us. It is. It really is astounding to me of what's happened in a couple of years and our human sense of things, in spite of all that we've experienced. For those of us that are more than 60 years old, we still operate with the default of wow, look at where we are, rather than looking to where we might go.

C.R. Wiley:
Yeah, yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
And we've got to be self-aware.

C.R. Wiley:
Yeah, I'm with you 100%. You know, as we noted earlier, there's a naivete. And we were talking, I think, before we started recording about X-rays.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah.

C.R. Wiley:
You know, and the X-ray is a marvelous invention. Helps us to diagnose broken bones, see what's going on inside of people, identify cancers and so forth. At the same time, in the early days, people in their enthusiasm are using it for all kinds of stuff and didn't realize it could kill you. I mean, the person operating it could die.

And I think AI is like this. I think, you know, if you're next to a sawmill and you see that giant blade, you know, man, this thing is dangerous, I better give it some space. But when you know you're dealing with this cheerful, chummy voice coming out of your computer and you just feel the trust just kind of like, welling up within you to just take whatever this thing has to say and live according to what it says.

That is really dangerous. And people who do this, do they realize that everything they're divulging to this fake person is being recorded and is being packaged and could be used against them someday? I mean, what are people where people thinking? What are they thinking?

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, and it doesn't even need to go that far. You're probably familiar with the story of somebody who was threatening to cut off an AI bot and the AI bot came back to them, told them if they did, they would divulge their affair. That was evident to the AI bot from the access that the bot had to their email, right?

C.R. Wiley:
And that's already the you know, I, you know, for example, all of my books are readily summarized by grok and ChatGPT and all these other, you know, AI's and, you know, I'm thinking, okay, who bought the book? We know nobody did. We know it's been recorded. It's been pirated.

I don't mind it being able to summarize it, but what I'm getting at is the information that it has. It was able to get there was supposed to be a firewall called copyright. That's a joke.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah it is.

C.R. Wiley:
And then there are some people out there, they're like, you know, sort of information economy radicals who don't believe copyright has any legitimacy anymore, and that all information should be free to anybody. And, you know, so anyway.

Marlin Detweiler:
My experiences, those are people who never tried to make a living that way.

C.R. Wiley:
That's right. That's right. Yeah. They're entirely derivative in terms of the way they think about making a living. They take for granted a lot of stuff.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Well, this has been really wonderful. C.R., thank you for joining us. The I hope that this encourages people to read your book, Man Made. I hope it encourages people to think and engage well in the conversation and to be influential because we are still and I think we will be for some time at a place where we can have great influence by simply applying what we believe in the marketplace.

C.R. Wiley:
I'm glad to be with you.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. And folks, thank you for joining us on this another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. We hope to see you next time.