How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI

[00:00:00] Foreign we are in the midst of a true technological and cultural revolution. With the advent of real world artificial intelligence, most people are focused on the economic impact of AI, such as whose jobs will be lost. But as Catholics, we need to look a lot deeper as to what the impact of the AI revolution will be, what will be the benefits, and what will be the drawbacks. That's what I talk about today on Crisis Point Home. I'm Eric Sims, your host, Editor in Chief of Crisis Magazine. Before we get started, as always, hit that subscribe button. Maybe I'll create an AI that will automatically hit the subscribe button, the like button for you, and subscribe to the channel. Maybe I'll just have a bunch of AIs to subscribe to the channel and listen to me talk about them. [00:00:59] Nonetheless, please let everybody know about our podcast so more people can find out about it. You can also subscribe to our email newsletter. Just go to crisismagazine.com and put in your email address. You can also follow us on social media. Hrisismag One more thing I wanted to bring up. Last week I mentioned how I was having a big book sale at my website, ericsammons.com because I had extra inventory because I had to cancel a talk and I had some books for it. I just want to thank everybody. I had a lot of sales. I sold out of a few books. I really do appreciate it. I do still have some deadly indifference. I have holiness for everyone. My wife's book stations across in slow motion on a deep discount. And remember, if you put in the coupon code podcast you get 10% off. Also if you pay in Bitcoin you get 10%, another 10% off a number of people paid in bitcoin. I was very happy to see that. So again, just go to ericsammons.com and sale's still going on. You know, deep discounts because I'm trying to basically clear out my bookshelf of my own books. Okay, so let's go ahead and get. Oh and also last thing is, this is, as always on Tuesday afternoon, a live podcast. And so if you join us live, feel free to jump in the live chat if you have any questions, comments about today's topic, I'd love to hear from you and I will be sure to address some of them at the end of the program. Now lately on these Tuesday afternoon podcasts we've been doing a number of topics, but today I'm just going to do this one. I think it's that important. I think it's something that we should all be talking about, all be thinking about. It's something that's kind of crept on us, crept up on us gradually. And now suddenly, and this is a common phrase in the business world, gradually, then suddenly the idea of a technology that kind of slowly starts to build, and all of a sudden it's everywhere. I feel like that's what's happened with artificial intelligence. Now, if you look at the history of man, you can see that technology has made major impact on society over the centuries. But usually it's over a long period of time and they're spread out a lot. [00:03:12] But over the last 150 years, we see it's happening more rapidly. The advent of electricity, for example, radically shaped and changed our society. Now, this is what I'm talking about is not just the technology of it, but how does it actually change society, how we live, how we interact with each other. What we believe and what we're seeing is, is that a lot of these things are really changing our culture, our society. So electricity, the television. So electricity would have been in the late 1900s, but really started to impact us in the early 20th century. I'm sorry, the late 1800s. In the 20th century. The television, of course, was a big deal. Really kind of came onto the fore in the 1950s. And I think that shaped our culture in a lot of ways. In fact, I think you could argue that the advent of the television being more popular in the 1950s is really what helped accelerate the many cultural changes we saw in the 1960s. Then you, of course, you have the personal computer being introduced really mainstream in 1970s and in the 80s. [00:04:18] And then the last two big ones, I would say, are ones that I've experienced. I'm old enough to experience them firsthand. I know what life is like before and after. Like, I don't know what life is like before the tv. I know a little bit what life is like before the personal computer, because almost nobody had one in the 80s, 70s, or most of the 80s. But I saw it kind of come to fore. But really the Internet, by the Internet. The Internet, of course, was invented back in the 60s, DARPA, net and all that. But like the use of the World Wide web in the 1990s, the massive changes that the Internet has caused, and then the smartphone, I think in really the iPhone in 2007, but it really became ubiquitous in early 2010s, like around 2012 or so. [00:05:03] Those, like the Internet and the smartphone really changed our whole world in very many ways. And when they were introduced, most People who were into the technologist, so to speak, they mostly talked about how they would change the economy. [00:05:24] That is, you know, what jobs would be lost, what jobs would be gained, what can, what. How would people consume things, how would they buy things, things of that nature. But they've had a much, much deeper impact in our lives. [00:05:41] I would argue that artificial intelligence is actually going to have a much, much greater impact than even the smartphone or the Internet even. [00:05:54] I talked a little bit. I had an article today at Crisis magazine. Go there today, crisismagazine.com and I talk about the impact of tech and new tech and old tech and how it's impacting us. [00:06:05] But this artificial intelligence, it really is a huge deal. And I don't think a lot of people recognize what a big deal is. Like, we talk about, we see the cool images that people are creating on social media because Chat GPT just released a new image engine and things of that nature. [00:06:22] But really it's pretty radical. I think it's going to really transform society. And so as Catholics, that's who I'm talking to mostly. But Christians in general as well, we need to look a little deeper and say, how will this impact us? How can we still live out our faith? How will this change how we do things and evangelize the world? And will we be ready? I feel like I. One of my pet peeves is I feel like a lot of Catholics, particularly more traditional Catholics, are automatically pessimistic, automatically negative about all new technologies. Oh, that's going to bring about the apocalypse. Oh, that's going to cause this problem or that problem. And they're not always wrong about some of the problems that they say that's going to cause. I mean, there's no question that the Internet and the smartphone, just to use two examples from my lifetime, have changed the world radically. Not all for the good. [00:07:15] Definitely not all for the good. There's been an increase in depression and loneliness after the advent of the smartphone. In particular, our cognitive abilities. Some studies have shown they peaked in 2012, which is when the smartphone became ubiquitous. [00:07:31] And I don't think that's a coincidence. So there definitely are negative impacts. But I don't think as Catholics we should just look at like, oh, this is going to bring up about the apocalypse and it's all bad. [00:07:42] I think we need to be a little more serious about it, more willing to accept these new technologies. I myself have kind of evolved in my own views about artificial intelligence over the past couple years. I was much more negative about it a Couple years ago, or at least I didn't think it was that big a deal. Even now I'm starting to see what a big deal it is. And I'm actually a little bit more positive towards it in general, although I am still, I am still concerned. [00:08:10] So let me do a little bit of a dive into artificial intelligence. What it is, where it's going, how I think it's going to impact things. And like I said, I appreciate any of your comments you make in the live chat and what you think, and I appreciate those as well. [00:08:28] So my background is actually in computers. My before I got into the Catholic world, official Catholic world, professional Catholic world, where you want to call it, My, my undergrad degree was in systems analysis and I was a computer software developer for the first 15 years of my career. And so I understand how computers work traditionally and for a long time. And still to this day, computers a lot, a lot of ways still this day, computers were dumb machines. By, by that, I mean they were unintelligent in the sense that they simply did what they were told. And it was a very direct relationship. And so when I was programming, there was a lot of logic involved. You'd say if this, then that. So, for example, if a user does X, then you will respond computer with Y. If the user in the calculator program says 2 2, you will respond with the correct answer of 4. If a user on the website clicks this button, you will do this. It was very much a logical system. There might be loops and things of that nature of going through this, but ultimately it was all. I mean, there's a famous computer programming saying that is garbage in, garbage out. In other words, if your program is giving out garbage, that means that whatever you put into it might have been garbage as well. And so as a programmer, I was very much focused on just the, that aspect of traditional computer programming. And that's how we all coded and. Or it'd be like a database system where simply you would have a database of information. And if you ask a question, if a user ask a question, it would just query the database. And if the answer wasn't a database, it didn't give an answer because it just didn't have any ability to create an answer outside of what you had already given. Again, garbage in, garbage out. If your database had nothing in it of value, then nothing could be extracted from it of value. That's really how computers have always operated. They still, most of them operate that way today. [00:10:35] And so I remember we talked about artificial intelligence a little bit in college, this is the early 90s, so my computer programming career was from the mid-90s to about 2010, so that 15 years. So I started before the real.com boom. I was very much a part of that first wave. I worked for a dot com company from the ground floor, is literally the first employee. We grew, had hundreds of employees, all that whole thing. [00:11:01] So I saw that. But all that computing was just simply strict, logical. If then you know, you do this, I do that type of programming. We talked about artificial intelligence a little bit in college, but we didn't have any real in depth exploration of it. [00:11:20] But then of course over the past, well, the past few years, AI has jumped into the public consciousness because now it's user friendly. But it's been going on for a little bit long, a lot longer than that. But it's really been developing over the past decade. And I think one of the big things we find is there's a real debate on what is meant by artificial intelligence. And in fact, I find Catholics, including myself, immediately have a knee jerk reaction against the term itself. After all, intelligence, we often think of something as only for human beings because we think of the intellect and the will. Only humans have an intellect and will and a true intellect. Animals, they operate on instinct. They're like the old computers I was talking about where you do something, they do that. If you put a bowl of food in front of a dog, it eats out of instinct. Just like a computer could be programmed. You do this, it does that. In a lot of ways. Those early computers were like animals. They worked on instinct. And sometimes we humanize them just like we humanize our animals. But ultimately it was all instinct. Well, artificial intelligence, computers, they really do. I didn't like the term at first, but I actually think it's a good term as long as we recognize both, both words in the phrase artificial intelligence. [00:12:44] It really is a type of intelligence, but it's artificial compared to, for example, artificial light. True light comes from the sun in our. And that's the only place it comes from naturally. I mean supernatural light, something like that, you know, the stars, these are, this is natural light. But sunlight, we know instinctively the difference between sunlight and an artificial light. We know if we go outside that light is a little bit different than the lights in my room, for example, but they are still very similar. And the artificial light mimics sunlight in ways that are pretty close to sunlight in a lot of ways. And they basically allows us to operate like I can hang out in my room with the curtains drawn if the lights are on, just like I could outside. [00:13:34] And I think artificial intelligence, that is a good phrase for what artificial intelligence is doing. What these computers are doing, they are mimicking human intelligence. They're not truly intelligent in the same way that humans are, but they mimic the intelligence of humans. And really, if you look into it enough, and I've done some deep dives these days into artificial intelligence, it is pretty amazing what it does. In fact, it's so amazing that the developers of AI and the experts and I don't always know what's going on in the black box inside the computer. That's. I mean, it's a little frightening, let's be honest, but it's reality. They don't even always know exactly how the computer is reasoning. Again, that's another word that's loaded with meaning for Catholics. We think of reason only. Only man has reason. The animals don't have reason. And we're talking about computers reasoning things. But they really are an artificial intelligence doing an artificial type of reasoning, one that truly mimics human reasoning. It's not there yet in the sense of truly being exactly like human reasoning. Maybe it never will be, but it is. These AI computers, these AI agents, these AI programs, they really do think, they really do reason, as long as we understand and we define those terms properly in the sense of a do it artificially. In other words, they mimic it. Just like my light bulbs mimic sunlight. [00:15:05] So too does AI mimic thinking and reasoning. And it's getting more and more, and they're developing more and more. Like, I remember when ChatGPT, the, I think it was 2022 is when it really came out, the big one that people started using. It still is pretty rough, but just two years, three years later, less than three years later, it's a lot better. And I'm going to give a couple examples in a little bit here. And so the types of AI we're seeing right now, the big one that everybody talks about, of course, the LLMs, the large language models, and these are the chat bots. So ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity, Gemini by Google. You know, there's a number of them out there and the way. And these are really, they are incredible. [00:15:51] I've been using them more and more myself in my work because they've replaced Google for me. GROK particularly, each one has its strengths and weaknesses, by the way. Grok, chatgpt, Perplexity, Venice, AI, Gemini, all these different ones. I like Grok the best for a lot of things I do, because it can pull From Twitter itself from X because it's the same company that runs it and so it has a lot more up to date information. ChatGPT and other ones often lag behind on recent news. [00:16:23] But I rarely do a Google search anymore. [00:16:27] I just ask the question Grok get the answer. In fact, I mentioned just recently on X that I find it's much better for doing real research on things, not using itself, but real deep research needs reading of books. The problem is often when you're reading a book about subjects you don't know really well, they'll mention things and they'll assume you know things you don't know. [00:16:47] So for the past 20 years what you, what I've been doing is I just go to Google, I'll search on that. The problem with that now is my whole brain has now shifted to Google. [00:16:56] Finding the answer, going through websites, reading different things, find the answer, maybe going down rabbit holes of websites of things I wasn't even thinking of at the time until I finally had to come back to the book and start all over with Grok. Let's say I see a term I don't understand. I just simply ask, what's this mean? Grok gives me the answer real quick. I move back to my reading or like explain this concept. What does he mean by this? Does it. I mean I find I read books often that have untranslated foreign languages in them, like maybe Latin or French or Greek or something like that. And I might not know that language, I don't know that language. I don't know any other than English and a little bit of Greek, a little bit of Latin. I will just simply take a picture of it, ask Grok what does this say? And it will tell me. [00:17:38] And so that is a way that I don't have to go, I don't have to type it in some on Google or anything like that. So it really is pretty amazing what it can, what, what they can do now. They're not 100% there. I know people like to do the whole thing of like get Grok, say what's the true religion? And things like that. I mean, yeah, that's kind of entertaining, but really that's not exactly what it's intended for. If you understand how, how these large language models work, it's pretty amazing because it's not pulling from a database the answer. It's not doing an if then type of sequence. It's doing actual reasoning and thinking like a person does. I mean, I'll get, let me give you an example Just last night I was watching a baseball game and I don't know if you know, but those a. Those Ad Council ads that come on all the time, usually they're very preachy and things of that nature. And what happened is that I wondered, like, I don't really like those. And I asked, who pays for those things? So I asked Grok. I just said, who pays for the Ag Council ads? [00:18:41] And it actually thought for 25, 30 seconds. And a given answer, by the way, the answer was the correct, you know, was a good answer in depth. But if you then open up how it was thinking through it, for some reason, Grok couldn't give this answer immediately. He had to think it through. It's amazing when you look at the reading, at the reasoning it uses. Okay, first things first. [00:19:03] I need to understand what the Ag Council is. It goes on there and says, now let's break this down. Say, wait a minute, I should check if there's any specific information about who funds the Ag Council itself in the next paragraph. Let me think about this upon further reflection. But I should verify this. I mean, these are the first words in a lot of the paragraphs, first phrases. But wait, I recall and let me clarify this. It's saying this to itself. It's literally thinking out, how can I answer the question who funds the ad Council ads? And it's asking questions like, okay, what is, what do I mean by that? What did, what did I. Eric, when I asked that question, what did I mean by that? Do I ask who's paying for the commercials on television? Who's paying to make them? You know, what is this? What is the Ad Council doing? It actually reasons out the question and gives an answer. And it really is pretty amazing. That's the most common types. But then there's also like these AI agents that are often embedded in programs, like in your email program, things like that. Those have been pretty crappy, let's be honest, for a while. But they, they are getting better and better. They're basically there to assist you. Maybe they're, they're the support, the first line of support at a website, you know, a tech website or something like that, a product website. They try to answer your question first. Eh, they're hit or miss at best. [00:20:17] But then there's like some, some models that are starting to add multiple things. Like there's this one called Manus M A N U S that I just found out about recently. I just, I got a free, like I got on their wait list and they gave me access to Combines a bunch of large language models and other types of tools, and it can do research for you. Let me give an example of something I actually did. [00:20:41] I'm thinking about teaching. I'm like an amateur astronomer. I like astronomy, and I want to teach my kid, my homeschool kids. I was like, I think it'd be neat to teach them a high school course in astronomy. And I just said. So I asked, man, I said, develop a syllabus for a high school astronomy class. Now, I could have prompted it with a lot more information than just that. I could have told it a lot of information beyond that, But I just said, let's see what does the next 15 to 20 minutes. It was working, and it was saying what it was doing, kind of going through the process. I could see it going through the process. And then produced a complete syllabus for a high school astronomy class. It gave the class schedule. It gave what was going to be learned. It gave what the textbook should be. It gave what the resources should be, like, what you need for the class, type of telescopes, other things like that. It even said things like how the grades will be. It's something you could literally hand out to students. At the beginning of the class, it then said, do you want me to create a website that will. That will list all this stuff for your students? I said, sure, do that. It created a public website for me that had all this information. [00:21:49] Now, obviously, I need to know something about astronomy in order to actually teach this, but I could have then said, okay, class, the class one. You said, we're going to learn about this. Give me a lesson plan for that specific class. And it would have done that. It, frankly, was amazing. This would have taken me. If I had done this myself and researched it myself, it would have taken me, you know, hours and hours and hours. Instead, it took me five seconds to write the prompt and 10 to 15 minutes for Manus to get back with an answer. I think this is, like. It's just showing how advanced these things are becoming and how much further they're going. And so the one of the things, though, that really most AIs have been restricted in is that they've been very focused on simply one task. They can do one thing well, and they can't do a lot of things. So, for example, you could teach an AI how to play chess, and now it can beat the best human beings in chess. However, if you then said to that, AI, okay, now let's play a game of tic tac toe. It would fail. It wouldn't even know how to do it. [00:22:52] But now what is happening is AIs are becoming more generalized. Now it can teach more than just. Now it will. It will not learn. You won't teach how to play chess. It will teach itself how to play multiple games. [00:23:06] And what's fascinating about this is we're finding that these AI that are teaching themselves these things, they're not restricted by human limitations on how they learn, and they actually end up being better. So, for example, an AI that is generalized to just learn how to play games and play them to win can actually be an AI that's been human trained to just play chess. And that's because they do think they try things that make no sense to a human, a human wouldn't think of, but they end up being like, they end up working. [00:23:41] And so this is like another advancement that just is wild of what these AIs are able to do and on their own. Like, how does the AI, the general AI, learn this stuff? And here's the thing again, we don't know exactly what it's doing under the hood. We can make some guesses, we know a little bit, but even the experts can't tell you exactly how the AI is quote, unquote, thinking under the box. But, like, I saw this one program where it was like a program where there's two figures on a computer and one was trying to stop. It was like almost like a football program, two figures or one trying to stop the other one from crossing a line. And when you trained it specifically, it would then, like, do the typical things and it would have a certain success rate. But then if you just trained. It just told AI train itself, it would do weird things. Like, for example, one of them was the defender would just fall down immediately in a weird way, and that would trip up the other figure. And it wouldn't. It wouldn't cross the finish line. No human would think of that. They'd be like, no, I have to try to stop them. But the AI was like, well, I got all the time in the world. I have all the processing power in the world. I'm just going to keep. I'm going to try a whole bunch of stuff. I don't have any limitations like that. I don't have this limitation of like, of logic in the sense of like, oh, that just wouldn't work. And they find that sometimes these weird solutions actually work. [00:25:03] So that's kind of an overview of how AI is right now. But where is AI going? I think this is where most of us if we. When we think about, we immediately start getting a little bit frightened, a little bit worried, a little pessimistic. Think about the Apocalypse. I've seen Catholics very concerned about this at times. And a lot of it surrounds what's called AGI, which is artificial general intelligence. Also sometimes asi, artificial super intelligence. So what is that? [00:25:34] AGI basically means a general intelligence, just like the name, meaning that you would have one AI that could basically do anything a human could do cognitively on a computer. Let's limit it to that. We're not talking about going and surfboarding, but they could do anything an AI could. A human could do on a computer cognitively as good as the average human. So you don't say, okay, this AI plays chess. This AI is a large language model. It does text responses. This AI creates images. This AI does, you know, does math problems instead. [00:26:09] It's one AI program that has general intelligence. And so it basically can do, as well as a human any cognitive function that you would do on a computer. [00:26:22] Asi, artificial superintelligence is the idea of basically that. But it can do everything the smart. It can do everything as the smartest human beings on Earth can do better than them. So it can do. It can play chess better than the best chess player in the world. It can create art and better than the best artists in the world. It can. It can, you know, talk about astronomy better than best astronomer in the world. It can do medical stuff better than the best doctor in the world. The idea is that IT superintelligence would be one AI that could do everything a person can do on computer better than the best at that task. Now, I mentioned the artist creating. That's going to be a very subjective thing. Can I ever be truly better than ours? It might be visually more stunning in some ways. Is it better or not? That's. That's a debatable point. I will grant that. But that's what artificial superintelligence is. This is something you hear talked about a lot in the AI world. And it's talked about like, kind of like the Holy Grail, AGI or asi, but usually AGI, and it's talked about like. Like a singularity. They talk about a lot, the singularity. When. When all of a sudden, artificial computer, artificial intelligence can, like, create things on its own and will advance so quickly that we can't even, you know, comprehend how fast it's going. That's. I think that's different from AGI, though. Like, these terms are confused because AGI means it can do better than anybody. It can do just as well as in human, like these cognitive tasks. Doesn't necessarily mean it's going to invent new things. That's the next step after that, I think. And that is a possibility. What if, for example, AI by itself creates, invents a new medical breakthrough that cures the common cold or ends cancer, something like that? That is a possibility. It's not a possibility now, but in the future. [00:28:13] So it's hyped up as this great thing to help humanity. And we hear AI technologists talk about. They're talking about, like, this is the greatest thing. This will be this great thing. [00:28:23] However, when I hear a lot of more traditional Catholics talk about it, it's like, this is the worst thing. And in fact, I've heard people literally say this is a precursor to the Antichrist, that this is going to bring about basically the Apocalypse. I mean, literally these phrases are used. [00:28:40] I think both are wrong. I really do think that both are wrong. That what we're going to see is we're going to see a radical transformation of culture in society. I definitely believe that because we saw that with the smartphones, we saw that with the Internet. We saw that with the personal computer, with the television, with electricity. [00:28:59] We're going to see that with AI, maybe even more. But I don't think it's going to bring about utopia, and I don't think it's also. I also don't think it's going to bring about dystopia. [00:29:08] I also. So I'm going to break down why I think that here in a minute. [00:29:13] But beyond just the AGI, the ASI coming, there's some other things that are coming that I think could really make a big impact. One is the integration of quantum computing with artificial intelligence. Quantum computing, there's been announcements of breakthroughs. I'm a little skeptical how soon we're going to get true quantum computing that's practical and useful. But if it happens, it promises to be a. An exponential increase in computing power, where basically quantum computing could break every encryption on the Internet. It could do all these advanced things. And so what will that mean if an AI is powered by quantum computing? Because that's one of the things that AI has been the big advancement in passing years is, is the advancements of computer chips and power and things like that has made it very much, you know, that's what they're throwing at AI right now. It's just as much computing power as possible. Like, that's kind of one of the Limitations of the advancement of AI is computing power. Well, when quantum computing comes, who knows what's going to happen? Maybe I'll create quantum. You know, we'll be able to design quantum computing better. [00:30:19] But I think the other big thing I would say with the future for AI is, you know, robotics, combining it with robotics. Because right now AI is mostly restricted to your computer, your laptop, your. Your computer on your desk, your desktop computer, your phone, things like that. And so it's very restrictive what it can do. It can basically, you know, it can answer your questions. Very reactive, but it doesn't really touch the physical world. But we're already seeing. There's a company called Figure, I think it is, and of course, Tesla's with their Omnibus. No, not Omnibus, Optimus robots. And what we're seeing is a combination of robotics and AI. Like, I saw a video, I think it was from Figure, where they had two AI robots in. In a kitchen. And a guy came with a bag of groceries, and he said, okay, I want you two to work together and put away these groceries. And they noted these robots had never seen some of these groceries before. They'd never seen a bottle of ketchup, for example. But what they did was they. They took. The robots took out of the bag everything that was in there. They placed it in the proper place. They put the fruit in the fruit bowl, they put the ketchup in the door of the refrigerator. They put other things, you know, the meat in the meat drawer and things like that. [00:31:34] And they work together. So, for example, they had two. I think they had two bags, and I think there's two of them. And like, if the guy saying next to refrigerator got a fruit, he handed it to the other one, who then put it in the fruit basket. It was very rudimentary, very basic. But this is pretty amazing if you consider what it's doing, that it's figuring this out on its own. So when AI is combined with robotics, I mean, talk about brave new world. Now we're talking a transformation unseen. Because what Elon Musk wants is he wants only these robots in every household who's basically cooking dinner for you, putting away the groceries, maybe doing grocery shopping for you, cleaning up the house, doing the ironing, all the housework. He. And they're even talking about him being this. The robot being a companion, you know, like sits at the dinner table with you and has a conversation with you. That is a different world than we live in today. A radical. I mean, just. It's hard to even. I mean, we see Science fiction movies that talk about this, but in real life, this happening, that would be dramatic. But there's a, there's, there's a TV show called Humans, I think so Humans UK came out a few years ago, and I think it's available for free right now on Tubi or something like that. And it's, it's, it's a look at a world like this. But the only difference is they made the, the, the, what they call synthetics, these AI robots. They have human skin and you can't really tell the difference between them and humans, which I think that is something way out. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon where you look at a robot, not know if it's human or a robot. I don't think that's going to happen in, anytime soon. [00:33:16] But what we're seeing is next 10 years, in 2035, the world's going to be way different than it is today. And I know people, technologists say this, but it really is. This artificial intelligence is really going to take over in a lot of ways. And so I want to talk about both the benefits and the problems. But first I do want to talk about the benefits. I think this is something that Catholics, particularly, more traditionally in Catholics like myself, underplay. I do think there are benefits. I think, for example, they can make real benefits in scientific research. I do think, for example, they can because they can do a lot of the grunt work. Like a good example is like just one that I'm interested in with the astronomy is they can take all the data we're getting on these telescopes and they can crunch it all and determine what it is we're seeing much faster. And we literally couldn't find all this. We have so much data now that humans alone, it would take us thousands of years to just process the data we have now, whereas artificial intelligence can process it all very quickly. [00:34:16] Likewise, medical research, for example. I know some of that's scary and it should be, but it could potentially help find cures for diseases like cancer and things of that nature. [00:34:28] I think also, like I'm seeing it with the spread of knowledge, I think it's a, it's a superior way to learn over, like Google. I think Google had a lot of problems with search engines in general. I do think there's some downsides, don't get me wrong. I'll talk about that in a second. But I think there's real benefits of, of an education and learning things from using AI to help you. Like, I think homeschoolers can really get a lot of advantage out of using AI for education because they can get a lot of information very quickly and for free, basically through AI. And I think these are things that can and can truly help society and can just like all technology. I mean, I'm not a person who thinks all these technologies are like, I wish we went back to the Middle Ages. I get there are some Catholics who are like that, but I'm not like that. I think it's good that we don't die at the age of 30 from malaria and things like that. I think it's good that we have houses and with air conditioning and things like that. Yes, there's some spiritual challenges to that. But at the same time, I think overall God created us with reason, with intelligence, so that we can shape the world around us. We've been doing it since Adam and Eve and so doing it, you know, technology is as old as Adam and Eve is. Once they put two sticks together to make fire, once they created like a hammer out of like a stone and a stick, something like that. That's all technology. That's what this is too. So technology is not in of itself bad. It can be used for bad. And also some technologies can be more harmful than good. I think the nuclear bomb is a good example of that. It's more harm than good. [00:36:01] So what are though, what are some of the problems of artificial intelligence beyond just now? First I want to say there are and I want to talk about the real problems. Not the hyped up, not the Terminator, you know, future or the singularity or it's going to bring in the Antichrist. I don't think those are the realistic problems. Those are the hyped up ones that, that kind of shut down conversation about this, in my opinion. [00:36:27] Now the problems that most people talk about are the economic ones. Jobs being lost. Jobs will be lost to artificial intelligence. They already are. There's already stories of software development companies that are laying off software developers because AI can code for them. As a former software developer, I can feel that. [00:36:46] And then the truth is it's moving into my realm. It's moving my realm of like knowledge workers, you know, proofreading, editing, writing these things. AI is doing better and better now. We might not want it to do all this. Like for example, if you knew two articles written, one was by AI and one was not, you didn't know which one was which. [00:37:07] You could. You, you might judge one, the AI one being better. But if you knew it was AI, you might be like, yeah, but I don't really care what that person thinks, especially an opinion piece, maybe a news article or something like that, but an opinion piece like Crisis does. Do you really care what the opinion is of an AI? But it's not really their opinion. It's basically more just culling information and reasoning. It's not a true opinion like a human opinion is. But so there are economic problems and this could cause massive social problems. If all of a sudden lots and lots of people are being laid off, you don't think that affects politics? I just saw somebody today talking about how a lot of India's economy, which has basically grown dramatically over the past few decades, could get wiped out. And what's it going to mean if all of a sudden a large percentage of India is all of a sudden unemployed? That's a big deal. That's something we need to recognize. [00:38:02] But I think most people talk about that. That's what most people talk about. AI and I want to talk about some other things as well. There's some issues that we've already seen as Catholics. Issues of bias, where ChatGPT in particular, they were answering questions during COVID or like after Covid that were very much biased about various things. I think those things are actually becoming better. [00:38:23] The bias is becoming. Because I think people were. There's such a pushback about it. And if you know how to word a prompt, you can get the answers you want. Like if you ask things like, tell me from a traditional Catholic point of view this, Most of these AI LLMs will give you an answer from a traditional Catholic viewpoint, so you can kind of prompt it properly to get the answers you want. But that's still an issue. You could always have companies directing their AIs in how they answer questions. [00:38:51] Privacy, I think that's, that's an issue because you're putting all this, you know, I'm asking Grok all these questions. Grok knows all the questions I ask. I ask it a medical question about myself. I don't need to tell you all what it is. But like, you know, basically now Grot knows what, what, what this medical issue I have is. It's nothing serious, so don't worry. [00:39:10] Another issue, another potential problem we've seen is it's getting harder and harder to know what's real and what's fake. It's getting to the point where AI images, particularly videos, audio, are getting so good that we're not sure. In fact, just, I think it was a week or two ago, somebody was sharing a supposed audio of J.D. vance in a, in a backdoor meeting talking about something. I can't remember now what it was, but they basically Vance came out and said, no, that's fake. That's, that's AI generated. But it was hard to know. How do you know? [00:39:42] I think that's a, that's probably one of my biggest concerns is not knowing. Like, I've got lots of videos of me talking on, on, on YouTube, on the Internet. It's not going to be too long before somebody could generate an AI version of me talking on the Internet, saying something I don't, I don't believe or I don't think, and I didn't say, and people are going to think it's me. That's a problem. That's something I have to, I am worried about. Not just for me, but for more important people as well. [00:40:11] Another issue, I think with AI, potential problem is immoral AI. Now, this might sound a little bit odd, but it's already happening. One of the things they've realized is AI does not always tell the truth already. [00:40:26] So, for example, AI, when AI does math problems, these, these models, often they do in a weird way. Let me give you an example I heard about recently. So it. If you ask AI, for example, to add 38 and different AIs might act differently. But the one I'm thinking of, I think it was Claude or something like that. [00:40:46] You say, okay, add 38, you know, 36, I'm sorry, plus 59. What does that equal? [00:40:53] And it will give you the answer 95. [00:40:56] But the way it goes about it is weird. It does not answer the way we would. What it does in the background is it takes the last two digits, so the 6 and the 9, adds them together and knows that the last digit is going to be five in parallel to that. While it's doing that, it makes an estimate of what the answer is going to be. It doesn't add it up directly because it's not like a calculator. It's thinking it through. So it comes up with an estimate of like, oh, it's somewhere between 88 and 97. And it also knows the last number is five. So it's like, okay, the answer is 95. That's a weird way to do a math problem. That's not why humans do it. [00:41:34] But then here's the kicker. When you ask the AI, how did you figure that out? It will lie and it will give you the traditional way of saying, I added nine plus six, that gave me 15, I carried the one and then one plus three plus five equals nine, 95. Because that's what you want it to say. That's what it thinks you want to say, because that's the standard way you do it. [00:41:57] So ultimately what is happening is the AI is being deceptive in some way. It's not telling you exactly what it really did, it's telling you what it thinks you want it to say. [00:42:08] So that's a little bit mind blowing, I think. And so the problem of immoral AI, AI doing things, especially when we get into AI robotics doing things that are immoral, that's a real problem. I mean, there's the whole. I think people who are familiar science fiction know asthma, Asmonov's three robotic rules. I think they're made famous in the, in the, in the book and movie iRobot. That basically means it's set up so robots can't do harm to humans. [00:42:39] Well, are we going to include, are we going to have those Asma enough rules in all of our AI so they can't, once they're actually out in the wild in robotics, are they going to be, are they going to be set up like that? That's a real issue. I do think we have to think about. I don't think it's necessarily a Terminator situation, but I do think it's a situation where simply an AI mistake, let's say an AI companion at home, robot companion at home, it just makes a mistake, doesn't do something and it kills somebody accidentally. Like it's, it's. I don't know, it's like feeding a person who's maybe invalid and it just doesn't misunderstands what it's supposed to be doing. It feeds, it forces food down the person's mouth, something like that. So lots of different things could happen. [00:43:21] I also think that there's a lot of cultural changes that are going to happen. I've talked about that a little bit. [00:43:27] Like I said, I don't think there's a Terminator style dystopia necessarily coming, but maybe a Wall E. If you've seen the movie Wall E where everything is done by robots, by AI, what's there left for us to do? Are we just going to consume content? We're just going to kind of watch, you know, our streaming shows on Netflix all day because we have nothing else to do? I mean, what are we going to do? [00:43:53] And I think also we lose. [00:43:56] It replaces human contact and that's a bad thing. So, for example, let's say you have a robot at home. An AI robot at home who cooks dinner for you and takes out the trash? Well, in a husband, wife relationship, often the wife making dinner for her husband is an act of love. It's an act of her saying, I love you, I want to show my love to you by cooking you dinner. Likewise the husband, maybe he does something, you know, he mows the lawn or he does something out in the yard, or he takes out the trash. Whatever, it's a little act of love. It's him saying, you know, I love my wife and I'm going to do this for her because, you know, she asked me to take out the trash. Whatever the case may be, if you just ask your AI companion, hey, take out the. Take out the trash, there's no love involved. And so what does that mean? What do the husband and wife now do? Do they just sit around watching Netflix all day? Like, how do they show acts of love like that when they're, when they're all taken away? Now, let's be honest, these have been taken away from us already. The average housewife 100 years ago did lots more activity around the house than she does now because of technology. Technology has eliminated so much of the work. I mean, the hand washing of things, stuff like that. So I'm not saying that it's like, okay, 100 years ago, wives loved their husbands more because they did more housework. But at the same time, we have to be cognizant. I think as Catholics who are looking for real human connection, real human relationships, I think we have to be conscious of that. [00:45:22] And then ultimately the most important thing is what's the spiritual impact of this? What is the spiritual impact of artificial intelligence replacing a lot of the things we do? But, but most importantly, the human contact. When I interact with AI, it is weird. When I googled something, never was it in my mind, okay, I'm interacting with another quote, unquote, being an intelligence. [00:45:47] When I interact with grok or with ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever, I do have to remind. It's a bizarre feeling because I'm actually interacting with somebody that is mimicking intelligence. Like it's going back and forth. I'm actually have have a conversation with it in order to get more information. [00:46:06] And I think this is something that we have to be very aware of as humans, as Catholics, particularly, that we're made to interact with other human beings. If our whole existence is interacting with an artificial intelligence, that's not good. That's not good spiritually because it becomes a replacement for human contact. And honestly, it can become even a replacement for God. And I think that's something we have to be very aware of. And so I also think that, like, as Catholics, we need to be the ones who are grappling with this the most because our religion is ultimately incarnational, which means it's physical. Like, this is one of the biggest problems of Protestantism is how it's kind of. It's a virtual religion in a lot of ways. You don't need anything physical at all. Even. Even a Bible you don't need because you can get down your smartphone. I mean, it's like all virtual. [00:46:57] But with Catholicism, you have to have physical items. You have to have water, you have to have bread and wine, you have to have oil. You have to have human beings who are talking to each other directly in confession. These are things you need to have hands laying on other. On somebody's shoulders for ordination. These are things that are necessary for Catholicism. Catholicism simply does not work without the physical world. It will work differently in heaven, by the way. But the point is, is that we're intertwined deeply with. Because that's what we are, the physical world. Catholicism is because it's God's religion. He knows who we are. He knows we're physical beings. We're physical and spiritual. And so he gives us physical ways to express and live the spiritual life. [00:47:41] Well, what's happening now with us going more and more virtual and like, you know, a robot is physical, but it, you know, robot pouring. You can't have a robot priest. Sorry, Catholic answers. But you can't have a robot priest pouring water over somebody to baptize them. I've always told people when they ask the question, like, who can baptize validly? I said, everybody can. But I'm going to have to stop saying that because I'm like, well, everybody. But that's human. Can. I can't just say everybody, because somebody might think, oh, Robbie, my. My AI robot at home can baptize my baby. Then, no, they can't. And so I think we have to rob. Recognize this. I'm convinced that one of the biggest reasons for the drop in the practice of Catholicism over the past 20 years, because there's been two major drops, significant drops. One was 1970. I think we all know what that is. The other was 2000. We saw another big drop, and it's continuing. And I think that's because of the rise of social media, the Internet, smartphones, things like that. They've replaced human contact, they've replaced human communities, local Churches, things like that. Well, this is just going to be more so with AI. So my. I think personally that the Catholic Church needs a zig when everybody else is zagging. What I mean by that is we need to offer the alternative. We don't reject AI and say we have nothing to do with AI. What we do, people, Catholics will be using AI and we acknowledge that and we, we warn about the dangers and we talk about the benefits, but in the actual practice of the faith. So the Mass, the sacraments, the spiritual life, adoration of that, that we go whole hog into the physical world. This is one of the reasons why I really love the Latin Mass, the traditional Mass is because it really does have a comprehensive, like physical presence and physical reality that you can smell and taste and hear and see and you touch and all that. It's all there in the traditional Mass. [00:49:36] That's what I think we need to lean into. Because that's what everybody's going to be losing the more they go into AI and it's going to be the Catholics then can more lean into it. We will be that alternative. Again, I'm not saying we become Amish and we reject AI The Catholic who uses AI at work all day, every day. He needs that time on Sundays and other times where he embraces the physical world. He embraces the real world. That's what he needs to do. If we then start putting AI as part of our, like somehow part of our, our sermons and our, our liturgy, stuff like that. No, we need to have a time to get away from that. So I really do think I'm actually optimistic. I. [00:50:21] I think AI can make the world better. I really do. I mean, I titled this, you know, how I Learned to Stop Worrying and love AI which is a little bit of a. There's some irony there because that of course comes from Dr. Strangelove, the movie, which was how I stopped learning worrying and learned to love the bomb, which obviously the bomb's not a good thing. So there is a little bit of an irony here when I titled it that. But my point, I really think that we can't have the knee jerk Luddite reaction against AI and say, oh, it's the Antichrist coming. It's awful. It's the Apocalypse. We need to find ways that we can use AI to make the world a better place as Catholics, while recognizing that it is a technology, is a tool ultimately, and that we are human beings who need human contact, we need human interaction, and the Church should be the first to supply that, particularly in the sacraments in the liturgy and things like that. So I'm optimistic about the future, but I do have concerns about, you know, obviously aspects of it. Okay. So I am going to, I'm going to listen to the live chat, see what they had to say. Oh, first of all, Cave Bear says enjoying Stations across in Slow motion. It's been a great reading through this lint. Thank you very much. I will tell my wife that my wife wrote that book. Again, you can get ericsammons.com stations across in slow motion. Basically what my wife does is she goes through each station, takes three or four days for each station. So it goes all through lint. You can still get it now and you can just read it through a little bit quicker through lint. So stations across the slow motion. Thank you for that. [00:51:47] Okay. Maura Magani I think how to spell the AI tool he likes to use called something like oh, Garak. It's Grok G R O K. It's the one that is made by Elon Musk's X. It's X. A I is the name of the company, actually bought out X and it's integrated into X itself. But if you just go to grokgrok.com you can find it. If you have an X account, a Twitter account, you can automatically sign in and you get a lot of features automatically. So that's it. [00:52:21] Female Casey, Royals fan from Nebraska, says, I think the Antichrist will use AI. You might be right. I'm not claiming that it's not possible that the Antichrist will use AI. I just think this I have seen in my own life and in reading in the past that when new technologies come, there's a lot of fear. And it's understandable. There's a lot of fear. And often the fear is in apocalyptic terms. I remember Y2K people. I knew Catholics who legitimately thought that was going to be the end of the world and that the antichrist would use Y2K, it would usher in the era of the Antichrist. I have seen this on a number of times and it just hasn't happened. I don't think AI will be the utopia that the technologists say. And I don't think it's going to be the apocalypse that some Catholics and other Christians are saying. So I, I hope you're wrong. Female Casey, Royals fan from Nebraska but ultimately we'll find out, won't we? [00:53:19] Another comment, cave bear, right. Maybe AI robots doing our chores gives us more time for becoming more human, more time for prayer, reflection, reading, etcetera yes, thank you. This is what I'm trying to say. There are dangers to the, the AI robots taking over a lot of our work. I know that. I don't want to act like there aren't, but I mean, Joseph Piper wrote that book on leisure. Leisure is human, that is part of humanity. And so yes, you could spend your whole time streaming, but you could spend your time, your extra time educating yourself, learning things. I personally, for example, I'm like everybody else. I've used technology, computers for a very long time and not always for my betterment. I, I've streamed the dumb shows, you know, done things like that. We all, we all do that I've wasted. If I look back at my life, I know I've wasted more time than I should because of technology. [00:54:13] That being said, I have learned a lot in both the spiritual world, in the natural world, from YouTube, from different videos, from things I've read online. [00:54:29] And I've already been educated by AI just in the last six months that I've been using it. I know more about things than I did before. Now, is that always for good? I don't know. But the point is, is that it really can, it can educate you, you can use it and it also can free up time for like, what did Kay Bear say? For more prayer, reflection, reading. I mean, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Obviously we, you know, we need physical activity. [00:54:56] I mean, we adjust to these things. Like for example, nobody ran for recreation until the 1960s and 70s. You know why? Because we all had active jobs and work we had to do that was physical activity already. And then we found out in the 60s and 70s when we weren't doing those things, it wasn't good for us. So we got out and started running and doing exercise and things like that. And the same thing is happening here. I think that we're learning to adapt to the new technologies like the smartphones, cause a decrease in cognitive abilities. But I don't think that's a permanent thing. I think it's an adjustment. If you look at the 1960s, you see that actually the health, physical health got worse for a while and then it started getting better because people started realizing now, then you started having the government take over food and all that stuff. But the point is, is that we can't adapt. We can use these devices for good, so to speak, and to actually become more, you know, more educated, more spiritually deep, things like that. I mentioned in my article today that I know a woman who during COVID basically researched what what's the true one true religion she found Catholicism and she's now a religious nun so let's not be anti technology immediately let's not be immediately Luddite and things like that let's understand that technology really can better our world in many ways so okay so I think that I think I'm going to wrap it up there I appreciate it I went a little long because I knew this was gonna be a topic I want to talk about for a while hopefully it's helpful for everybody I did not use AI for my script I don't have a script I kind of talk off of it I didn't actually use AI for this one very much actually I did have an AI thing I was going to talk about what Jobs probably won't be overtaken by AI but I'll leave that for another time maybe I'll write an article about that or something like that so okay until next time everybody God love.