Gary Bauer, Senior Vice President of Public Policy

This is included today only FYI. To be on the JDFI email list, add enews@drjamesdobson.org to your contacts or Safe Sender List to insure delivery to your inbox.

Another FYI today, since there are a few folks who believe we’re getting too political here. My simple answer is just because we answer to a higher calling, and a higher standard of truth and righteousness, does not mean we’re not to be involved in the life of our nation and our world, for that is where the church is… Yet, So Get Ready!

Is it conceivable that Christians could be banned from teaching in public schools? Some radical secularists have advocated for it. Now, a school board in Arizona has gone a step further. The Washington Elementary School District, serving students in the Phoenix area, just cancelled a contract the district had with Arizona Christian University (ACU). The contract made it possible for ACU’s student teachers to be placed in local schools for “field experience.”

There were no complaints from parents or students about the arrangement, which has been in place for five years. Then some school board members read ACU’s website where they found a mission statement that said the university is “committed to Jesus Christ – accomplishing His will and advancing His kingdom on earth as in heaven.” The university also stated that it believed in “the centrality of family …traditional sexual morality and lifelong marriage between one man and one woman.”
 
That simple statement of biblical belief was too much for the three members of the board who identify as LGBTQ+. The effort to cancel the contract was led by board member Tamillia Valenzuela, who describes herself as “a bilingual, disabled, neurodivergent Queer Black Latina.” She attends board meetings wearing cat ears. Another board member attacked Arizona Christian University for “teaching with a biblical lens.”
 
ACU has now filed a lawsuit represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). The lawsuit asserts: “This civil rights action seeks to protect a Christian university and its students’ fundamental rights to religious exercise and speech, and to be free from unlawful governmental discrimination simply because of their religious status and beliefs … Despite there being zero complaints about an Arizona Christian student teacher or alumnus, the School District decided to terminate its relationship with Arizona Christian and its students solely because of their religious status and beliefs on biblical marriage and sexuality.”
 
If history is any guide, what started in this school district will not stay in that school district. This outrage is a perfect example of what Dr. James Dobson and our team has argued for years. Someone’s values win. America once universally welcomed morally upright men and women to teach in our public schools. Today, there is increasing hostility to Christian teachers and acceptance of radical teachers who are exposing children to inappropriate LGBTQ propaganda. 
 
This is a good time to remember the importance of voting, going to school board meetings and taking every initiative you can to save your children and grandchildren. 
 

Biden Budget Disaster
 
James Dobson Family Institute (JDFI) does not usually weigh in on the, sometimes, arcane budget battles in Washington, D.C. But we cannot ignore the budget proposal just unveiled by the Biden administration. From economic policy to social policy impacting faith, family and freedom, the budget is a disaster. 
 
Biden’s budget includes, what even the pro-Biden Washington Post called, “unprecedented tax hikes” of five trillion dollars. The administration claims taxes have to be increased because our national debt is growing. But the same budget does not decrease the national debt – it increases it another $20 trillion over the next 10 years. That means President Biden is proposing major tax hikes and major new spending. In fact, the budget is 40% bigger than the last budget before COVID! All of this new debt will be left to our children and grandchildren to deal with. That amounts to an immoral generational transfer that will destroy their economic hopes and dreams.
 
Under the budget, big government grows even bigger and more powerful, while everything else, including economic growth, will get smaller. One of JDFI’s priorities is stopping America’s drift away from free enterprise and toward the “dead hand of smothering big government socialism.” This budget takes that disturbing trend and puts it on steroids. The IRS alone will get 86,000 new agents!
 
The priorities in the budget are also distorted. In a computer analysis of its 184 pages, the police are only mentioned four times, during a time when America is experiencing a nation-wide crime wave. Unbelievably, words like “transgender” (8 times), “intersex” (7 times) and the offensive slur “queer” (7 times) are all used more often, reflecting the Biden administration’s commitment to pushing the radical “52 genders” woke agenda. 
 
How about our veterans? The budget includes $137.9 million for the Department of Veteran Affairs, but bizarrely sets part of the money aside for “providing gender-affirming care to the nation’s veterans,” including sex change operations. At a time when homelessness impacts many veterans, are sex change operations really a top priority?
 
Of course, the budget does have its “fans.” One of the most powerful supporters is Planned Parenthood, the nation’s top abortion provider. Biden calls for providing them another $1.2 billion of your hard-earned tax dollars for their “vital” work of abortion on demand. This budget will be and should be “dead on arrival.” America can do a lot better. 
 

Biden HHS Attacks Rights of Conscience – Pro-Life Members of Congress Fight Back
 
Unfortunately, the Biden administration continues to be obsessed with keeping the number of abortions performed in the U.S. as high as possible. Fortunately, 25 pro-life senators and representatives are fighting back. 
 
Biden’s regulators have proposed a new rule that threatens to erase the conscience protections that prevent medical professionals from being forced to participate in abortions. The proposed rule states, “our health care systems must effectively deliver services, including safe, legal abortions, to all who need them in order to protect patients’ health and dignity.” Predictably, the “health and dignity” of the innocent preborn child, who will be dismembered or scalded with powerful chemicals, is not mentioned.
 
The Biden administration’s proposed rule is morally repugnant and also likely violates federal conscience statutes that have been passed by Congress, including the Conscience Protection Act.
 
The pro-life members of Congress, led by Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) and Senator James Lankford (R-OK), along with Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) in the House of Representatives, have filed a public letter with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), demanding they “enforce all conscience protections” Congress has passed. The senators remind Biden’s HHS bureaucrats that those statutes protect all medical professionals from performing or assisting in any health care services, procedures or research to which “they may object for religious, moral, ethical, or other reasons.”
 
JDFI believes this battle over the “conscience rights” of Christians and people of other faiths should be a wake-up call to the Church. This attack on conscience safeguards along with the continued effort to force all taxpayers to subsidize abortions, euthanasia and radical gender surgeries is a direct attack on our basic liberties and freedom of religion.
 
JDFI is working diligently to encourage additional pro-life members of Congress to sign the letter. Those who have currently signed include: Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), John Boozman(R-AR), Mike Braun (R-IN), Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Mike Crapo (R-ID), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Steve Daines (R-MT), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Deb Fischer (R-NE), Josh Hawley (R-MO), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), John Kennedy (R-LA), James Lankford (R-OK), Roger Marshall, M.D. (R-KS), Jim Risch(R-ID), Marco Rubio (R-FL), John Thune (R-SD), Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Representatives Robert Aderholt (R-AL), Jim Banks (R-IN), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Andy Harris (R-MD), Diana Harshbarger (R-TN), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA), Christopher Smith (R-NJ) and Brad Wenstrup (R-OH).

Gary Bauer’s New Podcast, “Defending Faith, Family, and Freedom”

Listen to Gary Bauer’s new podcast, “Defending Faith, Family, and Freedom” on our website or on your favorite platform, including Google, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Click the button below to subscribe. Every episode will help you stay informed and engaged on the policy and cultural issues that matter most to you and your family.

This is included today only FYI to add enews@drjamesdobson.org to your contacts or Safe Sender List to insure delivery to your inbox.

Accept His Love. Live His Joy. Embrace His Peace. Share His Hope. Refute Evil…... merlin

For you history buffs, many of us lived through these events as are brought to life today in his post, “Does It Take A War” by Seymour Hersh. But, for too many on the deck of life today who did not, and are now without historical moorings, in conjunction with his post I suggest you must read Romans 8: 22-39 from your favorite version to facilitate your internal moorings with His perspective, as that is the only one that will count in the end. Seriously! FYI, I prefer The Message Version here. Here’s Seymour:

There is an inevitable gap between what a president tells us about a war—even a proxy war—and the reality on the ground. It is true today as Joe Biden struggles for public support for the war in Ukraine, and it was true six decades ago as Jack Kennedy struggled to understand the war he chose to pursue in South Vietnam.

Early 1962 was a critical time for President John F. Kennedy. After his image and leadership had been tarnished by the Bay of Pigs disaster three months into his term, he had decided that he must make a stand in South Vietnam and confront the spread of communism there. The president spent the rest of 1961 secretly increasing American defoliation, bombing, and the number of US troops inside South Vietnam. His fight against international communism was on. His foil was Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who had overwhelmed the young president at a summit meeting on June 4, 1961, with his knowledge, toughness, and lack of respect for Kennedy’s floundering in Cuba. “So he just beat the hell out of me,” the president later told New York Times columnist James Reston.

Nonetheless, America was smitten by the glitz and glamor of Jack and Jackie and their life inside the White House, with parties and social events that brought together the best America had to offer from the worlds of music, the arts, and the academy. So it was that David Herbert Donald, the most prominent Lincoln scholar of his time, found himself asked to give a private briefing in the White House. The small group he addressed—it numbered no more than twenty—included longtime friends of the president and some key members of his government. Donald would be the guest of the president and his wife. He was delighted.

Donald, who had won a Pulitzer Prize that year for his work on the Civil War, wrote a long chatty letter to an old friend a few weeks later about his night at the White House. I learned of the meeting during the 1990s while researching a book on the Kennedy Administration. Donald sent me a copy then of the letter, but urged me to publish very little of it in my book. I did what he asked. Donald died in 2009, after decades of teaching American history at Harvard University, and I’d like to think he would have approved of my quoting it at greater length here.

Donald reported in the letter that he talked for forty minutes about the difficulties of Reconstruction after the Civil War, and the trouble he and other historians were having, as he wrote, “in writing a new synthesis of the period.” There was a long period of chatter, with both the president and his wife Jacqueline actively participating. “Mrs. Kennedy,” Donald reported, was “extremely simple and unassuming, very young, very shy, and a little unsure of herself. . . . That radiant beauty which appears in her photographs and in her television appearances is not apparent, but she strikes me as an enthusiastic and highly intelligent young woman.”

The letter went on: “The President himself, too is far less handsome than his pictures. . . . The boyish look which his photographs give him is simply not there. . . . [H]e led off the questioning and continued very active in the discussion throughout; and afterward we had a long, private discussion. It is clear that this is a man determined to go down in our history books as a great President, and he wants to know the secret.

“One thing he said troubled me considerably,” Donald wrote. In discussing the great presidents, Kennedy “asked whether, in sum, did [it] not take a war to put a man in that category? I firmly denied this. He seemed to agree and, since he is bent on being a great President, I hope he really did.”

In a brief telephone conversation I had with Donald in 1996, two decades after the American debacle in Vietnam, the professor expressed far more concern about Kennedy’s view of greatness. He told me that Kennedy was fascinated with Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt because “he thought to be a great President you had to be a wartime President. That was scary to me. I came away feeling that this was a young man who doesn’t understand history.”

Donald’s chat with Kennedy came—as the professor could not have known at the time—at a crucial early moment in Vietnam. The president had continued moving, in secret, to increase dramatically the number of American military men flooding in the South under the guise of special advisors. He also was fascinated by the derring-do of those who fought in World War II in undercover units organized by the Office of Strategic Services. OSS agents often worked in enemy zones in Europe and Asia with partisans and guerrillas. The head of intelligence for the State Department at the time was Roger Hilsman, an army officer who saw combat and later served undercover with the OSS in Burma. After the war, Hilsman joined the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency. He left the Agency to get a doctorate in political science at Yale University. Now, in the early days of the Kennedy Administration, he had special caché at the State Department. He had been wounded in battle and was part of a team that liberated American prisoners, including his own father, from a Japanese prisoner of war camp.

With his experience, confidence, and academic credentials, Hilsman became a favorite of the president and his brother Robert, the attorney general, and both became avid supporters of an innovative solution that Hilsman was advocating. The plan promised to resolve a vexing issue of the war: how to separate the anti-government and pro-communist guerrilla fighters known as the Viet Cong from the peasant villagers who, willingly or not, provided them with food, protection and support. Known as the Strategic Hamlet Program, the concept won immediate approval from the US and South Vietnamese military as well from those Americans seeking more social programs for the peasantry. “It was Kennedy’s last hope for winning hearts and minds,” I was told years ago by an American intelligence expert. The historian Christian G. Appy, in American Reckoning, an incisive study of the limits of American exceptionalism, described the project that emerged as “a coercive plan that forced villagers off their land and relocated them in armed camps. . . . What they [Kennedy, Hilsman and the White House advisors] did not take into account was how the villagers might feel about being forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and stuck in fortified compounds behind barbed wire.”

I had learned firsthand about the ignorance and cruelty of forced peasant relocation while reporting on the My Lai massacre in 1969. The massacre had taken place in March of 1968 and most of the GIs involved had finished their tour of duty in the war and were back home—at work, in school, or doing nothing. The Strategic Hamlet Program was long gone but villagers in some contested areas were still being forced off their lands into resettlement areas to enable the American military to slaughter all who refused to leave with impunity. The evacuated areas were designated Free Fire Zones. My Lai was not such an area. Some of the GIs who had participated in the murders and rapes at My Lai justified their brutality by telling me, with much contempt, about how the mothers in Vietnam, when being evacuated from their native villages, insisted on being the first to hop onto the waiting helicopters. I was told again and again by GIs, who had grown up in a culture that called for children to go first, that they had to beat the mothers—sometimes violently with the butts of their rifles—to allow the children to board first. None of the GIs had been told that in Vietnamese society the mother always crosses a new threshold first, to assure that all who follow will be safe. 

The Strategic Hamlet Program was a disastrous, and mysterious, failure for the young Kennedy Administration, and it hardened the resolve of the peasant population against the American interlopers. Jack Kennedy did not live long enough to learn that a major reason for the program’s demise was the work of a South Vietnamese army colonel named Pham Ngoc Thao, who had fought against the French with the nationalist and communist Viet Minh after World War II. Thao was one of eleven children born into a highly respected Roman Catholic family that held French citizenship, but joined the successful post-World War II opposition to the French led by Ho Chi Minh. Thao’s religion and social background, and his military leadership in the war against the French, made him attractive to President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, who ran the secret police. Thao was a logical choice to run the new American-endorsed and financed resettlement project for the nation’s Buddhist peasants.

It would not be known until after his assassination in 1965 that Thao had been one of North Vietnam’s most successful sleeper agents, one of many who had been infiltrated into the South’s military and political leadership. One of his first moves as overseer of the Strategic Hamlet Program was to rush the construction of the new villages. They were poorly built and poorly defended. Thao also ensured that the hated villages were placed in areas that were open to Viet Cong encroachment or attack with little fear of interference by the South Vietnamese army.

Jack Kennedy’s hopeful relocation project was doomed, as he could not know, even as he explained his view of presidential leadership, over cognac and a cigar, to an increasingly troubled Professor Donald. The setting—in the private family quarters of the White House—was dramatic, but in terms of the reality of the war then underway the two men could have been chatting in the captain’s quarters on the Titanic as the ship neared the ice flows.

Our current president, and his foreign policy team, in their unwillingness to seek an immediate ceasefire in the war between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and a NATO-backed Ukraine, could be on the same boat.

The Biden Administration is feeling no pressure from Congress or the American mainstream media about its fervid political, economic, and political support for Ukraine in its ongoing war against Russia. But protests and public anxiety over the war are surging in Germany, along with polls showing dwindling public support for Biden’s policy. Last weekend there were noisy anti-war rallies in Berlin, with crowds estimated at 13,000 by the police and 50,000 by the protest organizers. A “Manifesto for Peace” calling on German officials to halt the flow of weapons to Ukraine attracted 650,000 signatures in two weeks.

The clock is ticking.

https://open.substack.com/pub/seymourhersh/p/does-it-take-a-war?r=690o5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

By Erick-Woods Erickson Feb 25, Confessions of a Political Junkie.

Joy Behar thinks the people of East Palestine, OH got what they deserve because they voted for Trump. The National Transportation Safety Board says the braking regulation rolled back under congressional pressure by Donald Trump would not actually have impacted the derailment. It was a different issue. But Behar does not care. She does not like those people because they voted for Trump.

Adam Wren, the Politico reporter who exposed a Republican congressional candidate’s sexual assault against her will, posted a tweet with “scenes from East Palestine” and it was four pictures of pro-Trump, right-wing sentiment. It seemed to be in the “they got what they deserved” vein of Behar’s sentiment. Why were those pictures relevant to a disaster?

Over the past few weeks, left wing groups have trotted out a series of “studies” that “red states” get more federal government subsidization, have worse standards of living, have more crime, etc. Each another drip in smug justification to hate the people who vote differently, often with skewed framing and data to get the results just right.

Marjorie Taylor Greene wants her national divorce. The serial adulteress is holding herself out as the patron saint of Christian Nationalism in America. I’m guessing she’s all for it so long as the millstones aren’t brought back. She hates the left. The left hates her. They are two sides of the same coin.

There’s a small mindedness in these fights and a common thread is how very online so many of these people are. They don’t think the United States is great. They don’t think we are capable of taking care of ourselves and others. They have given up on each other, on their nation, and on a future that is better than yesterday.

Offline, driving across America, from red state to blue and purple and back, you have to work to really find people who want to break apart the country and not help those in need because of who they voted for. It’s easy to find online and hard to find out there where the people actually are.

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature,” Abraham Lincoln said in his in his first inaugural address. His words could not keep the country together for a time, but he fought like hell to keep it together.

Victory in sight, four years later, he said in his second inaugural, “With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace…”.

We could all use more grace and charity towards each other to think differently, vote differently, work differently, live differently, and still be American together. We should listen to our better angels and not the people who entertain through national dissection.

And into this environment, a series of candidates will come on stage for 2024. I hope they embrace America for all, not just America for their supporters. Out there, away from the noise and the constant tweets, Americans love America and their neighbors. Our leaders, on both sides, should remind us of that instead of stirring the divisions.

merlin now:

So, considering Erick’s words and prodding you for your response, the question begging to be asked, “What could/should be the churches response? OR, their responsibility? Consider these three verses form the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew 5 from the MSG; actually all three chapters, 5 through 7.

[8] “You’re blessed when you get your inside world— your mind and heart— put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.

[9] “You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family.

[10] “You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God’s kingdom. …

FYI, speaking of being away from all the noise, the clip below highlights “White Noise,” a movie released last fall, occurring even in the same town, eerily similar to the events in the Palestine OH tragedy that unfolded February 3. Simply more dysfunction? Family? Mechanical? OR?

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/white-noise-netflix-movie-about-train-derailment-b2283419.html

FEBRUARY 2023SCIENCE, NATURE & TECHNOLOGY

A.I. Yai-Yai

Tech Commentary 

by James B. Meigs

Fans of 2001 and the Terminator movies aren’t the only people worried about artificial intelligence. In 2014, Elon Musk (no enemy of technology) told the Guardian he thought artificial intelligence might be “our biggest existential threat.” Researchers developing AI systems could be “summoning the demon,” he said. Well, now the demon is here, and it wants to say hi. On November 30, 2022, the conversational AI interface ChatGPT was made available to the public. Today, anyone can ask it to write poems, explain quantum physics, compose letters, write computer code, or do their homework. Is this a good thing?

Throughout history, technological innovations—from the mechanical loom to the automobile to the microchip—have disrupted societies even as they brought enormous advantages.

Conservatives generally look askance at sweeping changes that upset the social order. At the same time, they tend to support advances that empower the individual. So should conservatives celebrate the democratization of this world-changing breakthrough? Or should they be standing athwart history yelling stop?

Here’s my take:

Artificial intelligence has the potential to bring numerous benefits to society, and conservatives should embrace it as a valuable tool for improving economic growth, national security, social welfare, and personal freedom. One reason conservatives should embrace AI is its ability to create new industries and job opportunities, and to enhance the performance of existing businesses. Another is its potential to enhance national security. AI can be used to improve situational awareness and decision-making in a variety of contexts, such as detecting and responding to potential threats. Finally, AI can be used to automate tasks and make our lives easier, freeing up time and resources for other pursuits. This can enhance personal freedom and allow individuals to pursue their own interests and passions.

Does this take on AI strike you as somewhat rote? A bit mechanical even? Well congratulate yourself. You have just demonstrated a skill we will all need to cherish from this day forward: the ability to tell when the person talking to you is actually a machine. Because I did not write the paragraph above. Those serviceable if pedestrian sentiments were generated by ChatGPT after I typed in the prompt: “Please explain why conservatives should embrace AI.” (I condensed it slightly.)

You’ve probably been hearing a lot about ChatGPT in the past few weeks. The brainy chatbot is just the latest platform made public by the AI research group OpenAI. Spurred in part by worries about the risks of artificial intelligence, Musk and the young tech-startup guru Sam Altman co-founded the firm as a nonprofit in 2015. The founders hoped that OpenAI’s research would promote a kind non-demonic “friendly AI.” Musk left the company in 2018, leaving Altman as CEO. Investment money poured in from Microsoft and others, and today OpenAI is an amalgam of nonprofit and profit-making divisions. But the organization’s stated mission remains “to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity.”

The artificial general intelligence that OpenAI describes in its mission statement doesn’t actually exist today. AI pioneer IBM defines it as “a theoretical form of AI where a machine would have an intelligence equaled to humans; it would have a self-aware consciousness that has the ability to solve problems, learn, and plan for the future.” This is the kind of capability, often called “Strong AI,” that scares the bejeezus out most of us. Do we really want our digital servants to be self-aware and planning for the future? What future? Are there humans in it? ChatGPT and other current AI systems are nowhere near that level of competence. Still, they can get close enough to be a little creepy.

It’s important to understand that even basic AI systems are much more than super-powerful computers; they are super-powerful computers that can learn. ChatGPT and similar systems employ a partially self-directed approach known as deep learning. If you want an AI system to learn the difference between cats and dogs, for example, you feed it thousands of pictures labeled “cat” and thousands of pictures tagged “dog” and let the system figure out the features that distinguish the two groups. Then you show it more pictures of cats and dogs and have a human operator tell the computer whether it identified them correctly. With enough cycles through this process, AI systems can get incredibly good at tasks like, say, identifying a tree from the image of a single leaf.

For an AI system designed to communicate with humans, the best way to learn is by interacting with as many people as possible. That’s why it makes sense for OpenAI to make ChatGPT available to the public. AI systems have been around for years, used in everything from credit card fraud detection to the Google Lens image-identification app. But OpenAI’s platforms are among the first to give nonprofessionals the ability to create content using AI tools. Within less than a week, ChatGPT was attracting a million users a day. And with each interaction, the system gets smarter. For now, the platform is available for free. But perhaps not for long. “We will have to monetize it somehow at some point,” Altman recently warned, noting that the cost of crunching all that data is “eye-watering.” 

ChatGPT has already begun disrupting established fields. The system is especially good at writing the kind of workaday prose that constitutes most written communication: business memos, simple news stories, student reports. “We are witnessing the end of the college essay in real time,” Google strategist Cory Wang writes. Feed ChatGPT a typical essay question, Wang shows, and it will crank out “solid A- work in 10 seconds.” The chatbot’s responses aren’t beautifully written or strikingly original, but they aren’t meant to be. Prior to being released to the public, the system digested 300 billion words from textbooks, newspapers, academic papers, and other supposedly reliable sources. Its job is not to come up with fresh new insights, but to produce seamless simulacra of that material. A great deal of high school and college academic work involves those sorts of dutiful restatements of the conventional wisdom.

The libertarian-leaning author Virginia Postrel predicts that AI platforms will drive huge productivity gains in fields that rely on written communication. “Instead of writing boilerplate memos, managers will soon assign them to bots,” she writes. The opportunities to automate routine communications are limitless. On Twitter, one doctor demonstrates how he uses ChatGPT to compose letters to insurance companies asking them to cover certain tests his patients need. In seconds, the chatbot generates a flawless—and persuasive—email, complete with citations to the relevant medical literature. Imagine similar efficiencies when it comes to tasks such as writing legal briefs, short news articles, or financial reports. Expect to see the same sorts of gains in other labor-intensive fields including animation, video games, or computer software.

Historically, we’ve seen new technologies replace low-skill jobs, especially those requiring human brawn. Farm tractors put field hands out of work, and diesel engines eliminated jobs for coal shovelers on trains and ships. The AI revolution will instead target relatively high-skill jobs. For example, it takes over a decade of training to become a licensed radiologist. But in a recent study, an AI system outperformed human doctors in reading mammograms, reducing both false negative and false positive findings. Jobs that entail skilled but repetitive work probably face the biggest challenges. A computer developer recently produced a YouTube video showing how ChatGPT can be used to write basic computer code. “I’m really scared,” another coder responded in the comments. “I’m working out how to handle my future job as a mover or farmer.”

Any free-market economist will tell you this is all for the good. Allowing AI systems to take over repetitive intellectual chores will simply make professionals in those fields more productive. A good computer programmer will work many times faster with the help of code-writing bots. A doctor who spends less time writing emails to insurance companies will have more time to see patients. Lawyers will be able to serve more clients. And so on. Moreover, the automation of routine tasks will allow these professionals to wring more value out of their hard-earned expertise. People will be paid for the unique talent and ideas they bring to the table, not for their hours of grunt work.

That all sounds promising. After all, historically, jobs eliminated by new technologies have been replaced by better jobs. Not too many of us wish we could go back to the days when most people worked in fields or factories. But the changes wrought by AI are going to come at a ferocious pace. It took over a quarter century for the automobile to replace both the horse and the huge workforce employed in tending to those horses. AI will transform many knowledge industries in a matter of years, even months. A few top law firms might benefit from a huge boost in productivity. The general-practice attorney who makes a decent living handling wills and real-estate contracts probably won’t. Many of the jobs disrupted will be in fields where workers are accustomed to social status and political influence. Remember: The same AI system that can write college papers will be able to grade college papers. Brace yourself for howls of anguish across elite institutions.

On the other hand, the AI revolution might help some groups who tend to get left behind by technological progress. It takes years to learn how to write standard business prose. Many Americans never do, and that holds them back. But now the small-business owner who never went to college (or whose English is spotty) will be able to send perfectly composed emails to customers. The unjustly sentenced prisoner will be able to petition the court with well-reasoned legal arguments. For many such people, AI will be a great equalizer.

However, one group’s power will be massively enhanced by the rise of artificial intelligence: the people who control the leading AI platforms. OpenAI says its mission is to produce a “safe and beneficial” version of AI. But whose definition of “safe and beneficial” does it employ? When prodding ChatGPT with prompts, it doesn’t take long to discern the hidden value system embedded in the software. If you ask it to create a conspiracy theory about some topic, it will refuse. Ask it to make up a joke about “Americans,” and it will make a weak attempt at humor. Ask it to do the same about “Mexicans,” and the bot won’t respond. Clearly, the programmers want to keep their platform free of what they see as bias, conspiracy kookiness, and other moral contagions. Their concern is understandable (an AI system that churned out and constantly refined conspiracy theories would be scary indeed). But, like a car with a faulty alignment, ChatGPT’s algorithms seem to constantly steer it to the left.

Relax now as you contemplate man’s frivolous short sighted attempt at intelligence while listening to two of my favorite hymns; the latter, Ten Thousand Reasons, as played at the memorial service of the late Brian Stoltzfus, who flew into glory Jan 21, 2019.