“This is episode 74 of the Renew the Arts Podcast, Rich Kids Syndrome and the Decadent Empire of AI. Welcome to the Renew the Arts Podcast, where we discuss the role of art and creativity in the church and in the world. I’m your host, Michael Minkoff.

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Welcome back to the Renew the Arts Podcast for our 2026 season. And I’m really excited to be back, and I hope you’re eager to listen to some new episodes. Speaking of which, what are we gonna talk about this episode?

It’s actually gonna be AI, because I’m sure you haven’t heard enough about AI yet, right? While love it or hate it or whatever it, it seems like we’re all going to have to figure out how to live with it. So we’re seeing AI in the process of reshaping our world.

Whether or not we’re actively using it ourselves, which full disclosure, I’m not. Well, I’m trying not to. They’re kind of forcing it down my throat, but some welcome this reshaping of our world, and others find it really disturbing.

So we’re gonna explore all of that. And since this is a podcast about the intersection of arts and faith, our discussions of AI will, I hope, ultimately come back to art and human flourishing. But it’s a really big topic, so we’ll have a few episodes this season on AI and the arts.

And this one is just gonna be basically about AI. I’m sorry if you were looking forward to hearing more about the arts. There’s not as much about the arts in this one.

I have plans also to include other voices on this topic in coming episodes, but I wanted to begin with a couple of solo episodes. Solo, laying out some of the questions, problems, and potential costs and benefits that the advent of AI integration into our lives has just brought up and we have to deal with it. All right, so I’m going to start this conversation on AI in more general terms, but as I said, rest assured, I will be bringing the discussion around to the arts in the next episode.

So let’s get started. Are you excited? Many of you know my affection for the book Technopoly by Neil Postman.

It’s one of the ones that I kind of come back to, especially in discussions of technology, because I think it’s a really important book, and I recommend you read it if you haven’t read it already. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it on this podcast before, probably multiple times. But in a nutshell, the book argues that we tend to focus on the benefits of technological advancement without really understanding that those benefits come at a price.

We don’t really pay attention to what the price is, and the benefits are often really well known. And I would say, most of the time, and Postman agrees, he would say, and I would agree, that the costs of technology are regularly unintended and unforeseen. Now, that’s a really important point here.

Postman argues that unforeseen, though, is not the same as unforeseeable. And further, that when we just blindly accept technological quote unquote progress as a worthy goal in itself, we unwittingly hazard our whole way of life, and potentially our civilization as we know it. When it comes to technological advancement as an end in itself, Postman might chime in with Dr. Malcolm, your member from Jurassic Park.

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

So when technological progress becomes the goal, rather than the tool toward a goal, the technology we think serves us regularly becomes the object of our service. This is, I think, Postman’s main warning in the book. Not that we should shun technology altogether, but that we really need to understand its unintended costs and consequences, and we should try to set loftier goals than just progress at any cost.

And we must also understand what the costs of any given technology could be, particularly if we’re going to make an informed decision on whether we accept or reject a purported advancement, and even if that decision has been made for us already when it comes to AI, which has some understanding of the potential negative effects, might help us preserve practices that counteract those negative effects, which I think is very important when it comes to AI particularly. But before we can dig into that particularly concerning AI, we should look further at this concept of the unintended costs and consequences of technology, because I don’t really think we spend enough time thinking about it. Though the word technology, I mean, you hear it and it kind of summons them to mind like space age, tech, electronics, and stuff.

Postman points out that even something as commonplace and familiar as a book, was once nonetheless a radical and society transforming technological advancement. And it too has levied a cost on those who have normalized its use. And so I wanted to talk about that a little bit, because I think that speculating about the future consequences of implementing AI is a little bit less secure.

It’s a far more contested and controversial topic. We don’t really know, we haven’t really seen. But when you’re talking about a book, I would say that that’s more apparent, and it’s at this point historical, that the consequences of our adoption of the book has already in some ways run its course over the past few hundred years.

So it gives us a good idea of the way a piece of technology, even something as commonplace and familiar as a book, might actually have impacts that are unintended on even human being. So bring yourself back. Float back with me to the time before machine printed books became widely available.

Even before that, when ideas and poetry and stories were not usually handwritten in books for wider distribution. Let’s let our imagination drift back to when narratives and ideas were transmitted to larger audiences almost entirely through oral transmission, through spoken word. So maybe you’ve heard about the famous Homeric question, like did Homer write The Odyssey and The Iliad?

This is something that scholars debate. And most scholars believe that the works likely predated Homer. Some don’t think Homer even existed historically, but was the authorial pen name given to the work of many poet troubadours who originated or later expanded that oral tradition of those two great works.

The point is that the text was likely transmitted before Homer’s day through telling and retelling. In other words, traveling poets memorized the whole work and recited it from their memory, perhaps embellishing certain portions. But those embellishments would still have to be in the meter of the original, which was a dactylic hexameter for those who want to know such things.

And this meter would have aided in memorization and retelling, as there are very many incorrect recitations that would have become apparent, just because they didn’t meet the metrical contract that’s in the text originally. So the additional thing is that audiences would have had a far greater influence on whether these core stories or their embellishments survived in oral tradition. So, though an unread book that no one wants to read might be preserved for later, more receptive audiences, simply because the book exists as an object in the world and could be found by people later, an oral tradition doesn’t survive if no one continues to speak it.

So if no one shows up to hear something, fewer and fewer people will bother to speak it, and this also applies to like embellishments or revisions to any oral tradition, like popular embellishments might persist from generation to generation, but an unpopular embellishment is just not going to be accepted, or no one’s going to continue to use it. This is not going to persist. And without a written text, the oral tradition would become shaped kind of like a well-worn stone into a mostly fixed state only through regular use and the feedback of perceived usefulness over the generations.

That’s a very different process of production and reception. And just think about that for a second. Like, what would that require of poets and their audiences if all you had was an oral tradition?

Stories transmitted through oral tradition, they retain only the most fitting and penetrating details and features, ones that both the speakers and the hearers have almost involuntarily agreed just simply must be included. It’s also the case that the form and structure that oral traditions take have to be memorable. Like, they just have to be, because to be transmitted, they have to be memorized.

Further, they would also likely be memorized by the audience members if any of them wanted to revisit that text or that story or that poem without the traveling poet. So if the traveling poet wasn’t around anymore and they wanted to revisit their favorite passages, they wouldn’t have a text to revisit. They would have to revisit it in their mind or go and find that traveling poet again, but none of them would have a written record of the text.

So just contrast that. Think about how different that is than the experience we have with books. The process of creation and reception that occurs as soon as something is written down is that it becomes far more fixed a lot earlier and standardized more from the beginning, and it also becomes reproducible in its details, even if some of those details are really hard to remember or memorize or receive.

And it doesn’t need to have a form that’s all that memorable, which means that the kinds of information and the way that it can be written is very, very, very different. And also, books don’t require the same intensity of sustained attention, because you can put a book down, you can pick it back up, it can be much longer than what you could ever receive in one sitting, for that reason. You can pick it up or take it or leave it.

And you’re not really going to do that if somebody, I mean, I guess you could if somebody was talking to you and doing a “presentation, you could just leave in the middle of the performance. But you likely wouldn’t, that wasn’t expected, that would have been considered rude behavior. But a book doesn’t mind if you put it down, it doesn’t know it’s an object.

So, we don’t usually think about this, but the book as a tool really did alter the people who used the book and accepted it. And it actually changed quite profoundly, not just how we receive communications, but it even changed the communications themselves. It changed the way we produce those communications and the kinds of communications that we would produce.

It’s highly unlikely, for instance, that anything much like The Odyssey or The Iliad could ever be composed again after the widespread adoption of the book. In fact, I mean, I was thinking about this, and my wife mentioned The Song of Roland as a potential book-age epic poem, but it’s not really of the same quality or lasting endurance more than likely as The Odyssey or The Iliad. But there is something that I thought was a little bit closer maybe, and that is Paradise Lost by John Milton.

The interesting thing about that though is Milton actually wrote it when he was blind, which means he had to write and edit this epic poem in much the same way that blind Homer would have done in his head or out loud and memorizing it as he went. So that is a really very, very different process. Writing in the book-age does not require that level of memorization or memorability, and perhaps this seems like a trivial difference, but it really is not.

There’s differences in the way our memory and attention work because of what’s required of the pre-book transmission of information that just isn’t required now, and because of that, like, human beings actually have altered. Like, just think back a little bit forward from The Iliad and The Odyssey, but think about even the time of written manuscripts, when manuscripts had to be written by hand, which is actually what manuscript means, manu meaning hand and script meaning write. So it’s handwritten.

And it became the printed book, and then the electronic text, you know, which comes after the printed book. And with each jump, the technology of writing becomes more and more accessible to greater numbers of people, and it eventually maximizes both the benefits and the cost of the technology. So the next logical step after handwritten text would be handwritten copies of those texts, stored in academic or religious institutions, schools, libraries, and churches.

So this is before the printing press, when you just have manuscripts. And most people, even scholars, did not have easy access to manuscripts. Not even when authoring their own books or their own arguments, did authors necessarily or easily have access to all the books they had read and wanted to quote from.

So they had to quote their proof or reference texts, think about this, from memory. This is why the author of Hebrews says things like, someone, somewhere, said, and then he’ll quote exactly from the Old Testament in the Septuagint translation in the Greek. He’s quoting from memory, and he obviously knows the text because he quotes it accurately, but he doesn’t get the reference right, and he wasn’t even sure of the name of the author or the book even, so he doesn’t mention it.

But notice how that kind of memory is really different than ours, because we tend to memorize the reference so that we can find the text in our copy. Ancient authors memorized the text because they didn’t necessarily have a copy, and for that reason, they didn’t really necessarily need to know the references and the citations, because, in a lot of cases, it wouldn’t even be possible for them to use those, because they wouldn’t have access to the text, so it’s not that useful, so it’s not memorable to them. And you got a little bit later than that, well, actually much later, maybe a thousand years later than that, in the time of the scholastics, like Thomas Aquinas.

So the time of like handwritten manuscripts was, you know, a good 1,100 years, where humanity had the opportunity to kind of adjust to that technology. But if you’re talking about the time of like the scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, they still don’t have, you know, machine printed books or access to books whenever they wanted them. So in the time of the scholastics, like think about this, it’s crazy.

You have these densely layered, I mean, if you read Thomas Aquinas, you know, like very dense, heavily layered oral arguments involving oftentimes hundreds of quotations from dozens of authors, and they had to “be delivered without any aids or written notes of any kind. So that was one of the things the scholastics had to do. You know, they’d go into the forum, and they’d be arguing with each other about their various arguments.

They had to make their case, and their quotations and their citations and their references and all the precedents and everything else that they were drawing from, all had to be quoted from memory. They had no notes. They had no capacity to look at any notes.

They weren’t allowed to. That’s just crazy. That’s crazy to me.

Think of a modern lawyer showing up to a court case ready to argue his case with nothing. He doesn’t have a briefcase. He doesn’t have anything in his hands.

He’s just got his entire argument in his head, all the case laws, all the precedents, any references he needs, all the quotes he needs, entirely do it without any notes. I mean, it’s really, it’s actually remarkable. And this is not just the case then.

I mean, this lasted for a period of time, even after printed books became a reality. There were certain disciplines that took a while to “remove from human practice, and memorization was one of them. I mean, for instance, in the reform tradition, we have the Westminster Confession, larger and shorter catechisms.

The shorter catechism, which is currently taught to and memorized by sometimes, sometimes memorized in part, at least, by, you know, adults in seminary. When, like, if you go to a reformed seminary, you’ll be like, here, you know, you got to… You’re a masters of biblical studies, so you need to memorize some of the shorter catechism and be very familiar with it.

Well, the shorter catechism was written for children. It was written for little children at the time when it was written. So not even that many hundreds of years ago, the demands even of children in terms of memorization and attention were much higher.

The scarcity of written text really changed the way people read texts that they had access to. You just didn’t know when a written text might be seen again, and you didn’t know for sure if you might want to reference or quote or think about it later on when it was not in front of you. So basically, without any exception, the ancients would read very closely and very slowly and usually out loud and with the intent to memorize and incorporate whatever they read.

So, of interest, our phrases scan a text and peruse a text used to both mean to read a text intently and closely so as not to miss any detail. Now both scan and peruse both mean basically the same as like skim. But ancient authors basically did not skim texts ever.

Modern people, products of the book technology’s final advancement as the worldwide web, don’t have a need for close reading or memorization. We just don’t have a need for it. Think about that.

Most people simply don’t need to read that closely or memorize things. Not even academics read closely, though, in our day. Like the bibliographies of the most advanced academic works that are available at the most prestigious universities out there, they’re filled with references, citations to written texts that the original author has either skimmed or crudely abstracted or included for superficial resemblances that would not have sustained closer inspection.

And this is happening at the highest level of academic prowess, where people are just skimming stuff regularly, if they’re even reading it at “all. And the average reader’s resources at the popular level are even more impoverished of detail and require almost no sustained attention or effort. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but most books written at the popular level are extremely repetitive.

And the reason is that if you space out and aren’t paying attention, aren’t reading closely, but you come back in, you’re probably going to get the same point. Like if you’ve ever read John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life, he could have written that in a short article, but instead had to take a few hundred pages because he just basically says the same thing over and over and over again, just in case you were just spaced out for most of the time you’re reading it. You began at the beginning of the paragraph, you started thinking about something else, you came back to it up, you didn’t even miss anything.

That it’s written in that way because it’s basically expecting that there’s not going to be very much close attention. Okay. And most of us really don’t memorize intentionally or read to memorize either.

The fact that written text for us can be brought up in our handheld phones without hardly any effort has only accelerated this movement away from close and sustained attention to any text. I mean, even you might like look up a definition or look up a fact that you’re like, oh, I wonder what that is, and you go and look it up, and it’s really easy, and it’s effortless to find that information. And then a couple of days later, you know, you’ll be like, oh, you know, you’ll have the same question, you’ll have this, and you’ll look it up again.

You don’t even remember it. There’s like no need to remember it because you can bring it up so quickly and without any effort. So you just don’t have to remember, and you really don’t have to pay all that close attention because things are just going to be there if you ever need to go back to them, and you just, you know, put them down, pick them up, whatever.

And so we all feel this implicitly, that any information that’s out there is preserved, and it’s preserved without our memory, and it’s preserved without our attention, and it’s in objects that are outside of us. So we’re like more than willing to grant that memory requirement, the memory requirement that used to be on us, we’re more than willing to grant that to objects so that we don’t have to be responsible for it because it’s onerous and difficult, and why? So in us, that has fundamentally altered both our memory and our attention.

That’s just a fact. That has fundamentally altered human memory and human attention over the generations.

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It’s hard to overemphasize this, but I’m going, I guess I’m going to try it over. But memorization was a really huge part of the ancient monastic and scholastic life. It was such a huge part that many ancient practices were preserved orally or in manuscripts on various different techniques of memorization.

And they were like pioneers of memorization. And some of those techniques are still used today by competitors in like memory competitions, which yes, those exist. If you want to know more about those, and you really should, because it’s really fascinating.

I really enjoyed Joshua Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein. I’ll put a link to that, but you should check that out if you’re interested in the history of memory and memory techniques. But if you consider memory and attention to have nothing to do ultimately with what is able to be produced by people shaped by the technology of the book, I think you’re thinking about this too narrowly.

Okay, so I want you to think about that just for a little bit longer, that the alteration of memory and attention doesn’t just affect the way we receive information. It also affects how we are able to produce and organize information as producers or creators or authors. And it’s like, well, what difference would it make if the memory is being taken care of by a book rather than in my head?

What major difference would that make? Let me give you an example. And this is a minor example, but it’ll help you to understand that there are potentially lots of things that are lost there.

And the problem is we don’t even know what they are because you don’t know what you don’t know. But I was making a music video for my friend John, who’s an artist with Warbler. And so I made this music video called America, which, you know, you can check it out.

I don’t usually make music videos, but I had an idea for this one, and I was like, I think I can probably go on the Library of Congress and use a bunch of archival videos and footage and stuff from there and kind of piece it together. And if you watch the video, I’ll put a link in the show notes, you’ll see that there’s, you know, huge amounts of archival footage, and I’ve pieced it all together. But in order to find what I was looking for, like I had an idea, and I had certain shots where I was like, man, if I could find something that, you know, was an image of this or that worked for this, that would be awesome, that would work really well.

So I did have an idea beforehand, somewhat, of what I was looking for. But I didn’t have everything in mind. I just had a vision, an overall vision.

When I went on to the archives, though, I just started watching videos. Like, I just started watching any, and I was open to the possibility that they were important, and even if I didn’t know why, because maybe they could be used, I don’t know. So I just was watching.

I watched probably, I don’t even know. It took me like 200 hours to make that video, which is, a lot of it was just my incompetence with editing. But I looked through, I looked through, I looked through, I looked through.

I was watching these videos. Some of them were really fascinating. Some of them were obviously not going to be able to be used or work.

But I found one that I thought the video itself was just so interesting that I was just going to have to use it. And it was just one of this circus carnival baboon that was playing a fake violin. You know, he’s just kind of sawing away at it because it was a carnival act.

It was kind of disturbing, kind of humorous, but kind of sad. It was all sorts of things all wrapped together. And I just thought, this is good.

This should go in here. I didn’t know how it would work, but I knew that I wanted to try and figure out a way to do it. And if you see it in the video, it looks like I had intended to do it, but I didn’t beforehand.

It was sort of like the selection of it or the finding of it. It started to give me the idea and change to the vision. But you understand, if I hadn’t just been closely paying attention to more than what I thought was actually necessary or more than what I thought was actually important, I needed a huge amount of information, a huge amount in there, kind of holding it all together.

And I needed to pay attention. Do you understand? If you’re not paying attention, we think that if it’s important, I’ll pay attention to it.

Unfortunately, you don’t know it’s important sometimes unless you give it attention. So that’s a major, major problem in the production of something. If you’re not paying attention to kind of everything in general, you sometimes you don’t even know what’s important because you haven’t paid enough attention to see the things that eventually end up could be important, but you wouldn’t even know.

You wouldn’t even know that you missed them because you’re not paying attention. And so that’s a major issue in terms of productive and creative cognitive processes. We really actually do need a lot of sustained attention in order to be aware of the things that are available and possible that may show up or may not.

We have to look. We have to be looking. We have to be paying attention.

That’s one thing. But memory also, if you don’t have a massive amount of material in your head to draw from, it is very hard to have intuition about patterns or hypotheses or the structures or relationships of things, because you don’t have enough information in your head to be able to draw those conclusions or at least make those hypotheses. You know, like say, maybe it could be like this, because you have a paucity, like too scarce of a set of information already in your head.

And again, you don’t know what is and is not important out there. So it’s not like, well, I’m going to come up with my hypothesis and then go and look for that information. You’re not going to even come up with the hypothesis if you haven’t already stored enough information in your mind to be able to make those connections and see those patterns of relationship.

And so I really do believe that a loss of memory and a loss of focus, sustained attention is a real problem, not just in the way that we receive information, but in the way we create and structure things and produce things of new and novel interest. So I think that has impacts on the arts. It has impacts on writers and thinkers and speakers and all sorts of things like that.

So all I’m saying is there’s a cost. There has been a cost to this. And not just the benefit of having information easily accessible. “So we need to take a little journey through some related ideas that I think are going to help to clarify what we might lose, because this is where we’re at. Like, what might we lose? We kind of have some idea of the benefits of AI, some of the potential benefits of what is offered to us.

But what would we lose? What are the potentially unforeseen, but not necessarily unforeseeable, costs of the adoption of AI? So I’m just going to begin with what I think is a central and historically verified principle of human being.

And I’ve yet to see this contradicted in any people group or even in any individual person. Here it is. Bodies and spirits expend as little effort as they are allowed to.

Or to put it another way, bodies and spirits will do as little as is required of them. Now, don’t get me entirely wrong here, that the one requiring your body and spirit to make the extra effort could be you. I mean, you can actually require, let’s go, let’s do this, come on.

Don’t give up on me now, body. You can go, just one more. You know, we can do another set.

We can do another run. We can do another page. We can do another whatever it is.

You can, you know, you push yourself. You can push yourself. And some people do that.

But most of the time, if you’re required to do something, it’s required by somebody else. It could be your parents when you’re young. Could be the force of societal norms or the needs of survival or just circumstances.

But all that said, it seems clear that there is a, I would call it like a second law of thermodynamics of the body and spirit in a fallen world, that things in the body and spirit just tend toward disorder and falling apart, and they require additional effort to keep from degenerating. In other words, if you allow the body not to do something, or you allow the spirit to not do something, it simply won’t allocate the resources to be able to do it. So like, if you don’t use your muscles, even beyond their short-term limits sometimes, like really push them, like they’re going to atrophy.

If you’re not using them, you will lose them. If you give your brain feel-good chemicals that, in healthy circumstances, your brain would make for itself, it’s not going to thank you for the leg up, and I’m going to get on to making more of those chemicals just like you need. It’s just going to stop making the chemicals altogether, because it doesn’t need to anymore.

Because you’re getting it without its production, so it just stops producing. The spirit is the same way. No one grows in virtue without discipline, because even the spirit, like the body, won’t make an effort unless it’s required of it.

So that’s just true. I know some of you might be like, no, that couldn’t possibly be. It is definitely, like, just think about it.

It’s definitely true, and you’ve seen it in your own life, and you’ve seen it in others. It’s pretty much a, you know, a rule, a principle, that holds over all cultures, that people pretty much will do as little as they’re required to. Now, consider this corollary to that above principle, and this is where it gets even, I don’t know, somewhat disturbing.

Most people, perhaps even the vast majority of people, will not voluntarily apply discipline to themselves. This is vast. So, in other words, if most people are going to make any effort at all, they will have to be required by something outside themselves to apply that discipline and pressure.

So, because most people will not voluntarily apply discipline to themselves. They just will not. Now, obviously, this is a generalization.

There are exceptions. Most people will not apply discipline to themselves, generally. In fact, this is the reason why all attempts at Communism have failed.

Because Communism removes the survival incentive to work, to labor. So, in other words, it says that you can eat even if you have done little or no work. It’s not connected to the work that you’ve done.

You eat whatever it is that you need, even if you’ve done nothing. Now, if most people were self-motivated and applied themselves to doing the extra effort, even without any other incentives from their external environments, Communism would function quite well. It would function generally, and there would be exceptions, but on average, Communism would work just fine.

Because most people would not need any outside survival incentive or force of the market or punitive societal norm to make the extra effort. They just would, because they were motivated by themselves. They would make themselves do it.

Unsurprisingly, however, most people do little to no work when it’s not required of them. So if they don’t have to work to survive, they won’t work. So they don’t work, which is why, you know, the American Walmarts and Costco’s have goods from floor to ceiling, and the Soviet market struggled to stock a few loaves of mediocre bread.

Again, this is not because Americans are better than Soviets. It’s just that we leveraged the self-serving instincts for survival, and we used it to squeeze work out of most people who wouldn’t otherwise have produced anything for others if they didn’t have to do it in order to feed themselves. We all think even that we’re more virtuous than this, but we’re not.

Okay, we’re not. The vast majority are not, and history confirms this over and over and over and over again. Most of us atrophy wherever we are not forced.

You could call it like rich kid syndrome. You’ve probably heard of like rich parents who grew up poor, and they had to scrabble for every little scrap and persevere and work really hard and go without anything and work late and wake up early and go without all of the necessities and etc., etc.,

etc. And they built up for themselves a lot of wealth through these great capacities that they developed through their difficulties and disadvantages. Well, oftentimes rich parents who grew up poor have a really hard time instilling those same like work, ethics, and values into their kids.

How do you teach spoiled kids the virtues of perseverance and thrift if they’ve never had to try and they’ve never been in want? It’s really hard. And further, is it likely that those kids, those same spoiled kids who never had to go through any disciplines will even be able to manage or steward their inherited wealth without the virtues that would have been necessary to create that wealth?

No, it would be basically impossible unless those children somehow adopted an exceptional degree of self-discipline and self-motivation at some point. But it’s very hard to instill that and still give them all the benefits that the rich parents didn’t have when they were kids, right? I mean, it’s like this struggle.

I think Malcolm Gladwell talks about this. He talked to some rich parents that were talking about strategies. How do I train my kids how to be like I was without putting them through all the hardship I went through?

It’s a real challenge. It’s kind of a conundrum. And what is true of individuals is also true of societies.

You could call it rich kids syndrome at the individual level, but at the society level, it looks more like decadent empire syndrome. You’re probably familiar with this cyclical view. Like you’ve probably seen this on the Internet or whatever.

It says, hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. Or as Dan Carlin from Hardcore History likes to quote Voltaire, that history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up. In other words, the decline of these silken slippers empires and the rise of these clogged, uncomfortable, but functional shoes going up.

And around, and around, and around, and around that goes. As unpleasant as these realities are to dwell on, I think it’s really important to look closely at this, because I think this principle actually does the best job of predicting the unforeseen costs of any technology. So think about this is a corollary, but it makes a lot of sense.

Whatever technology does for us, we will probably cease to do for ourselves. Like the vast majority of us just won’t do it for ourselves if technology could do it for us. And the longer we cease to do it, the less capable we will become of ever doing it again.

Like in some ways, society has altered to such a great degree, for instance, that it is unlikely that society in general will ever recover the sense of like expected societal attention or memory that would have been the norm, say, in the pre-printed book era of the written text age. It just probably will never happen again. It’s kind of gone forever.

And again, you could say it’s not necessarily bad, it’s not necessarily good, but it is different. That is a difference that we probably won’t ever get back to that same place. There will be a handful of self-motivated people who make an effort, even when technology makes that effort unnecessary, who still do the work, even when technology says you don’t have to do work.

But these are rare individuals. And it’s not necessarily in the same kind of work. You see what I’m saying?

Like, you could have time saved by a device, a time-saving device, like a washer or a dryer or a microwave or an oven or a stovetop or running water or a toilet or whatever. That saves you time and energy. You don’t necessarily say, oh, you know what?

I’m not going to have the washer and dryer. I’m going to continue to go down to the river and wash my clothes by hand on a washboard. You could do that.

That is true. But that’s not necessarily what I’m saying. I’m saying if you’re going to use the washer and dryer, you’re going to save time from that.

But are you actually getting the same benefits from the time you’re spending? Meaning, are you just doing more? Like, are you disciplining yourself with the same discipline you would have had to use in order to go down there and wash those clothes yourself?

Now you’re able to dump the load in the washer and leave it, set it, and forget it. Are you using the time that you just saved in the same degree of discipline, doing some other meaningful thing, and potentially doing something that is as meaningful socially as going down to the river with all of your neighborhood pals would have been as a community bonding experience? Do you still have that?

Are you doing something that maintains that? Or are you just wasting that time? Are you doom scrolling, etc.?

Because if that’s what you’re doing, I mean, think about, like, all these women of the past who had none of these, they cooked over open fires, had to go and get water from the well, they didn’t have running water, you know, they’re having to wash by hand, they’re cooking all their meals, they’re, you know, making flour tortillas by hand, or whatever else, you know? I mean, like, all this stuff is hand prepared. And yet, these women, a lot of them, even while they were doing all of this, also did all the other things that are expected of women in terms of, like, social bonding and maintenance of, you know, like, the emotional health of children, etc. Like, these women were, like, we look back and we’re like, those women are superhuman. But they weren’t.

They were just redeeming their time, and they were actually disciplined by the hardships and difficulties of their lives in such a way that they became stronger through those difficulties. We’ve become weaker because of our ease. That’s a thing that I don’t think that we’re really taking into account.

Now, you don’t have to be weaker because of the ease. You could actually exercise that discipline still upon yourself and actually be even more productive because you don’t have to do that same amount of work to make the meal. And you could still do an additional amount of work, but maybe it doesn’t have to go towards the meal.

Maybe it goes towards reading that book that you haven’t read or writing a book that you wanted to write, or writing a song, or learning how to play the guitar, or exercising, or going for a walk, or whatever. I mean, there’s any number of various different things that you could do to spend that time productively, but oftentimes we’re wasting it. And I think that is the really major way in which technology can harm us, because a lot of times, people that were not having technology, but having to do all these things by hand, circumstances were forcing them to grow in discipline and virtue.

But once you have all those things taking care of you and you no longer have circumstances or the need for survival forcing you to grow in virtue, are you still going to apply yourself to discipline? And most people, unfortunately, will not. These are rare individuals, really, who are willing to apply discipline to themselves and don’t need it applied to them from external sources.

And these people have really never been able, the handful of them historically, to save their own societies from the inevitable collapse that has always come right after periods of decadence.

Hi, I was just gonna interrupt here for a second. To say, we’d love to hear your thoughts on AI. We might even include them in a future episode this year.

So please record a voice memo or write a note, ramble if you please. I mean, I know I do. And then send one or the other voicemail, voice memo, email, carrier pigeon to Michael[at]renewthearts.org. And include your name and your location if you want it to be included. And we’re looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

So, how do we apply this to AI? Well, the initial indications are troubling. A Times article from last year explains an MIT study on the cognitive effects of ChatGPT on its users.

And as the article explains, quote, the study divided 54 subjects, 18 to 39 year olds from the Boston area, into three groups and asked them to write several SAT essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s search engine, and nothing at all, respectively. Researchers used an EEG to record the writer’s brain activity across 32 regions and found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement, and quote, consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels, end quote. Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy and paste by the end of the study.

The paper suggests that the usage of LLMs could actually harm learning, especially for younger users. The paper has not yet been peer reviewed, and its sample size is relatively small, but its main author, Natalia Kozmina, felt it was important to release the findings to elevate concerns that as society increasingly relies upon LLMs for immediate convenience, long-term brain development may be sacrificed in the process. So this would follow from what we’ve already discussed so far.

Book technology reduced the human need for memory and sustained attention by making access to information effortless and external. But it still left the thinking and dreaming and planning and problem-solving to humans for the most part, although it may have affected our capacity, one could argue, with diminished stores of memory and degraded attentions that maybe we’ve become less effective and less creative thinkers. But AI purports to do far more than make information more accessible.

It also purports to process, interpret, and even represent that information back to you. In other words, you might be tempted to let it do your thinking for you. And the Pope recently exhorted in a recent talk about AI, he said, do not renounce your ability to think.

Like that was one of his big exhortations concerning AI. Do not renounce your ability to think. And though renounce may be too active a word for what we’re doing here, because we’re kind of just letting go, we’re not really actively renouncing it.

The historical evidence does seem clear that if we allow technology to do our thinking for us, eventually fewer and fewer of us will do much thinking at all, and that’s just the way it’s going to be if we let that happen. Now, so far, most all I have talked about here probably seems like, you know, bad news. Call me a hopeless romantic if you want, but I think that the AI crisis may actually allow a change in human being that has never been necessary before, and that’s exciting to me.

So I’m going to unpack that a bit. I mentioned, you know, that successful empires tend to become decadent. If they are successful, they tend to be decadent eventually.

And this is because the goal of empire is always to make it more effortless for the loyal people of that empire to live well. You know, the point of empire, accumulating power and wealth and status, is ultimately to reward those that are loyal to the empire, and to reward them with what? Well, with ease, with comfort.

And it turns out, however, that making it easier to live well means most people lose the capacity to do the hard things necessary to build and maintain empire. So thus, empires inevitably collapse under their own success. The very ease they secure is their undoing.

And decadent empires generally collapse when another wannabe empire takes over. And this one’s usually hungrier, harder, tougher, mostly forged from its own difficulties and disadvantages. And the strength forged in hardship comes and punches the fat, lazy old empire right in the nose or something like that.

All right. So that’s the cycle we were discussing. But ask yourself about the empire created by AI.

Like, what does that decadent empire actually look like? It’s not one nation. It’s not one people group.

Not just one people will benefit from its rewards. AI really could create a worldwide empire of ease. I recommend you read a recent viral, and to me, quite convincing, article by Matt Schumer titled Something Big Is Happening, where he opines that within, he says, five years, pretty much any job that can be done on a computer will be done instead by AI, and it will be being done better than pretty much any human could do it.

I mean, read the article. It’s very compelling. But what he’s saying is that in five years or so, entry-level landscapers will probably be making more money than most all the people currently making six or more figures working white collar jobs.

And if you add robotics into that mix a few years after that, probably, like a huge number of currently necessary jobs will be taken entirely out of the hands of humans. And I mean, this is not even that far in the distant future. But like, I mean, it’s like, oh, no, they’re taking our jobs.

But think about this. When robots and AI do most of the work, because they’re not really participants in the economy in the same way that you are, who will pay for their services? Because they’re not.

So you understand, like, they’re providing services that humans want, but now humans aren’t doing the jobs that they would get paid so that they can pay for services. So like, that’s going to necessarily mean that prices and profits will have to plummet, because most of the people who need services no longer have jobs. So robots compared to humans have extremely low overhead as employees, you know, as laborers as well, which means that the cost of living of necessity probably reduced to the point that most humans will have an extraordinary amount of free time.

And what they do to make money too, will have to be something that robots and AI can’t do better than they can. So I don’t really know what that economy even looks like, but it’s totally different than what we currently have. We really can’t even tell what that would be.

That’s a really weird scenario that will almost certainly come to pass as AI becomes more and more ubiquitous. All that to say, what we can’t tell with a pretty good degree of certainty is this. AI is going to make it so we have even fewer currently necessary and difficult things that we have to do.

And we already know what we don’t have to do, few of us will choose to do or even choose to exercise the effort to do other things with the time or space that we’re saving by not doing those things. Okay, so then, is the cycle of empire going to continue in the same way it’s continued before? Well, no, I don’t see how it could.

Because if the worldwide empire of AI collapses into decadence and purposeless meaninglessness, what is going to replace it? Like what empire is coming around on the other side and be like, oh, you’ve gotten soft and old and here comes hard, tough. There’s nothing.

There’s nothing. It is the world. It’s humanity.

So AI may really just usher in the slow degradation of the species as we generally continue to sink to the minimal efforts required of us to live, which will be less and less and less. So this really is actually, I think, a human crisis in the most specific and literal sense of that word. This is a decision point.

This is a point of decision. But as in every other society, there’s going to be human beings even after AI takes over or whatever. There will be human beings who resist the siren call of ease and continue doing hard things, even if they don’t have to.

Just as there have always been these few people. I’m talking about the people who discipline themselves, who apply themselves to make the extra effort, even when no one is forcing them. They’ll work.

They’ll love. They will share. They will give.

Even if their life doesn’t depend on it anymore, they won’t be able to keep the empire of ease from basically devolving into purposelessness, but they will have the opportunity to persist and forge their own kinds of communities. And ultimately they will be the harbingers of whatever is left to humanity of humanity. Even now AI is forcing us to consider this.

Like what does it mean to be human? And what is left to us if AI takes all of this stuff and does it better than we could? And as dour as it might seem this podcast has been, I’m actually really excited about this.

Because as we’ve mentioned, most humans won’t do something until they’re forced to. They won’t do a good thing that requires effort unless they’re forced to do it. So if AI is going to force humanity in general to actually find out what makes us human, and it’s going to force us in general to pursue what is actually meaningful and filled with purpose, maybe humanity will actually do that “in far greater numbers than we’ve ever seen before.

And I want to talk about that next episode, about what this could mean for the arts and human flourishing. Because I think for all the doom and gloom, it will be very good in the end.

The Renew the Arts Podcast is a production of Renew the Arts, a 501c3 dedicated to cultivating Christian communities by inspiring arts partnership and supporting artists. If you’d like to find out more about our work, please visit renewthearts.org. The Renew the Arts Podcast is directed, produced, and hosted by Michael Minkoff, with oversight by Renew the Arts President and CEO, Katie Martin.

Production support provided by Chase Tremaine and Abby Sitterle. Edited by Chase Tremaine. Theme music by Civilized Creature.

For the 2026 season, we’re using the instrumental version of the single Think I’m Ready, used with the generous permission of the artist, Ryan Lane of Civilized Creature. Thank you all for listening.