The A.I. Conversation Needs to Change / Aaron Youngren

On this episode of The Right Stuff, Pastor Jared Longshore is joined by Aaron Youngren of Red Ballon Network to discuss how AI is shaping job markets. Is AI really our biggest threat? Will it surpass man? Or is this all just a Darwinian story?

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What you're really saying when you say that AI is going to take over, it's going to get smarter and smarter and smarter and then just take everything over. What you're really saying is that a man-made machine can thwart the purposes of God. That's what you're essentially saying because God has set the narrative. We know what's going to happen. And yes, someone might wire up their toaster to that handgun and do something really stupid and saying, go wild, go surprise me. Well, you're going to get surprised. In fact, you tell it to do that. Right. Right. It will obey. Welcome to the right stuff, everyone. Thank you for joining me today. Today I have the privilege of speaking with my good friend and elder at Christchurch and also the head of product and marketing at Red Balloon, Aaron Youngren. He's also the author of Wild and Glorious, this very fine book right here, Artificial Intelligence in the Battle for Future Christendom. So Aaron, thanks for joining me today. Great to be here. I really liked your book, but before we get into your book, why don't we start talking about Red Balloon? It's right here nested in Moscow, so there's a local business for you and for me as well. Can you tell us what Red Balloon is and does and can you tell us what the head of product and marketing for Red Balloon does? Sure. So Red Balloon is a merit-based hiring recruiting and software company. So we make software to help people recruit people. We have a job board and we really came out of the BLM riot COVID lockdown era when people wanted an alternative to their crazy corporate jobs. I myself was at a Fortune 100 company at the time, regularly getting handed down political agendas that were just totally wild. They had a COVID mandate and I jumped over to this great company in town that was doing something about it. But we offer fixed fee recruiting and with a high focus on culture fit and merit. It's weird that you have to focus on merit when you're doing. You think that would be a part of the post. Right, right, exactly. So that's what we've been doing. We've been around about four years. And my job in particular is to run ahead of our great engineering team and help them decide what to build in our software. We have a really distinct software that has a unique approach to merit-based hiring. And also to get the word out, my marketing job is essentially a directed team to tell the truth about what hiring is like. And because no one wants to, it makes my job very easy. So nice. Okay. That's what makes this book particularly interesting to me. So I'm a pastor and I'm in higher education, I'm a dean at NSA. And so when it comes to AI-large language models, it's mostly involved in education that hold the difference between reading Augustine City of God. Page by page versus can you give me an outline or poking into various subjects. Even can you give me where does a coin is talk about such and such. And obviously the corruptions that can come from, hey, AI, can you just write me the paper? Or can you take my notes and put it in? So I'm not in the whole, the business marketing world. It really is all sorts of different uses. And you get into that here. So if people are trying to situate your book, that's what's quite interesting about your book. And I'd add the second thing that striking is, well, you're a faithful, by believing Orthodox Christian. And so you're actually providing in that realm of high level business marketing strategy. You're providing sound Christian wisdom throughout this. Yeah. That's fair. All right. So maybe just start with why did you write this book? Yeah. So as a product guy, tech guy, so I kind of grew up in the tech world. My first job was at Amazon.com. I went from boring gray cubicle to a global product leader leading an innovation team. I've always had my foot in that world, been coding software since I was like six years old as a hobby. I, this is not my first book. My first book was about products. I'm a product guy like making things and building things. And I really wanted to write a very far future, you know, excited. Here's where it's all going kind of book. But as I was listening to the way that my friends and colleagues, Christians, were grappling with this new technology, it became very clear that a lot of them were trying to understand it without any kind of biblical framework at all. And this is one of those things. Technology tends to be one of those things that is easily secularized. That we don't, we have a hard time holding up and looking at and saying, what are the actual Bible verses that connected this thing? And so that, that drove me to write this book, which is really trying to provide a biblical foundation for how to understand this new technology, what are right and appropriate uses. And if we believe that we are to have dominion over the earth, what would dominion look like? Okay. And so what would you say, like, if I say, Christian or not, I pick up this book, what's the biggest problems with AI? What are the biggest advantages? How can you like, in a nutshell, what do you teach me here about how to be a better AI user, a better human? Yeah. I'm assuming your position is not ignored entirely into the Luddite thing. You're not a techno file either. For good reason. But then there's like everyone, you know, the middle, the middle way, the wise way of voting the ditches is one way to shape it. But what else would you say? What's the key dangers I need to look out for, what principles do I need to consider? Well, the first thing is we have to realize that we have been living in someone else's story when it comes to this technology for at least 75 years, probably more. That the narrative and even the grounds on which we have this conversation are set by someone else. So the first thing that I want to do is get out of that conversation. And what I'm talking about is a conversation in which my only two alternatives are number one, we just created something that is going to become transcendent over us, more enlightened than us, you know, take over our government, show us the path to salvation, which many people right now are. Or number two, we've invented something that is going to outsmart us to a degree that it's going to cause the end of all human civilization. And in the conversation, you know, the leaders that are making all of the money and all the technology right now have some mix of both. And sometimes they use the pessimistic view that it's going to annihilate us all to run ahead and say, so, you know, let the good guys handle it, we'll go out and go full speed ahead. Neither of those are biblical conversations at all. So on the one hand, on the positive view, you have people who have this absurd idea that humans, we humans can make something that actually transcends us. So the first thing I want to say is that's just not a possibility, right? We're made in the image of God, God is the only one who knows himself fully, knows his own mind, God is the only one who can create something like us. Now we might create something that can do certain tasks better than we can. We already have a category for that, right? I can't drive a nail nearly as well as even a hammer, right? We have tools for that. So, but we're not going to create something that transcends us because we are created uniquely in the image of God. On the other hand, we could create something, I believe, that has, that is capable of bringing disaster upon us. It would be kind of a falling into your own net type of disaster is what I believe. I think we're capable of that, but we're not going to reset the clock on the plan of the redemption of the world, you know, that God has made. Okay, so the tree is growing, right? The mustard seed has been planted, the tree is going, I don't think we're going to go back down to a, you know, a one inch high stump in the ground. I don't think you can thwart the purposes of God like that. So could a country, you know, use AI in such a way that would bring catastrophe on its own citizens? Yes, I think that is true. But it's also not really nearly as interesting of a question or a problem is a lot of people think like from my view, if you wire up your toaster to a handgun and potent that handgun at your face and then say, I wonder what happens when you push this lever down? You know, everybody's going to look at you and just think you're an idiot, you're an idiot. But we have this fascination. Well, if we do really dumb things with AI, what will happen? You know, and it's not that interesting of a question, but you have to have principles to actually know how to not do dumb things. So that, I mean, that's, I find that to be right on the money and really not only like the founding principle of your book, but also one that when I read, I thought, well, this is, this is makes perfect sense. I'm a Christian. This is a Christian take on AI on the nature of, basically on the nature of man. And so you, you, you, you talk about this, basically you have a chapter that's basically on anthropology in my assessment. But you also commit in the book early on, say, I'm not going to call these artificial intelligences. I'm going to call these man made intelligence. That's right. And he said this might be a little clunky, but it's essential. And I'm glad you made that move because it underscored throughout your book. If I was going to say, what's the unique take of this book? For example, we read books like at New St. Andrews, we read, amusing ourselves to death, postman, or any pastor Douglas Wilson's plot activity. You've got also Neil Postman, technology, God with the internet's doing to our brain, situating these very interesting, it basically tech books. Yeah. What is interesting here and seem plain to me, but also seemed like actually fairly controversial, even in like Christians, or goes, I could hear a Christian going, okay, I think what he's saying is true. So they won't transcend us. They won't develop a mind of their own. We always use that language. Can we bake enough data into the program that it turns into that it does transcend humans and then turn against us? I mean, not all of our movies seem to kind of have that. We've been catacquized with this story for like 75 years. And it's a Darwinian story. I mean, it is a flat out Darwinian story. In fact, in the book I call attention to the fact that this guy Samuel Butler wrote a book called Aeroan about three years after the origin of species in which the screwdrivers and Alan Ranges were already taking over. So it's a very old story that we are trying to convince ourselves of. And I would argue it goes even further back to a biblical narrative in which people are hewing the log throwing half in the fire and bowing down to the other half as God. It's a very old idolatry. And it's a prideful idolatry for us. The fact that we think that we can accomplish something like that shows us what we think of ourselves. Yeah, and it does. It's not very conservative or practical, I guess. You know, both of us have several children and busy in life. And you think, well, A.I. is a thing. You need to know how to use it well. But rather than actually doing the practical work of learning how to use this well, right? You use it wrong. You use it right. Whatever. You create the crazy story that it's. Yeah, like you mentioned, either it's going to help me to become transhuman. I'm going to lead in that way or I'm going to be scared to death of it. It's right. You have a whole chapter on what I kind of titled. You've titled this the impossible singularity. And as I looked over, I thought, these are all you walk through false A.I. fears. Yeah. So I thought, let me just take some of these. I'll pitch these. Sure. As you pitch them in the book and have you speak to them. So we've already touched this one, I think already, but you say artificial intelligence will learn to make itself smarter. Decide that humanity is unnecessary and killer and slave us all. But maybe I will ask you a question on that. Is it not possible for A.I. to learn to make itself smarter? What about that part? Like just that part of your proposition. Now deciding that humanity is unnecessary and killing us all sounds like the robotic movies and stuff. But does A.I. make itself smarter from what you can tell? So there is a sense in which all A.I. can do is derive tactics from us. Now, can't because it's all trained on the internet, frankly, the entirety of the internet was poured into this thing. All the bad parts, all the seamy parts. That's what it has to work with. Okay. With Agente at A.I., which is I have an A.I. that is capable of creating plans going out and trying to execute those plans, going out and measuring the results of those plans, coming back and improving the plan. That's possible. What that is fundamentally is, and this might sound reductionistic, but it's a rearranging of words. It's a rearranging of words. We live in a world that runs on words. So to say that it's becoming smarter, you're kind of reducing what intelligence is and definitions get really thorny here. But I think it's a very narrow kind of intelligence. And I'm perfectly happy with that kind of becoming smarter. But again, the idea, what you're really saying when you say that A.I. is going to take over, it's going to get smarter and smarter and then just take everything over. What you're really saying is that a man-made machine can thwart the purposes of God. That's what you're essentially saying. Because God has set the narrative. We know what's going to happen. And yes, someone might wire up their toaster to that handgun and do something really stupid. In fact, there was a new story just this last week where people were giving full control to one of these new agents, giving it their credit cards and all kinds of stuff and saying, go wild, go surprise me. Well, you're going to get surprised. In fact, you tell it to do that. It will obey. Yes, correct. But there's no mystery. There's no enlightenment that I see that we should be gaining from that. That's just stupid, stupid, play stupid games when stupid prizes. Nice. All right. Let's see. Artificial intelligence will eradicate all forms of work. This is another, say, unfounded A.I. fear. Yeah. And that seems to be self-evident. But that's actually very interesting that even you side people, because you think, well, who would say that? Oh, yeah. All of the tech leaders say that. And these would be the ones that basically want to, they're not really afraid, but they're just making false promises that if you join, if you join GROC or whatever it is, you can find a word in the world. Well, they are literally trying to plan for a world in which every citizen of planet Earth has to be provided for by something like UBI. Because A.I. is so much better at every kind of work than we are, you know, in 15 years, right? In 20 years. This is not a long time horizon that they think this is going to happen. It's going to be so much better at everything from surgery to playing the piano that we are going to really be in a crisis of meaning. And there is a sense in which if you think sitting down in a cubicle and answering emails is the purpose that God created you for, or that's the only kind of work that needs to be done in the world. Yeah, you might be frightened. You might be a little bit frightened in this moment. What I would argue is that you're dramatically underestimating the amount of work that needs to be done in this world. So when they're saying that, they're not thinking of training up a child in the way that they should go. They're not thinking of people becoming skilled craftsmen that can stand before kings. They're not thinking of, you know, the kinds of government reform that you and I think are going to take 2000 years to work out. They're not thinking of any of that. They are simply thinking of the rather transactional day to day vocations that they have shepherded us all into like cattle, right? And so it makes sense that they're afraid or they think there's going to be a crisis of meaning, but guess what there already is a crisis of meaning. Okay, speaking of meaning, this is your next one. I'm still working through this chapter. You've got AI will be better than us at everything. Therefore, humans will be unable to find meaning in the world. AI will be better than us at everything. So I mean, I've seen some of these videos out of these robots. Prescary robots do it. Pretty significant moves, back flips and using weaponry. And I'm thinking, well, I think probably beat me up. I mean, yeah, so probably could be has will have a martial superiority. To me, in Imagine it can be trained to beat me on the football field as well. Yeah, probably could hit a baseball for home run. Imagine these kinds of things. Right. Could it be a better pilot to me? I bet. Probably. Right. Right. I don't know. Could we download it with all of the great the great sermons of time for me as a minister? So that maybe that question sheds a little bit more light. Yeah. So if the question was, hey, name me a few things, a few kinds of work or labor or I don't know art, whatever that AI won't beat humans on. What comes to mind? How would you answer that question? Yeah. Well, the kinds of labor really constitute the latter half of the book. But maybe a general framework, what I would say is, I have lots of room in our vocational future for what I call eagle-eyed intelligences. So an eagle can dive bomb, you know, 250 feet down in the air, grab a fish out of the water, bring it back up majestic, glorious. I don't sit around worrying about that because I know what the eagle is for and I know what I'm for. Our problem is we don't know what we're for. Right. We don't know what our actual purpose is as humans. And we've been trained to think it's to do these, you know, as I said, rather mechanical tasks in the world that are devoid of beauty that live lives that are not enriched by, you know, the kinds of education that we have at our fingertips. We're not really thinking about any of that. So specific tasks, I want to say, yeah, let's figure out how AI-powered robots can remove cancer better than we can. That's great. But I would say there are a whole host of things that God calls us to be, that God calls us to master, that God calls us to do, and the AI excellence of which are kind of irrelevant. So you take something like art painting, right. Right now, there are tools like mid-journey that you can with a prompt, kind of outclass probably the bottom, let's call it 40% of people drawing some kind of cartoon or, you know, some kind of lower art. I have no problem with that. Right. And that might be a crisis of meaning for them because their whole thing was I was really good at this, you know, kind of primitive form of art. That's fine. What were they trying to express with their art? What were they actually doing with their art? Were they trying to communicate to other truth, to other humans with their art? If they were, they should feel no threat, like zero threat from any of this happening. And if they weren't, they should feel all the threat in the world because that culture, that part of culture is to get them to just be non-commercial going forward. Yeah, that, that, that answer and that question is very interesting to me because it, it gets down to the root of what you're talking about, of why calling them man-made intelligence is so important because what am I really saying when I said some kind of robot, I mean like other humans put in enough data to enough machinery. Right. To make, to make a tool that could be better than me. Right. It's not, it's not actually its own. Right. It's not a not, not non-man-made intelligence. So we think for students, you have your paper and then we say, AI can beat you. It's not a the speeding you. Right. Right. All of these other humans. That's right. Exactly. Synthesized. It's got really good cheating. Yeah. You know, you gathered all of these other people. And it's also because you're using the tool to mechanism. There is something of the human that is, it's, that's missing. Right. You know, which actually that was one of the ideas that popped somewhere in your book was that your emphasis on it being a man-made intelligence made me think, well, what the, the tool, whatever that, call it if we want to talk about the tool part, the intelligence part or on what you call it. It's mediating, for me as a user. Yeah. It is now mediating all of these other people to me. Yeah. Which is not a bad thing. I understand that's what a Google search does. Right. But thinking of it as a Christian in the terms of mediator is helpful. Yeah. Because it, I think it will set you up to go. Yeah. There's, I don't want to begin to have it be a kind of mediator for my whole existence for my life. Exactly. Because it does start to take on that kind of Christ our mediator. Yeah. Well, I'm getting back to something like marketing, right. So people are very excited about AI right now because now I can write 10,000 hyper personalized emails to people. And you, you know, if you hold that up to the light for just a second, you realize, well, what you're saying is I'm going to write a message to someone through this mediation channel that really sounds a lot like I care about them. Oh, man, keep going. And I really don't care at all. So I was on a conference call with a guy a year ago. And I said, so tell me, how are you interpreting all of the movement that's going on in marketing with using AI? And he's like, oh, I got to show you this. I got to show you this. And he shows me this picture. And it's an image of him. And it says, I wrote a note to myself telling you or telling myself to call you today. And he's holding up a blackboard and it says call Aaron Younger and it sure looks like handwriting. And so he's very excited about this picture that makes it seem like he gave a second thought, you know, like so it's just further manipulation along lines that we're already pretty sick of, right. We're already pretty disgusted with this continuous barrage of communication that is made to sound like someone out there cares. And they really don't. And so, so this is where it starts to get really practical, right. I don't want the Lord has called me to be someone with salty speech. The Lord has called me to have his words on my lips. It's very exciting that there's this new technology that's word-based because, you know, words are ours as Christians. But I don't want to use it to, I don't want to use that technology in a way that is dishonest in a way that is dulling my presence to the people around me. I don't want to further the problems of digital communication that we already have. Now there's a discerning way to do that. And the discerning way is you are very transparent about this not actually being personal from me, from the depths of my secret heart, my emotions pouring forth to you, you know, in this email, but that doesn't seem to be the direction we're going. Yes, feel a stick up. Various institutions that have written me letters in the president that I know as a mass mail and it opens with Jared. I was praying for you. Right. Right. It's a lot of people who be praying for me. Not sure you were. Yeah, that's right. Or political ads, you know, that they text you. I actually just got a call from some kind of senator. But it was not a personal call. It was a robot call. Yeah. I mean, let's do the marketing thing. Yeah. Does that mean you don't use AI to particularize to is it a can you can you take data on these people and pitch them where you think it would be? Is it a matter of the personalization language that's baked into the AI that's disingenuous or is it a matter of like AI understanding them and being able to give you as the one who's going to pitch them? The information that you wouldn't have. Yeah, otherwise. This is why I think we need a framework because certain parts of it are great, right? Personalization, if that means Jared, so for instance, we send out job invites to apply for jobs all the time in communication regarding jobs. So I send something to you and it says here's how I think you exactly match this job that we have open. You know, this part from your your work history, this particular skill and it goes down and makes a very compelling case. But does not give the effect of. I was up till 1 a.m. writing this email carefully analyzing everything and hand crafting it for you. That's completely fair game. You're you're just giving information, right? This is just a transacted information. And I actually also do think that we are probably within the next. I would guess probably five or 10 years actually going to have a category for a ambassador agent something that communicates between me and you where I'm not saying that it's me. And I think that's something that's, you know, communicating to you on behalf of me because it would be a very efficient way to do scheduling. There are all kinds of little details that, you know, 100 years ago I might have sent someone from my household or my entourage to communicate with you or if I was in Hollywood, I guess. That that I think all of that's fair game. You just don't want to lie. Really when you're trying to say that you care about someone more than you do, it's just a lie, right? That's really what it is. Yeah, it's striking when you. Trying to have a wise approach. There's mass mailers. There's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you're not lying. Yeah. Getting data because it's out there on the internet of all these people that might be suited that we don't really know you. But given what is on your LinkedIn and given what's on your socials and given what's publicly available on the internet. This might be for you. Let's have that meeting where we can get to know you more. Yeah. That's a great, that sounds like a good use. It is what's creepy is when, and this is a broader point, but how? It's so easy to only live that way. Chesterton said, I do not wish to be dehumanized in my study of the humanities. This is a fascinating line. Robert K. Pahn, who wrote the supper of the lamb, talked about how he just abominated cocktail parties. He just rejects them. He says, no thought was given to the dinner. No stress over the guests of where they would sit and whether they would show up on time. Just mass me over when it comes. It's just cluster of people. No matter how good these AI gets, if you actually think about your flesh and blood localized presence, you can only be an association with so many people. No matter what the internet has done for us. That's right. How many friends or followers you have. That's an interesting, fascinating principle. Even if you cluster to thousands of people together, you can't actually, God has made us these spatial creatures. I think when you're saying, I know if you can distinguish between what AI can do and what it can't do, it will never be able to do the flesh and blood localized thing. That's right. I think there are quite a few categories that are there. It can be an aid. It can be a help that you actually were made for something. You were made for a job and you have to do that job. Very simple example would be, do the Rotterdam E6. You were made to pass on the knowledge of the Lord to your offspring. You were made to do that in a very intentional way to be talking about it all the time. Maybe there's an application where you are on their side or getting some training yourself using, you mentioned, like search tools and research assistance and stuff like that. We also have to be careful on a system trained on the internet and read it threads. Maybe you're getting some of that. But the job of training your sons and daughters is yours. That is your job. You plop them in front of an AI to do that. That is not what the Lord has called you to do. In AI, I wouldn't say this or that AI can't help you to do that. But there is actually something that is like non-AI adjacent that you have to skill. You have to develop to be a human. Because the human, God turns the hearts of the fathers and the children and the fathers. But God does that. AI doesn't do that for you. In the same way, you would have to learn AI, whatever inputs and learn how to use that tech, which you should do. There's this whole other part of your life that you have to do that AI can't actually get to. That was something like that. You have to know, I do think we have a real gap in terms of knowing what we should be. I think this technology exposes that gap a little bit. The Lord has called us to not just do things, but to be things. The Lord has called me to hide his word in my heart, not in my iPhone. It's great that I have this iPhone here. But is it getting past just my visual cortex or am I just feeling secure that it's always there? Because God wants me to be someone whose word is hidden in my heart. He's put me in situations and I have to be battle ready. Being battle ready, as you well know, as a pastor doesn't mean, hold on just one minute. Let me chat that. No, you are supposed to be a wise person. You are supposed to be a skilled person that can stand before kings. You are supposed to be diligent in your labor. You are supposed to be loving and sacrificial. These are things that technology is not. It can help you with training and things like that. There are tools. But ultimately, God has a vision for you and what you can be. Not just do. One other access for this would be the... I was listening to a book called Trust Me I'm Lying, Cameron McGuist's name. He's got a terrible mouth, so you just prepare yourselves if you're going to listen to it. But it's on marketing. Another book, Super Bloom, written by the same guy that wrote what the internet's doing to our brains. He was talking about... Basically, Zuckerberg, when frictionless came out. The idea of tech, a big part of this is we wanted to be frictionless. Over against do hard things going uphill. But the tech was we want to make it smooth. And so much of that tech is smooth and sleek. AI definitely elevates that. Could I get to all the data that AI can get me? Yeah, I could. Right. But now I can get to it so quick that in that frictionless... And what's weird is I don't think frictionless is bad. Yeah. But it's just not friction. So, and there are things that you have to do with friction. Yep. So, perhaps that's another way to think about not only a middle way, but it's almost like in our doctrines. You go like Calcedan, Nicaea, our doctrines of Christ. He's one person in two natures. Without confusion, without... There's a distinction between his human nature and his divine nature. Yes. And one of the things came out in your books. We have to have this distinction between humans, we're humans. This is data. That's different. Yep. This would be frictionless. And that's okay. You could be frictionless stuff. And there's advantages and go a long way. And then there's friction. That might be a helpful. Yeah. Well, one of the things that's kind of ironic on that note is one of the central points that I'm making in the book is that this is actually... It's an easy technology, but it's a wild technology. So, and by wild, I mean, it's going to do unpredictable things. That's where all the nerves come from, right? That's why it seems so scary is because there is a sense where you don't really know what it's going to do. And from my point of view, this could really lead us to a world that looks a lot more like what God made, versus the very predictable, dull edge world that we live in right now, which is not really wild at all. Now, we have to learn that where no oxen are the main... the crib is clean, right? But much increase comes from the strength of the ox. So, we have to learn how to have good fences for our ox. But we ought to embrace the technology for its difference, actually. You don't program a cow. That's what makes it very useful, right? If you had to tell a cow, you know, wake up, raise your head 20 degrees, you know, put it down, walk forward two steps. No, the cow is adaptable. It's an intelligent tool. That's what makes it useful. And that's what I think ultimately the place of this technology is in our world. It's something very new. And I think that the wildness is a feature, not a bug. Yes, yeah, you hit that theme. And I was interested, you almost, I can't remember what you called it, like, by the world of binary outcomes. Yes. And you were casting that, this is a bad idea. Yeah. And the wildness and the varied outcomes that might come through AI. Give me an example of what that looks like. Is that when you're... Yeah, yeah. So, in general, I mean, our software sucks, right? So, it does break quite a bit. But in general, what we've been trained to expect is, I'm going to go to IKEA. I'm going to get a table. That table is going to look exactly like the one I saw at my neighbor's house. The knots are going to be all in the exact same place. It's going to be a very predictable thing. That's what I like. I want to go into Starbucks. Now, some of that is just great. How am I going to wrap a chino? Yeah, that's right. It's going to look just like the last column of the chino. Just like the way you're going to say it. Yeah, exactly. Some of that is great. But we have to recognize that the beauty that God put into creation. Not the chaos that comes from the fallen world. But the actual beauty of a world where every blade of grass grows in a different direction. There are laws, but then there's amazing things that are happening all around us, autonomously. That's a kind of beauty that's a little bit missing in our world. It's not as much a part of our culture anymore. What we expect and want are highly predictable things at all times. What that leads to is a world where all of our tools necessarily are dependent on us. If we don't have any room for any unexpected outcomes, that means that we can't really have intelligent autonomous things working for us. The way that you would on a farm say. So I think, and this is getting a little bit down the road from where we are now. Right now we're excited to make better anime. But I think that the true place of these things in the world is a lot more like animals. A lot more technology that we don't have to be bothered by. I'm sitting here in this interview and my phone is buzzing in my pocket, distracting me every three seconds. And that's because in a sense, it's a marvelous technology, but it's also kind of a dumb technology. It can't tell the way that a great secretary would tell when to buzz. Or when to storm into this room. And so that means for me, there's a sense in which I'm not fully present. I mean, I'm trying to be right, but there's a sense in which the technology is getting in the way of my actual life. In the way that something a little more intelligent wouldn't. Okay, this is, see, this one's an interesting one. So you think it's good. You think the, these man made, you think man made intelligence. So let's keep calling it that. Yeah. We'll get to the place where they're more like cows. They're not going to transcend humans, but they'll be more like cows. Because what's interesting about the way you're pitching it, and I like it, but I'm trying to think of how it's going to game out. I think right now, profs at NSA, if some student were to cheat and have A write it, it'd be like, look, you did this inhuman, this binary, this, it wasn't a living thing. You know, living would be not using man made intelligence. Right. But I don't think that's necessarily contradicting what you're saying. Just tell me more like you, is it, is it the difference between being a user of it and the creator of it? I mean, when you're work of product and marketing, you're actually telling this, you're kind of telling the man made intelligence what's to do and seeing different things that could do something. That's right. I'm the master. So I'll give you, I'll try to give you an easy example, but maybe a future looking example. Let's say that I have a beautiful piece of property out here on the police and I have a lawn. And let's say that I can buy a beautiful, well-crafted machine. Maybe it looks like an animal, but it's, this thing is great. Like a great watch, you know, it's just beautiful craftsmanship. And they're known to last 300 years. And the people that made it have put all kinds of great biblical truth into it because it's going to follow a word, it's going to be a word-based intelligence. Okay. And they've also done some of the things that I argue that we have to do, which is we have to have good fences around the technology. So there's a kill switch, there are ways to turn it off. Let's say that a child tapping it on the head in a certain place can make it fall apart. So it's not dangerous to anyone. But what this thing does is it goes out and digs up dandelions. And it's just, that is its whole mission. It's out there, like an animal. And it is just digging up dandelions and cultivating the ground as it does. And that's its whole job and it does it for 250 years. And we pass it down through my family. I think that's a more beautiful world than I've got just a mere tool that I go and grab the dandelions with. Now that tool would be useful only if it was low maintenance. Right? Only if it knew its little job and it was doing its job all the time and it went out and did it. And it really have to think about it and my kids didn't have to think about it. And it was built in a good way. That's the kind of world that I'm talking about that I think this technology will be used for. Right. Right now it's very screen based. So it's trapped in the computer. But yeah. I think that's a good example. And that doesn't mean it's not because we abominate pulling up dandelions with matoos. For example, it's very interesting that is so much of our toil work has slowed in the modern era. Yeah. Now we like go and pay people to tell us to carry sandbags. Right. You know, to run with a sandbag early in the morning before the sun comes up. Yeah. So you can have both. But we all know that obviously that tech removing toil from us gives us more opportunities and whatnot. Maybe one more question, one more angle on this. You had a section here. This is page 68 where you were touching upon education. You're in the cafe. You can get nearly unlimited information about almost anything from anywhere in the world just a few seconds. And you were talking about I think where you were writing the books. You're like, I'm writing the book here. And then you wanted to find what the temperature was in the random place. Yeah. And then you said, when I get this, now I want to learn about the history of this place and who settled it. And I want to know if there's some kind of natural disasters that happen in the place. And then you said, and I found out there weren't any natural disasters happening in that place. In this few moments, I've imagined exotic peoples and hot desert winds have seen 200 to 300 pixel visions of strange new lands. I feel the pressing weight of millennia condensed into a handful of peer edited sentences. And I look up and I'm back in the cafe again. What was in that I gained during this two-minute excursion? None. That, I think, is another fun controversial one. Yeah. What do you mean? I did. I roamed. I went a long way. I mean, I snagged. I learned what the... What floor in Fauna were present in Augustine's Northern Africa when Rome was falling. I was riding the city of Calam. Right. I'm not wiser. Right. Don't you think that it's curious that in this technological age where, just like I described, we have much of the wisdom of the ages at our fingertips. We could ask now with AI what great thinkers think about anything. And I would argue you sure wouldn't know that if you popped on X today and just scrolled for a little bit. I'm sure would not seem like we are the wisest, most enlightened people of the ages. I think that we are, again, part of not knowing what we're for, has meant that we live in the illusion of wisdom and knowledge, skimming over the surface of the actual depths of knowledge and wisdom that we're called to have. And we don't really notice it because the appearance of knowledge is everywhere. We have access to it, but that knowledge doesn't go down deep in the way that say, it is for my children right now going to NSA, where they have to actually practice it, make use of it, speak according to that knowledge, know it, memorize it, get it down deep. Now that's not to say that there aren't very cool benefits that come from technology. If you think about the convergence of say AI and VR in the future and the way that you could have really enriched experiences to augment your education, I think that's great. That's great. But who are we kidding if we think that we are an enlightened people? All you have to do is open your eyes just to crack to see that that's not true. Yeah. What I thought was very applicable from that section was how you were, you explained you were localized, you were in Acafeter, you were in a place doing a thing. This was a distraction and what you did come back with more information, but you didn't come back with wisdom. Right. Because wisdom is always applied. It's always wisdom is not knowledge, me pulses knowledge puffs up love builds up, but the it's not just data or information, which is back to the being human versus what you're kind of warning against the you have to apply it. Now, if the floor and fauna and Augustine's North Africa somehow relates, you know, but for me in the in writing, particularly reading and writing, I've toyed along these lines with like AI could, if I said give me 10 spicy fun metaphors in the style of PG Wode House. Yeah. Yeah. It can do that. Yeah. And they're not all bad. And it's like, well, then you can memorize those 10. And then you could employ them in your writing. Right. And I thought interesting. What happens though is a metaphor. The best come out in context. They're not reduced to the sentence. They're in a paragraph. So you're going through like a forest and like things pop up. They can't be like parachuted. It's it is artificial and superficial. Even if it's a great and it could. I'm not saying it can't stay alone as a sentence. Yes. And then when you read a bunch, it all starts. It's just turning in there. Yep. And I'm sure you're doing this with some of your work with selective red balloons. Like you can't. It's the difference between some shiny new model or that guy that is season is like, yeah, I can't teach you everything. This guy knows because he learned it over time and space. It became a part of who he is. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Chesterton. I think once said, was it Chesterton? Somebody said it. I think about Chesterton that his colorful writing. It said it wasn't like sparkly. It wasn't sparkly because he was always shining up his sword. He said it's sparkle because he was swinging it so quickly. His metaphors were like that. They would come out. Just another example of what popped in my particular and the education front and how easy it is to chase down data. Yeah. So it's a click away. People ask me, you know, I love to write, been writing for a while. And they ask me if I'm nervous about AI writing. Are you going to use AI to write? And my gut feeling about it is, I don't even know what it would do for me because, you know, when you are and you've written. When you're writing, you're word to word trying to shape an impression for a person. I don't need anything else to do that. Now, it's a skill. You have to be copious. You have to work on all these things in order to be able to create that impression. But I would love for the technology to handle other things. I don't need it to write. And I think there is something fundamentally special about words. So I think this is what makes it a little bit of a confusing technology for a lot of people because it really brings up that our world runs on words. And that we are a word based people. Now, I would argue words are ours. The words belong to Christians. But I think fundamentally we still need to be people that are good with words. Yep, very good. Well, Aaron, thank you. Thanks for writing the book for joining me and then folks wild and glorious and written by Aaron Younger and King's Glory Press. You can find this on Amazon. If you just go on Amazon, find this. And then before we close out here, where else can folks connect with you or get to know what you're up to? Well, I'd love for as many people as want to to come join the Holy War that we have launched on LinkedIn. I post about these kinds of things, technology and business from a Christian perspective on LinkedIn all the time that that ultimate secular of spaces linked in. So if you're in business, come and join us there. Also have a sub stack undiscovered good dot sub stack dot com. Great. Thanks. Yeah. Thank you. You