Our cover story and editorial this month is about artificial intelligence (AI), and as the Marxists say, it is not a coincidence that we are publishing this series of articles and commentary the month after we wrote about the significance of imago dei. AI presents an existential threat to humanity, but even if it does not wipe out mankind, it still represents an attack on our humanity. Leonard J. DeLorenzo, a professor of theology at Notre Dame University, wrote recently in Our Sunday Visitor that usually the questions asked with the advent of a new technology is what problem does it solve? “Nobody’s asking what we’re becoming in the process.” DeLorenzo argues that the effects of the Scientific, Industrial, and Digital revolutions had enormous effects on how humanity viewed itself: the destruction of mystery, turning humanity into a mechanistic process, the impersonalization of work, greater alienation alongside greater connectivity to others while attention spans collapse. AI presents new challenges to mankind’s concept of itself, and these questions are not merely philosophical or academic; DeLorenzo says they are “urgent questions about human formation.” Smart phones, he said, “didn’t just connect us, it rewired our brains.” How will AI change how we view and think about the world, but more importantly, our own place within it. DeLorenzo says “human beings aren’t just really smart animals or really complicated machines” because “we are made in the image of God.” That is, “we have an inherent dignity that can’t be earned or lost, can’t be optimized or automated.” On her Substack titled earlier this year “You have to be human,” Freya India, says that using AI tools for writing and research undermines motivation and meaning, especially among the young who have yet to learn those skills. Last year, she argued against the “commodified life” (mostly through social media channels) in which technology turns identity, relationships, and creativity into marketable products, which makes (at least) our digital selves bland, risk-averse, and interchangeable. More problematically, AI turns individuals (as presented in carefully collated selves online) into data points, further reducing the humanity of what are essentially self-created caricatures. Technology not only changes how we do things, it changes us. We need not resist all technologies, but we must approach them prudently, cognizant of the questions that need to be asked: how does this affect personhood and human dignity, and does it contribute to human flourishing?
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AI has become ubiquitous because so much of our life has migrated online. Part of the reason we publish a physical newspaper and review books is that we hope people will use cognitive skills such as reading and critical thinking in the real, physical world – or as the kids say online IRL (in real life). Unfortunately, many schools have moved to full digital: text books are replaced by online reading, whole books are being replaced with excerpts of them, assignments are written and uploaded for teachers rather than written manually and a paper handed in, and cursive writing is seldom taught with students using keyboards in elementary school. If the current adult population is resistant to AI, this disembodiment of learning makes the next generation more susceptible to artificial intelligence and its accompanying dehumanizing effects in the near future.
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As an exercise to check the quality and accuracy of ChatGPT, I asked it to write a short biography of me. It mostly wrote in the abstract (“While his views and affiliations have at times attracted criticism, they have also earned him a dedicated readership among those who share his perspectives” and provided no examples), but when it became specific, it was often wrong. ChatGPT wrote: “As an author, Tuns has written and contributed to books that examine Canadian political figures and movements. One of his notable works is The Man from Nowhere, a biography of former Canadian prime minister John Turner.” While I have written two books on Canadian political figures, they were about Justin Trudeau and Jean Chretien; I have never written a book about John Turner. I will leave it to others to judge ChapGPT’s conclusion: “In summary, Paul Tuns is a significant figure in Canadian conservative journalism and writing.”
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Jonathan Kay, an editor at Quillette, tweeted about the “gender fluid” or “non-binary” labels, describing them as “completely meaningless terms that are basically astrological signs for upper middle-class neurotics.”
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Making the rounds on social media is a video of an unidentified gender-confused man who is attempting to pass as a comedian joking, “I think we should start killing kids until they let us use whatever bathroom they want.” It is unclear when this comedy show and grammatical train wreck was made, but in the last few years, transgender assailants have, in fact, killed children in mass shootings at schools in Nashville, Tennessee; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. Even though the joke was in poor taste regardless of when it was said, the audience laughed at the attempt at humour.
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David Mulroney, former ambassador to Red China and a must-follow on X (formerly Twitter), tweeted: “That we now have same-day assisted suicide shouldn’t surprise us. MAiD like, abortion, is now untouchable. And as with abortion, we deal with the truly shocking nature of its scope and the resulting moral corrosion of our healthcare system and our society by ignoring it.”
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New York magazine ran a story on its website under the headline “I regret having children.” The story is based on three, mercifully anonymous, interviews. “A 34-year-old Rhode Island mother of a six-year-old and three-year-old” says she would get “hung up on thoughts like ‘what I really wanted to do today was painting, or reading.” She says, “I love our children and would never want them to think ‘mom and dad would be happier if I wasn’t here’,” before adding, “But thinking about life without them, I’d be happier overall.” And then there’s the “27-year-old North Carolina mother of a one-year-old” who is giving up custody of her son to her soon-to-be ex-husband, because, she admits, “I don’t feel anything for (my son).” The fact that these mothers are anonymous makes the story of their parental regret only slightly less horrifying. One hopes that their children never learn of this article and figure out that the regret being aired is about them. Jordan Boyd, writing in The Federalist, says the article is “bad journalism that borderlines exploitation and the normalization of mental illness,” because the “three mothers featured are clearly struggling with symptoms of depression, anxiety, unprocessed birth trauma, body dysmorphia, and other ailments linked to pregnancy and postpartum.” Boyd says the last thing these mothers “need is for their deepest and darkest thoughts to be used as an advertisement for divorce and childlessness.” Data shows more people regret not having more children than there are people who regret having them at all, but their stories are not featured in articles by magazines like New York.
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On page 12, Rick McGinnis writes about Paul Ehrlich, the infamous modern-day Malthus who boldly predicted hundreds of millions of human deaths due to widespread famine caused by overpopulation. Thomas Malthus also famously predicted overpopulation would be the ruin of the world, but he wrote at the end of the 18th century (1798), just as the Industrial Revolution was altering mankind’s capacity to shepherd resources to meet the demands of a growing population; he had an excuse for his erroneous views considering that humanity’s standard of living barely improved over centuries, so he had some reason to believe that burgeoning populations would strain a society’s capacity to meet the basic needs of a growing population. (That said, the Anglican parson was motivated by his personal opposition of charity toward London’s poor; he was not concerned that there were too many Anglican ministers or political scientists, but too many poor people sullying urban centres.) Ehrlich made his prediction more than a century and a half later, just as the agronomist Norman Borlaug was ushering in the Green Revolution, an agricultural boon that vastly increased the yields of numerous crops and thus the ability to feed the growing number of people in the latter half of the 20th century. Erhlich should have anticipated humanity’s ability to rise to the challenge of rising population because he had 150 years of data showing that it already had; but this time might have been different. Perhaps Ehrlich could not see the fruits (and vegetables and wheats) of the agricultural revolution that had just begun at the time he published The Population Bomb in 1968, but he continued predicting imminent crisis caused by overpopulation long after it was clear that his predictions were not only wrong, but completely unfounded. Borlaug saved untold hundreds of millions of lives by improving agricultural methods to feed the world’s growing population, but it was Ehlrich who was celebrated for his eternal pessimism with celebrity and sinecures.
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Paul Ehrlich, like other scientists who confidently predicted impending catastrophe brought on by over-population, was not a demographer but an entomologist (someone who studies insects). Specifically, he was a lepidopterist (someone who studies butterflies). Edward O. Wilson, perhaps the most famous entomologist, studied ants. He also wrote two books about mankind causing ecological genocide and placed part of the blame on overpopulation (and much blame on capitalism). Other entomologists include Thomas Eisner and Michael E. Soulé. David Suzuki studied genetics and zoology and his early research was on fruit flies. None had any expertise in human population dynamics. They took their knowledge from their narrow area of expertise and applied the rule of the jungle to humanity. When populations of insects – or other species — grow beyond the carrying capacity of a biome or biotope, there is an inevitable destruction of the ecological system that leads to mass starvation of the species causing havoc on the environment. But human beings are not ants, butterflies, or fruit flies. Insects, even most mammals, do not have the capacity to innovate technologies to increase the carrying capacity of particular environment, or in the case of humanity, an entire planet. The American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt, writing in the Washington Examiner, said that Ehrlich — like Wilson, Suzuki, and the others — “offered a worldview that ‘insect-fied’ humanity,” denying “the unique traits of the human species that have allowed us to escape the Malthusian trap.” Those traits, Eberstadt identifies, include “adaptability, ingenuity, problem-solving.” In some ways, Ehrlich and his ilk predict imminent doom for humanity because they deny human exceptionalism, not only in our value (which is why they think too many people is a problem), but our abilities, traits that are vastly superior to other animals.
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Kim Headley, Campaign Life Coalition Youth coordinator, tweeted: “It’s crazy that we live in a world where it is considered controversial to be opposed to killing children.” It is truly crazy.
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Campaign Life Coalition Youth tweeted: “If Canada has laws protecting turtle eggs, then why don’t we have laws protecting babies in the womb?” That sort of inconsistent madness is only possible in a society where it is considered controversial to be opposed to killing babies.
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The first time I saw an actual Planned Parenthood center was in 1990 in Lakeland, Florida when I was 17. The non-descript abortuary was located in a shopping plaza in the mid-size city located in Polk County between Orlando and Tampa. I did not know if they committed abortions on-site or whether they merely made abortion referrals to local hospitals or their abortion mills in nearby cities. I am pleased every time I read about a Planned Parenthood location that closes, but was especially thrilled to read that the Lakeland Planned Parenthood abortion center closed its doors on March 13 after more than 50 years of operating in the city.
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Darrell B. Harrison, pastor at Redeemer Bible Church in Gilbert, Arizona, says “If abortion is healthcare, slavery is job creation.”
– Paul Tuns
