Transcript for Episode 60

Ryan: I've been thinking most about your stuff, Gretchen, just because I've been listening to your stuff most recently. Um, man, I love the Derek Schuurman episode.

Gretchen: Isn't that good?

Ryan: You asked so many good questions. The one that was most fascinating to me, and that has me thinking all kinds of new thoughts in different frameworks, is will there be bugs in heaven? So, he thinks there will be computers in heaven. And so if there are computers in heaven, will there be bugs? And he thinks, yes, that it'll be part of human finitude. What's your take on that?

Gretchen: Well, I want to say, I think he framed that as the reason there are bugs is because of the fall. And I don't know that he carried bugs into heaven. He was positing that there are bugs, and even if we were living in a sin free world, there would still be bugs because of our finitude. So, he separated fallenness and finitude.

I don't know that once we get to heaven, if computers are a tool we use to explore and to discover even more of the depths of God's creativity and amazingness, that’s what he's saying: there's going to be tools that we use here that we probably might use there.

Ryan: Right. And so just as our getting tired by running is not a result of sin in this world, but in heaven we will run and not be weary; so also then will there be a shift from finitude to a certain level of infinite capacity.

Gretchen: Infinitude.

Ryan: That would ideally eliminate bugs?

Gretchen: I feel like the whole, there will be no more tears, no more sadness—if you look at a computer bug, that makes you cry if you're a programmer. So I would think that it would be a purified, redemptive version of computers in heaven. I don't know. That's a really good question. 

Let me ask Grant a question. Grant, you had a podcast with a guy named Ted Castronova, and in it, you guys referred to what you called the laptop class. I think we're hearing that phrase quite a bit as a new ruling class, because they are what I would call the “landowners” of online products that we spend our lives using and increasingly depending on. Mark Andreason, the venture capitalist who was the Netscape pioneer, refers to this group as the reality privileged. They become VR apologists, maybe even metaverse evangelists, for the lower classes and the unwashed masses. 

Maybe Ryan, you can speak into this as well; but in medieval times there were three orders of society: those who fought, those who prayed, and those who worked. If the laptop class is now those who fight—like the nobility—what are the other two classes, and how does that work? Even in a “classless” society, we still have classes. What do you think? 

Grant: I actually don't think that the classes will be so fundamentally different. I think that the distribution will change tremendously. This is something that Gabe Winant and I talked about in our interview: the laptop class that we're talking about will essentially be analogous to capital; and you have a service class, and this will make up the majority or a substantial portion of employment. The folks that wash the clothes, and care for you when you're sick. But what will grow will be the sort of surplus population, the folks where there's no meaningful employment. 

Because what's happening in the contemporary economy is there's this disconnect between industries that make a lot of money—you think about tech—and the industries that employ. For the amount of money Google makes, they employ very, very few people. So I think that ultimately you'll still have this sort of capitalist class, the laptop class. It'll be different than Andrew Carnegie, but it'll be similar in its power and abilities. And you'll still have a service sector. But what I think will shrink mightily is employment in non-service industries. And I think that we really are facing a moment in which we're not quite sure what to do with all these folks that used to be in manufacturing and other similar industries, and now have no meaningful opportunities for employment.

So I don’t know how that matches up on the taxonomy that you created, but I think that those are fundamentally [the classes]. And folks in the university and in government, I see those as part of the laptop crowd. Even though they're not part of tech and don't necessarily own capital in the way that the CEO of Google will, I think they're fundamentally a part of the same class.

Gretchen: Let me throw in that, “those who pray” portion, because it was the nobility, the clergy, and the peasants, right. Ryan, you can confirm nodding your head. 

Ryan: Yeah, definitely.

Gretchen: Where does the “those who pray” fit in this culture? Are there any?

Grant: Well, what Ted Castronova and I talked about is those that pray will certainly be smaller, but I think in many ways they'll be much more dynamic and creative. And I mean particularly, not creative in the economy, but actually procreatively. I do think that there will be a community of religious people who've committed themselves to prayer and to living outside of the structure we just talked about, having children and praying and living lives of creation in that way. 

Ryan: What's interesting is that, as far as I know, the first person to formulate that three estates theory in the Middle Ages was Alfred the Great, this English king in the end of the ninth century. He puts it in the context of this political theory that begins with the question of God has given us creation; now, what do we need to do to cultivate it? God has given me this land, this creation, as the king; so what do I need to cultivate it? Well, it needs to be cultivated in these three ways, essentially. And so that's where those three estates come in.

Gretchen: The Romans also had the senators, soldiers and plebes, right? Maybe we're trying to retrofit it too much and go too far with it. But it really did strike me that in your podcast Grant, with Ted, that the online product owners are the ones who are engoggling and engrossing us in this goggles-in-a-chair or chair-and-a-screen mentality. 

I guess we can leave the three orders of society out of it and just talk maybe for a second about this idea of the reality-privileged. Mark is a huge investor in Meta—which is Facebook—and it behooves him to make sure that people can go into these virtual worlds and experience the beauty of a gated community, or a vacation in Fiji, or whatever, when they couldn't otherwise. And that would make their lives better and happier, but they would still be sitting in a chair, and also seeing online advertisements, which would support these metaverses. The whole idea of product placement gets a huge boost. 

So what are your thoughts on how we should respond to that? Because it's a thing they're pushing, and the metaverse is all over the place in brands, in terms of advertising.

Ryan: I don't think we actually do need to leave behind the framework of the three estates, because it draws a helpful contrast between the different ways you can approach these problems. On the one hand, you can approach them beginning from reality as gift; and then the question is, how are we stewards of the gift of reality. I think when we have these modern economic conversations, we're not beginning from there. We're beginning from capital; the analysis is capital and labor. That's the starting point. What that means then is that this idea of surplus people, a properly Christian, creation-oriented political theory wouldn't view those people as surplus people, right? They would have value in ways that exceed their economic value.

Gretchen: That goes back to Ebeneezer Scrooge in a Christmas Carol, who said we can decrease the surplus population. That was his big line.

Ryan: Did he say that?

Gretchen: Yeah. When he was still a Scrooge.

Grant: When he didn't want to give money to charity, that was one of his lines. 

Gretchen: “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” 

I love your phrase stewards of the gift of reality, Ryan. There's a thousand ways to go with that. Anyway, what else do you got?

Grant: Well, I do really like that with the phrase that you used. Reality privilege. I mean, it is very interesting. We look over the history of modern society.There's all these things that capital gives to labor, if we want to continue on that analogy, or power gives to the people. There are things that are offered to free them and make them free, but which the laptop class has absolutely no interest in. So as Christians, we often talk about birth control and the breaking of the nuclear family; we always hear that by breaking the nuclear family, women are now free. But it seems that the vast majority of upper middle class women get married, have children, and maintain nuclear families. And it becomes a privilege then to have this family that was for everybody. I think a similar thing exists here. 

I heard your question more as what do we do from a political and social perspective. And I honestly really don't know. I mean, all of the instruments of power and money are behind establishing this very society that you're talking about. I do think it's particularly incumbent on Christians to think very, very hard about how we should live within this relatively apocalyptic reality, where we'll have a reality-privileged class.

Gretchen: The irony here to me, is that as you sit in your gated community or whatever you wanna call it; you are thinking of how you could bequeath the lower classes with some semblance of yours, but at the same time, you're making money off of that very offering. And so I feel like as Christians, we need to call out that irony. 

Also, going back to Ryan's delightful phrase, the stewards of the gift of reality: lobby hard that reality … this actually segues into a question I have for Ryan. Can I just go there?

People are using technology as a means of relieving or eliminating human suffering, and enhancing so-called human flourishing, and that's a big selling point of AI these days. But Christian theology, as you talked about in a recent podcast, Ryan, clearly embraces suffering as a means to many virtues, including compassion and charity. And historically we see Christian revivals happening in times of suffering. So when we're looking at people who are trying to use technology as a means of eliminating it, how would you sell the art of suffering well to a modern audience? And how might we rethink some of our technological goals that seek to eliminate it? 

Ryan: Well, first of all, I think it's an absolute fantasy that suffering's going to be eliminated. Even supposing that gene therapy is invented such that we never experience any kind of sickness or the deleterious effects of aging, there's still psychological suffering. There's this very interesting book that I just started by Liah Greenfield on psychiatry and the cultural causes of the three major psychiatric disorders: schizophrenia, bipolar, and major depressive disorder.

She talked about speaking with her students about suffering in class, these undergraduate students at NYU—super sharp students—and telling them about the reality that, prior to modern medicine, most people just lived in constant pain. It wasn't always from the same source—there's toothache, there's the older you get the more pain, and you get old much more quickly. And her students response was, well, they weren't actually feeling pain. They just got used to it. Because to them, it's impossible to imagine living in a sustained way with pain. 

And then she said, do any of you know someone who has been in the depths of despair, or felt so anxious, they couldn't leave their room? And almost all hands in the room went up. And she said, are those people living continuously with pain? And then they're all nodding their heads. 

So even if we are able to technologize all of the material causes of suffering out of existence, there's still going to be ourselves, and a potential abyss of suffering. That's why Christianity is always going to be necessary, because it is one of the few religions that proposes suffering, not as a good in itself, but as a path—through participation in Christ's own suffering—to ultimate happiness. That's why I feel confident to say that there's no intrinsic good to suffering or to death.

So Gretchen, you have just completed your doctorate. Congratulations,

Gretchen: Thank you.

Ryan: A PhD, and it is a qualitative study of AI technologists and professionals who also are Christians. How many hours of interviews did you do for this?

Gretchen: It turned out to be 21 hours. I had like 250 pages of single-spaced, raw interviews. It was ridiculous.

Ryan: Wow. 

Grant: I’ll go ahead and jump in there. A related question, I think, as I read the abstract from your dissertation, one thing did come to mind. If someone with a thoroughly Christian worldview became the CEO of Google, what would be the first thing they would change?

Gretchen: Hmm.

Ryan: That’s a great question.

Gretchen: I even addressed this in my dissertation in fact, on the applied thoughts and reflections—let's call it, applying a “what would Jesus do” filter. Out of the gate I addressed profit and power as the two things that drive the tech industry today. If the Silicon valley ethos is to chase after killer apps or unicorns—the unicorn is the app that comes out and becomes a billion dollar thing—then maybe we should be thinking of chasing righteousness instead of ROI. So that was one. 

And then this quest for power—and we've kind of alluded to that earlier in light of the laptop class being the one who controls everything, because everyone has to use their stuff, just like the railroads and the robber barons of the other times. The chase after profit and power would be set second or third or fourth, or even way, way down the list. And then I kind of dug in on righteousness, and what that looks like in God's economy versus our economy. I don't have to go way into it, but I think those are the things. I didn't use Google, but I did say, if Jesus was the CEO of a tech company, what would it look like?

Grant: I’m interested in your thoughts on this, but one I think would drastically change is making it a paid product, where people have to pay for the services they want. In many ways Google functions like the Matrix. Ryan and I have been talking about the Matrix a lot as we're getting together: people become the battery. Their information exhaust becomes the battery that powers Google, and then they're used, as opposed to the product serving the human person. I think the first thing that a Christian could do is charge for the service. That seems counterintuitive, but I actually think that might be the most important move.

Gretchen: A hundred percent. And in fact, Jaron Lanier was on Barry Weiss's podcast. He's the guy who wrote You Are Not a Gadget. He worked for Microsoft research; he's got dreadlocks; and he was a virtual reality pioneer who wishes he wasn't now. Who Owns the Future is another one of his books.

And he says the same thing, Grant. If we didn't have this hidden transaction going on—your data for my services; and a binary choice—you either accept and give me everything you've got, including your photos, your life, your purchases, et cetera. But if instead you had to pay for it, and then I didn't get all this other stuff—that would really be a good first step.

But right now it's so lucrative, and people don't really know the value of what they're giving, and so they consider it a free app. And the idea that you'd have to pay for it is crazy.

Let me throw that one back on you, Grant. Because in terms of healthcare, you've given a lot of thought to the models of healthcare and how it's connected to employment and the idea that in the thirties—my mom, for example, was the fourth of five children. Her dad died when she was three, and they didn't have medical care. It was single mom, five kids in the depression. And basically, their church helped them out. There was a doctor in the church who did things for them and didn't charge them. There's no way they could have afforded it. And then you get all these other different models, the biggest one being insurance for medical care, linked to employment.

So I would wonder, back to you, what if we did away with medical insurance and had a marketplace where you'd know what you were paying, and you could say, no, I don't want to pay that. I'll go to somebody cheaper.

Grant: My students ask me this from time to time; I teach a healthcare finance course. One real challenge is that market dynamics don't work super well in healthcare. There was an old paper guy named Ken Arrow in the 1960s, arguing for why medical care is very, very different. It is different for a number of reasons. One is the classic insurance market problem; one is that healthcare is relatively unexpected—you don't know when you’ll have a heart attack. Now there's some exceptions, for long term, chronic diseases and things like that. But it's relatively unexpected. And it's exceedingly expensive. It doesn't have to be that way, but it is. That's the reality. And your price elastic, which means that if you need it, you need it and you're going to get it. 

So that's the type of product that insurance markets form around. Because you can't really save for it. I suppose you could; but you can't really, in the same way that you can't save for this unexpected event—your car crashes. So that's a big difference.

Also, there's an intermediary who has tremendous financial interests in inducing demand for healthcare that you may or may not need. This is one of the biggest things that hospitals and providers do, is they induce demand. All these great studies show that in areas where there's more cardiologists—controlling for the underlying age and illness level of people in that community—there's more bypass surgeries, because they're cardiologists, cardiovascular surgeons, and that's what they do.

You don't actually know what you need, right? So you go to a physician, they say to you, well, you need a bypass surgery; and like, oh, geez, I don't know anything about this. Maybe I need a bypass surgery. And so you just sort of trust them. I guess I could see a scenario in which you go to another cardiologist and say, this other guy told me I need a bypass. Will you undercut his price by 12%? But it's just different than being able to walk into Best Buy, see a television, see how much it is, then go to Costco; because you want it and you need it, but you could go and shop for it.

So I think healthcare is just a very different product than say televisions or cars, for those reasons that I was just enumerating.

Gretchen: Let me push back and say the context in which I was thinking of it is we've got this model already for free apps all over my phone, and they're not free. They cost a lot. They're billion dollar companies. So if everyone's using them for free, how are those companies making their money? We know the model.

And what you've suggested—which I think is really a good way to go—is to flip that model instead of having these other avenues of revenue be the primary ones; but we're used to it now. And what I guess I was suggesting is that because we're used to insurance covering things, it's completely opaque to me how much I'm paying for a simple office visit, and insurance has enabled that. That's my question.

Grant: I do think that there are actually particular types of care that are amenable to the sort of market mechanisms that you're describing. So LASIK—that's a really good example. You don't really need LASIK. It's nice, but you can wear glasses. You're pretty price elastic, because if you went in for LASIK tomorrow and they told you it was gonna be a million dollars—eh, no thanks. And it's expected: your eyesight's deteriorating. 

So there are these services that I think are actually amenable to markets, like LASIK, and those ones are being treated this way. It doesn't have to be insurance, but I do think that there has to be some sort of risk pooling agency for those things that are, again, very expensive and unexpected.

Gretchen: Catastrophic.

Grant: Yeah, exactly. And I'm very open to those sorts of models like concierge primary care, where you pay 40 bucks a month, you get your primary care services, and then you have a high deductible plan above that for when you get hit by a bus on Fifth Avenue in Oakland. Those sort of things do exist. And there are a number of interesting, innovative mechanisms, but none of them have seemed to bear much fruit in terms of reduced costs. 

Now, one thing are these health insurance sharing ministries. I don't know if you're familiar with these; but these are plans that were historically there for evangelical Christians who had theological concerns about health insurance, because it destroyed the virtue of mercy.

Gretchen: Caring for others.

Grant: Exactly. And so what ended up happening is after the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—they became qualified health insurance plans that you could get in order to not have to buy private health insurance. And they boomed. They went from like a hundred thousand members—I'm gonna get these numbers wrong, so someone will have to fact check me—from like a hundred thousand members to like a million members in five years. They're actually super low cost, and they're predicated on people sharing expenses, but in a way that's grounded in mercy, not in contract.

So those are very interesting, and I think that they're innovations. But all the powerful sources—they get flayed in the New York Times; the New York Times had this series of hit pieces on these health insurance exchanges, sort of making fun of them as weird fringy Christian things.

I do think that these little places where people are experimenting with new forms of healthcare delivery, new innovations that hopefully reduce costs; but they're very fringe. 

But yes, I think there can be a re-imagination, and I think one re-imagination is I don't have to live forever. That's like a real re-imagination in healthcare: I don't have to live forever. Of course the incentives are not aligned with that; the physician is always going to induce more and more demand for these sort of end of life services.

Gretchen: Which speaks to this idea of safety, and a book I read called Being Mortal, that talks about why we extend life just for the sake of extending life.

Grant: Atul Gawande, I assume.

Gretchen: Yes. And in part, my mom made me read it, because my dad has Alzheimer's, and there was all of this attempt to keep dad safe. He is in a place now where we're paying for people to keep him safe. But that's a huge question in terms of what our expectations are. And I think technology has played a role in this medical technology for sure; we can keep people alive artificially for a long, long time. And it goes back to what you said earlier, Ryan; you said people lived with pain. They also died earlier, of cancer that they didn't know or couldn't get treatment for because there was no catastrophic fund for that. 

Grant: I don't want to downplay the amazing advances in healthcare—for instance, the bypass surgery and revascularization for heart attacks has saved so many millions of lives and has increased life expectancy, et cetera. There’s a huge increase in life expectancy as you get these sorts of technologies. 

But really, there's this reducing marginal return on investment. So washing your hands is the best thing you can do to increase life expectancy—having indoor plumbing and that sort of thing. And then some early medical technologies; but now we're really working on the sort of edges. And maybe there'll be this emergent technology that radically changes life expectancy again; but I think we have every reason to believe that we're at sort of the top of that return. It seems as though, the maximum life expectancy, we've sort of asymptoted towards what we can probably achieve.

Gretchen: I love that phrase. Listen, I want to throw a Ray Kurzweil quote to both of you on this same line. In The Singularity is Near, he posits that in the not too distant future, humans will be able to live as long as they want. And then in parenthesis, he put a subtle distinction from forever. At some point in your long-as-you-wantness, you're gonna hang up your spurs. Okay, I'm done on the planet. Which I don't see happening, although I don't know; and plus it's not going to be that way. 

But in terms of this idea, when is long enough long enough? No one's gonna argue that you would not give somebody a bypass surgery if you can afford it, if it will save their life; or work on a technology that would cure a major disease like Alzheimer's or cancer. And so. This is where I think we sit on that razor's edge of what Ryan alluded to. When are we satisfied with a good life well lived, versus this idea of safetyism and medicalism keeping us alive longer and longer and longer?

Grant: There's also an act of generosity that goes into this as well, where a generation of people say, we've lived long enough and now it's time to give the younger people the opportunity to flourish. I think there's something to that as well. There's something interesting that the current generation wants to live forever, but does not want to have children. That's really interesting. We want to save the planet for us, not to bequeath it as a generous gift to someone else, but so that we can enjoy it forever.

Gretchen: Wow.

Grant: But that didn't answer your question exactly.

Gretchen: Kind of did.

Ryan: I think it becomes very dangerous to frame life questions in terms of quality of life, because that's where on the one hand, we get the push for the legalization of euthanasia, where quality of life is the deciding factor; if your life is poor quality, then maybe you want your partner to put an end to it. Then on the other hand, if you are able to eliminate obstacles to flourishing, then we could just live forever. Something is missing there in that analysis, and it seems like part of it is just a very materialist, reductive understanding of the human, and therefore a reductive understanding of human flourishing, and therefore a reductive understanding of quality.

Gretchen: Right. 

Let's switch streams for a second. Ryan, I have a question for you. In your podcast with Brad Gregory,he mentioned a book called Science and the Good: the Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality, and you hadn't heard of it. Neither had I, but I immediately Googled it and then bought it, because it really tied into my dissertation’s idea that we've been appealing to science rather than God in terms of moral decision making. Algorithms are making a lot of our decisions, and they're driving the bus toward making more and more moral decisions in terms of using technology, because it's more efficient and more data driven and so on.

But in the book, the authors say the quest for a scientific foundation for morality maps roughly onto the story of modernity, a story of the shrinking world in ways that bring us in closer proximity to different cultures and different ways of life. And so they talk a little bit more about competing claims on the public space and who gets to decide what's right and wrong, and how we do that when we bump up against cultures in a highly technical world where it's immediate. These affordances of technology cause us to have to question more about what we thought was right and wrong. So let me ask you this: is it getting harder to agree on morality because of the onward march of modernity and its embrace of technology? 

Ryan: Well, if you go from a predominantly theistic society that locates the good in a natural order that's designed by a Creator—if you go from that to the widespread view that morality is imminent—so it comes from us, from the subject. This isn't Kant, but I think the sort of baseline Kantianism that you get in a typical college student, it is deontological, so there is this sense that I have a moral duty to do what is right, to conform to the law. But where is the law coming from? Well, the law is ultimately what I decide it to be, right? So if you move into that sphere, and into a sphere where science itself doesn't have doesn't claim a moral status in the sense of seeking the good—it only claims a moral status in having the technocratic solution to our problems—then, yeah. We're going to really struggle to come to agreement. 

But this is not to say that, for example, in the Middle Ages, in Europe, that they were characterized by profound moral agreement. No—there was constant disagreement; but there was an underlying agreement over what are the things that we’re fighting over.

Gretchen: Go in there.

Ryan: If there's a common understanding—to go back to our economic conversations—that creation is gift, and therefore economic activity must be a kind of stewardship, then the question becomes, is the charging of interest—what was called usury—is this a way to be a good steward of our economic resources, or is it in fact an abuse? But the basic understanding of where property and where money comes from to begin with is there, so you can have vigorous arguments about this.

Gretchen: In light of this, one of the questions that came up during my dissertation work revolved around a paper called “Delphi: Towards Machine Ethics and Norms.” They crowdsourced 1.7 million moral responses from a Reddit feed. “Am I the Asshole” is the name of the feed; and also from Dear Abby. I'm not kidding. So 1.7 million answers, and they fed it into an algorithm and asked this machine, this Delphi, this Oracle, questions about what was right and wrong. You can find that online, because it immediately got slammed and confounded with their demo site, much like the chatbot Tay from Microsoft.

But the underlying thing is that we could find some moral agreement via technology; instead of appealing to God or the transcendent we appeal to Google and humanity. 

Ryan: To a common underlying morality? So that was the hypothesis?

Gretchen: Absolutely. Well, I would say they didn't say out of the gate, this is what this is going to do. It's a proof of concept for a run at the hill at this. But they absolutely framed it: we're not gonna appeal to the transcendent. This is all sort of cultural and current. So questions about sexuality, questions about gender, questions about abortion, were all based on what's currently legal.And also the permutations: you'd have one that said, is it okay to drive a car? Sure. The machine says, well, is it okay to drive a car if it's stolen? Maybe not so much. Is it okay to speed while you're driving a car? No. Well, what if you're taking someone to the hospital who's dying? Okay, maybe so. So it had some permutations to it, but again, it's sort of that oracular appeal.

Ryan: It seems like one assumption there is that humans are basically good, and so if we throw enough data of human judgments at a problem, the mean of that is going to tend towards right action or right Judgment. 

Gretchen: Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan: I mean, this is really, it seems to me, one of the big existential crises in Silicon Valley right now, is that the default moral anthropology is that humans are basically good. And yet what we've seen in so many contexts on social media is that, when you don't censor, a lot of bad stuff happens. So how do you square that? 

Grant: And then the algorithm becomes evil. It makes people more evil, which makes the algorithm even more evil. 

Gretchen: There’s a cycle of vice. 

Ryan: Right. And this is what, going back to your dissertation research, one of the things I wanted to ask you. I mean, it's young technologists are keenly aware that there is a lot of structural evil built into the tech world. And one of our Beatrice Institute Christian Studies fellows this year was talking with our colleague, James DeMasi, and he was asking them something like, what would be a course that you don't see being offered that you would just love to take? She's a computer engineering major, specializes in machine learning. And she said, I would love to take a course called, how are we not going to ruin the world? How can we do what we're doing without ruining the world? 

That's a very different orientation from probably even just 10 years ago, that a 20 year old with the most marketable skills in the world, that's their main concern. Are you finding that? The people you're interviewing, how do they think about the work that they're doing? Is that a concern, or is it just a generation where they're still pretty much like we're going to solve things?

Gretchen: Listen, this is a whole other podcast in terms of what I found in this study. And the dissertation is really interesting, if I do say so myself. My committee consisted of an atheist, an agnostic, a Buddhist, and a progressive Christian, which sounds like an entree to a bad joke. But they were universally interested and intrigued by the responses of ethics and AI and how they're separated. In fact, even at Christian universities and Catholic institutions, they don't have courses that should be informing the people who are making these online products that we're all using about what general thinking about ethics is. Even if you took the deontological/utilitarian/virtue ethics versus Christian ethics. 

One of the guys on my committee is the chair emeritus of the computer science program at the University of Washington. Brilliant scientist. And he sat in the dissertation and said, there's nothing. We don't have any courses about this. Now that's a big, difficult-to-get-into university that does computer science. And I asked that question of the guy at Notre Dame, the guy at Santa Clara; I asked Derek that question; I asked a guy from Middlebury who teaches computer science; and they all say the same thing. We may tack on a day in class where we talk about the ethical implications of things, but that doesn't make us moral people or virtuous people. So this is a huge gap. 

But here's what's fascinating: for what resonated in my dissertation was Jesus. It's a Christ forward dissertation at a secular university, which is bizarre and miraculous in and of itself—there's God knocking down the walls of Jericho. But that's what resonates: the love of Christ, the acknowledgement of spiritual evil, and human sin that needs to make it into the AI product roadmap. You can't divorce it saying, well, if just the right people are in charge, it'll all be okay. Because Christians know that's not true. And also anchoring it in the transcendent, and dealing with not just data provenance—where did the data come from that trained these models—but ethics provenance: where did it come from? Who do we appeal to when we're asking what's right or wrong? And if it's simply humans, the material worldview, then you have this shifting sand, and as CS Lewis puts it, we're surprised when we castrate and bid the gelding, be fruitful.

I don't want to go off there because here's what I want to know. Grant, you sent me some questions that you were going to ask Ryan, and I actually want to know Ryan's responses to them. So I'm gonna pass the baton over to you.

Grant: It's so funny. I was literally just about to interrupt and say, Hey Ryan, I got a couple fun questions.

Gretchen: No, I wanna hear those. So go, you guys.

Grant: So here's the first one. Ryan, what is one conspiracy theory that you find uncomfortably convincing?

Ryan: Isn't this from like some kind of psychological questionnaire? 

Grant: It could be. I might have also gotten it from Tyler Cowan.

Ryan: That's right. I knew I had heard that recently. I've been taking psychological questionnaires and listening to Tyler Cowan at the same time. 

I think that I'm constitutionally allergic to conspiracy theories, and because what conspiracy thinking requires is that a lot of people are doing a lot of things with sinister motives, and they're colluding together. And despite the fact that I take a very sober Christian view of human depravity, such as it is, I don't find that it's possible for all of these people to be working with sinister motives. They're actually all for the most part operating with their own vision of what's good. Especially in a hyper pluralist society like ours, late modernity, with all of these people with their different competing visions of the good, it's going to be very difficult for them to collude together. So that's why I think, whenever I come across a conspiracy theory, I just don't find it likely. 

What's more likely to me—but I'm still very suspicious of—are genealogies of modernity: these big stories, like the Liah Greenfeld one that I was talking about, that the emergence of the nation state is the cause of schizophrenia. It's not a conspiracy theory, because it doesn't impute motives to an individual people; but nevertheless, it says here's this unseen cause of something that we have today. But the Genealogies of Modernity project itself is built to interrogate those narratives, and not to take them as explanatory by default, but to investigate them and say, where are they helpful for understanding reality? Where are their limitations? 

Grant: It's almost as if you're saying it's so sinister that no one can even conspire together, because we're all working at such cross purposes that conspiracy isn't even possible.

Gretchen: It's that 4D chess thing. Nobody’s that smart.

Ryan: Maybe it would be possible in a different society. 

Grant: In some of the writing Paul Kingsnorth has been putting out recently, he talks about progress, and he says, it's so sinister because there's no one directing it. It's just moving like this machine that has no pilot. So there's no conspiracy, but there's this natural progression of the world, and he argues it's especially evil because there is no conspiracy; because there's no way to stop it. There's no way to stop the conspiracy.

Gretchen: But wouldn't you go back to Ephesians chapter six and say there is actually a conspiratorial force that's spiritual? Even beyond our own abilities to be sinister, there is a sinister force that seeks to influence us.

Grant: And that's where Kingsnorth goes, is the spiritual reality of what he sees to be so evil. He's particularly concerned about global warming and the advancing surveillance state, and he started re referring to it as Moloch: this demonic force that we can't see, but is advancing in this deeply sinister way. 

Ryan: That's the conspiracy theory that I find most compelling.

Gretchen: I agree with you.

Grant: That the devil is at work? Conspiring with demons?

Ryan: This goes back to what I think ultimately is just a terrible and herertical view of the spiritual world, but has some very true and compelling aspects to it, which is the Frank Peretti books.

Gretchen: This Present Darkness. The most poorly written, compelling novel I've ever read.

Ryan: I read that when I was like nine years old. My parents were like, oh, it's a Christian novel. He should read it. And it terrified me, and it warped my sense of the supernatural world for many years. But what I think is clear there is that, if there is a kind of politically engaged, economically engaged, mass psychologically engaged conspiracy of principalities and powers to bring about the things that we see in the world that we don't like, there's also the conspiracy of the angels, in communion with the saints and with all of the living Church in prayer. 

Gretchen: Which the gates of hell shall not prevail against.

Ryan: Right. And so that's also, as I take it, inconsistent with conspiracy theories, which never have anything close to a balance between competing conspiracies, and, hell shall not prevail against. And in this case, we think the good guys are winning anyways.

Gretchen: Grant, you have at least some more that I want to know Ryan's answer to. So go on.

Grant: Ryan, what's one of the biggest disagreements that you and I have about the nature of political and social life in contemporary America? We talk a lot. 

Ryan: I think the biggest disagreement is whether big business/corporate America—major aspects of what Paul Kingsnorth would call Moloch—whether those are unmitigated evils, or whether they are an aspect of a very complicated, mixed, but nevertheless potentially good system, that can create spaces for human flourishing under the conditions of modernity. Right. And that latter would be my position, which I'm beginning to doubt more and more as the months go by.

Grant: Well, hopefully it has something to do with my constantly pounding you about that at dinner parties; but maybe I'm being too arrogant.

Gretchen: I feel so left out that you guys are back there in Pittsburgh with dinner parties and all.

Ryan: I know, we need to fix that. 

Gretchen: It'll happen.

Grant: So Ryan, one more question for you, and then we'll pass the baton. Before the prosperity made possible by modern capitalism, did people climb mountains for fun? 

Ryan: Yes. Absolutely.

Grant: Why?

Ryan: I guess then we would need to ask what fun means, and whether fun is a modern experience that even existed prior; but yeah, for play, for pleasure. I think that it was deeply integrated into some kind of religious sense of the transcendent, of the supernatural. But, as anthropology knows, play finds its origins and its ground in the religious and the religious sense. And so I think if we understand fun in those terms, then yes.

Gretchen: You know, that idea of play is written about by Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens—the man at play. So I tend to agree. Even at my age, I go out on a hike to—I don't know, it fills me right. Climbing a mountain, as little as it is that I do.

Grant: But I would think in 1250, you'd be too busy plowing your field and staving off death to go for a hike in the mountains.

Gretchen: Excellent point, Grant

Ryan: No, you're only working two thirds of the days of the year on the 13th century liturgical calendar. 

Grant: Okay. Those other third, you hiking Mount Rainier. 

Ryan: All of the other days are fast days or festival days.

Gretchen: So on a festival day, can you climb a mountain? I tend to agree with Grant.

Ryan: Oh yeah. I mean, that's why there are crosses on all these mountains.

Gretchen: Oh, good point. So it would be more of a pilgrimage than a hike for fun. 

Ryan: So the conquest thing, that may have always existed. It existed literally, as I've been learning recently. In classical literature, as Jason König, the classicist at St. Andrews, has shown, the number one place you're gonna find mountain climbing is in battles and wars. There really is that conquest element. But Peter Hanson, who I'm going to be interviewing for the GenMod podcast in July, he has fantastic stuff about how the invention of climbing as a modern phenomenon in the 19th century was part and parcel of colonial conquest.

But I think that the vast majority of climbing throughout history has not been for purposes of conquest. It's,been for these other kinds of spiritual reasons.

Gretchen: Can I switch back over? I read this article this morning in the New Atlantis. I don't know if you guys saw it. It's called “Surveillance Humanism: The Unholy Alliance of AI and HR is Coming” by Paul Dicken. Did you read it?

Grant: I didn't, but I can imagine what the article's about.

Gretchen: There's a lot of things that go on in it, but he talks about Charles Babbage, who's technically the first computer guy who invented the difference engine; but that he's more famous for some economics principles. They call it the Babbage principle: essentially mechanizing the sub-proceses in complex operations to improve efficiency. And he calls this a “financially cutthroat extension of Adam Smith's division of labor and a forerunner of modern management practices of reducing labor costs by differentiating high skill and low skill tasks and paying workers accordingly.” Grant, I know this is a subject near and dear to your heart, especially in your recent work in the healthcare industry and how people get into that industry, but it's low paying, and we need more, and these conundrums that we face.

Ryan: Was this the same piece that was also reviewing a book called Human-Centered AI? 

Gretchen: Yeah. Which he claims is kind of an oxymoron. I mean, he doesn't say that word; but as I read into it, it's like, we're calling it human-centered AI, but what is it really doing? 

Ryan: Right. It’s centered around productivity.

Gretchen: And efficiency. And so I guess where I want to go with this is just to toss this out for discussion. Talk amongst yourselves: privileging a mechanized view of efficiency as optimal for humanity at the expense of other, Biblical definitions of human flourishing. What case would you make for inefficiency in light of that?

Ryan: That's a great question. I do just want to mention: an alumna of Beatrice Institute, before it was even Beatrice Institute, was a civil engineering major at Pitt, and went on and got a master's in Catholic studies at University of St. Thomas, and wrote her thesis there on human-centered logistics programming, and then went on to work at FedEx. She is a logistics engineer at FedEx, specifically working on how the drivers interact with the entire system of delivery.

And her question was, obviously we want this to be more efficient; but what is it about the human worker that allows them to add value? And then how do we enhance things like freedom of choice in this process? She has a [forthcoming] paper that specifically speaks to these questions in terms of the Amazon warehouses—she's gone in, and she's looked at that. Kristin Gottron is her name. Hers is actually a human centered approach to workplace automation, and so I find it incredibly inspiring. 

Gretchen: Grant, what do you think?

Grant: I'd be interested to know who the efficiency and productivity gains serve, and who they’re recruited by. There was this talk many, many years ago that we'd be working 20 hours a week, making the same salaries, and have all this time for leisure; but what's actually happening in reality is all those productivity gains are being captured by capital. What a lot of people don't realize is that the levels of inequality in 2022 rival and exceed the height of the Gilded Age, which was sort of seen as the most unequal time. 

So anyway, this would be my first thought. And to the extent that these productivity gains allow workers to have higher salaries and more leisure, I see this be a good thing; but those productivity gains always are owned by capital. And I hate to be constantly Marxist about this; but it's the same with the conversation I had with Winant. I sort of proposed that maybe Lyft and Uber and the gig economy can actually be liberating to the worker, as they can kind of work when they want, and they can sell their labor as they see fit, when they want to do it. But what the technology has allowed Lyft and Uber to do is be mercilessly precise about high flow times in order to manage the work of the employee and extract evermore of the profit from the workers.

Gretchen: So where my brain goes with this is, in the question of making a case for inefficiency, it's the same question that I would say in healthcare makes a case for caring for somebody as they die, as opposed to simply trying to keep them alive. And/or the other questions of the mechanized view of productivity makes humans into widgets and healthcare workers into carebots.

So I've just been thinking so deeply about what we lose by becoming so much more efficient, and even the value of being interruptable in your day, saying, well, I didn't get my punch list done; but I was able to encourage a brother or sister.

Grant: You know, healthcare is the one industry where you get more technology, and you actually don't get more efficiency and lower costs. And there's all sorts of reasons for that. But one is that it's the service industry, and it's so bound in humans being with other humans. And you're right; caring for someone, it's very hard to make that an efficient process. And actually when you do it well, it's pretty inefficient. I think that there's a loss of attentiveness, and the ability to care in a slow way, when we're sort of ruthlessly efficient. 

Ryan and I have a mutual friend who is the deepest apologist for capitalism that I've ever met. His whole argument is capitalism is the best system we've ever identified for creating efficiencies. When you want to get things done efficiently, it's the best system that we have. But the problem is there's so much of human life that efficiency should not be the aim. There are some things like making televisions, making cars, where I think efficiency might be a gain; but things like service and spending time with your family, those are terribly inefficient, but they're the good things in life. They’re meaningful.

Ryan: It’s fascinating to me that in this age of mastering efficiency, another key concept has been sustainability. We were just talking with our friend and colleague David Sanchez, whose the associate director of a sustainability institute here at Pitt in the engineering school. He said that he would describe the motto of the current dean of the engineering school as, how do we improve the human condition? How do we improve the human condition? And if you back up that far, efficiency is not necessarily the answer.

So to the extent that sustainability is a competing or an enriching concept to efficiency, I see that as potentially a positive sign. It's certainly a place in the mainstream academic and technological, and maybe even cultural, discourse where Christians can go and say, let's see what we can elicit here; let's see what we can add. 

Grant: I actually think, if my podcast is trying to do anything, and my career is trying to do anything, it's trying to hold the human person at the center of all these conversations, and realize that the person is actually the object of all of our inquiry. If nothing else, our job should be to serve the human person, not the other way around. So that was the point that I was trying to make before. I don't think efficiency is a good or a bad; it's to what extent does this efficient process serve the inherent motivations and desires of the human person, such as love and meaning and purpose. Obviously the material sustenance of food, water, and air; but how does it serve the totality of the human person and flourishing? 

And in many ways, I think that is what BI is trying to do. I think if we had a broad goal, it is to keep the human person at the center of inquiry within the university. Ryan, David, and I realized that we all teach classes called “happiness and.” They're all grounded around understanding how our own disciplines can better understand the human person, and serve the needs and motivations and desires of the human person. I think that might be our contribution to the university, if we have one. 

Gretchen: How many classes are there that say “happiness and”?

Ryan: Three?

Grant: It's our three. 

Ryan: I don't know, maybe there are others. It's a big university.

Gretchen: That's fascinating. I've been in school a long time—can't seem to quit it—and I've never seen a class called that. I wish I had taken it.

Ryan: I think there actually is a larger nationwide trend to do this, especially in the positive psychology movement, in psychology departments. And there have been some really successful philosophy courses that have done this. 

If I could just say, so that the conversation maybe gets balanced out a bit more toward the hopeful: I think a lot of people recognize that the modern university is no longer university. There's nothing unifying about it. And in fact, it's attained some of its greatness through specialization and siloing and so on. But I think within the secular university, the way to have a unifying telos once again would be precisely this. How does this discipline, how does this research, contribute to human flourishing?

It's not going to be the unifying focus of the medieval university, which began with God and worked back to the human person. But to the extent that we see these things happening in the university, to the extent that we can encourage them, foster them and work towards them, it actually makes sense—not as a subversive thing, but as a real support to what I think many people can agree is the unifying mission of the university.

Gretchen: Ryan, did you have any questions for Grant?

Ryan: In your conversation with Gabe Winant, he talked about a kind of necessary dismantling of the family system, nuclear family, as we know it; that would be necessary to liberate women, to transform labor and capital, and so on. You made some very affirming noises to that. I'm wondering, to what extent do you see a modern conception of the human family as an obstacle to flourishing right now? Or is that something that you were charitably listening along with?

Grant: After lots of conversations, I'm realizing I often say, “right,” as in “I'm following,” and sometimes Ryan hears it as “I agree with what you’re saying.” 

I would say that the economy in many ways is turning away from the “traditional man”—the guy who goes to work nine to five at the mill with a hardhat and the lunch pail—to a caring economy, where it is traditionally women's work, for what that's worth.Whether that's nursing, or childcare, that seems obvious to me. 

So there's lots of layers to the question you asked; lots of layers to what Gabe said. I do think that we need to figure out ways to include men in this economy. And I think that there's going to be a necessary way to include men in this economy that equips them to do jobs that they would typically not do, at least historically, whether that's being a nurse, or doing childcare work. It seems to me to be the inevitable future of the economy, which is a caring economy. 

So to the extent that that is blowing up gender roles? Sure. But I don't see that as blowing up gender roles. I mean, I do think that there's something natural about men doing thing-things, women doing people-things, although I don't take that very far; but I do think there is something to that potentially. I do agree with Gabe in the sense that we need to reimagine what man's work looks like; I don't think that that necessarily is an explosion of gender roles. 

Ryan: Is that partly because your sense of gender roles is not particularly fixed and boxed in? 

Grant: Sure. You know, again, I'm a male nurse. In many ways, I'm a very typical man, but I've taken on a role that is atypical. So I do think that. I think even within Christianity, there's all sorts of ways to be a man, and there's all sorts of ways to be a woman. 

Now I am very committed to the biological reality of sex and that it determines our gender roles in a way that I'm willing to talk about. But I don't think that that is what I would characterize as a complete destruction of gender as we know it. 

Gretchen: Can I go in on the nursing thing for a second with you Grant? I did read the links that you sent me. I've always wondered why there are so many acronyms in nursing, and it confuses me in terms of who's had more education than whom and so on. Is it an RN, an LPN, a CNA, an APRN, et cetera. By the way, what are you?

Grant: I'm a registered nurse with a BSN, although to be fair, I've practiced probably a total of six months in my life.

Gretchen: Because you have too much podcasting to do. But this thing that you've just addressed in a paper is this idea of the master of science in nursing, or the MSN, has been a traditional way of amping up your credentials. But now it's being replaced by a doctor of nursing practice. I say replace; that's not what's happening, but there's a shift in the direction. And the study that you did, as I understand, it says, is this a good thing or is this the right thing? How does this land? And as I understood your findings, it was like, not much. Doesn't make that much of a difference.

Why does it matter anyway?

Grant: I'll give a little background. There's a thing called advanced practice nurses, which have historically master's degrees, and they do what we call advanced practice. There's nurse practitioners—probably many of you have seen nurse practitioners. They do diagnosis and treatment, very similar to physicians. There's some difference in the orientation and the education between NPS and physicians, but in many ways, a nurse practitioner will function in a very similar role as a physician’s assistant or primary care physician. This was a role that came out in the 1960s, particularly in rural communities in Colorado, where they really had an intense need for care for pediatrics patients. And so a physician and a nurse at the University of Colorado came up with this role called a nurse practitioner. Originally it was a certification, where you didn't necessarily have to go back and get another degree. You get a nurse who's been a registered nurse for 35 years; they're a great well of knowledge. We can use them to do some of the things that a physician would do and expand access to care for rural kids over time. 

For historical reasons, the field believed that these nurse practitioners needed an advanced degree, a master's degree, and that became probably the most smashing success for nursing education. Nurse practitioners were growing tremendously. They were being employed. Employers loved them. They were filling a tremendous need for access to care in all sorts of different disciplines. 

But about 20 years ago, AACN passed a position statement that said that we should transition away from the MSN and move towards a DNP—a doctor of nursing practice. There's all sorts of disagreement about why that happened. One is that they had all these credits anyway; we should give them a doctorate. Physical therapy, occupational therapy were all moving towards a doctorate; and now we can also be on par with physicians because we're all doctors. That's sort of the basic argument. 

But what's happening is after folks get DNPs, employers don't really know what to do with them. They're treating them like nurse practitioners with an MSN, sort of doing the same role. I've always been a pretty vocal critic of this degree creep, where we continually add credentials to nurses.

Gretchen: How much of it has to do with compensation or credibility? What is the driving force behind this, and do the people who put in these extra hours and get these degrees get return on investment?

Grant: No, not so far. It seems as though the salaries are no different, because employers aren't quite sure what to do with this. Some of the extra degree goes into things like quality of care initiatives, policy, the classes that they take; but it hasn't turned into any sort of difference in wages or responsibilities. I tend to be someone who thinks that again, the MSN was probably the best thing we've ever done. It was a great thing for expanding access to care. There were high quality programs. I didn't necessarily see the need to add another X number of years to education.

Gretchen: Was that a driving thesis behind your paper? Yhat's what you expected to find—that it wouldn't make that much difference, and the current model was fine?

Grant: Yeah. There's a number of qualitative papers that came to that conclusion. They interviewed employers; they didn't really know what to do with the NPS compared to MSNs. So I suspected we'd find this thing where they had the same roles, they did the same kind of work. 

I have a paper that I'm finishing up that shows that they delivered almost identical quality of care as well to MSN prepared nurse practitioners. And this is the first time anyone's gonna study outcomes, comparing MSNs to DNPs, so it's going to be a little bit of a controversial paper, at least within the small group of people that are talking about these issues. It compares hospitalization rates and readmission rates across patients that were cared for by DNP prepared nurse practitioners and MSN prepared nurse practitioners. Because the idea is the DNPs will provide a higher level of care, because they're better trained and have more education. And the paper that I would be publishing doesn't find that.

Gretchen: So this is actually speaking into the debate about whether this should be a continued practice or something,

Grant: Yeah. There's been a lot of support to phase out associate programs in diploma programs, and push people towards bachelors programs. There is some evidence that people cared for by bachelors prepared RNs—so I'm talking about RNs now—get higher quality care. But people want to do this with the DNP—phase out the MSN, have it be only doctoral preparation for nurse practitioners. And I'm making the argument that it's a bit premature to do such things for nurse practitioners.

Gretchen: Awesome. 

Grant: Anything else?

Gretchen: I have a lot else, but it's not gonna fit into this one.

Ryan: I was hoping someone would ask me what I most want from the metaverse.

Gretchen: Ryan, what do you most want from the metaverse?

Ryan: I want an entire season of Quidditch. Like an entire Quidditch league, an entire season. And you get to float above and be a part as much as you want. 

Gretchen: Do you actually have goggles and go in?

Ryan: No, but if they create that, I'll get them. And I'll pay for it.

Gretchen: Grant, what do you want from the metaverse?

Grant: Mostly to be left alone, to be perfectly honest with you. I mean, I don't have a smartphone. I have no games. I hate zoom. I can't imagine a scenario in which I'd ever want to be fully immersed in VR. 

Here's the deal—the world is so amazing. I mean, how do you ever. plumb the depths of actual reality? Actual reality is so rich and beautiful and complicated and lovely and wonderful and full of joy, why would we accept an alternative?

Gretchen: To close the loop on this back to your original question when we started, Ryan—will there be computer bugs in heaven? I think heaven will be the ultimate metaverse, and that all of the things that we experience with latency and bad graphics and stuff, that's actually what we're going to get in heaven is this amazing … I just watched “My Octopus Teacher” on Netflix, and it took me to worlds that I couldn't have gone to. It's so visually stunning and surprising. I think that's what heaven's going to be, and I don't care if there's bugs.

Grant: Although we might have to ask God to rebrand it, because the metaverse is totally dystopian in every form. So maybe just a rebranding would be called for.

Ryan: Heaven? 

Grant: Yeah. Just call it heaven. That works.

Gretchen: God is the ultimate brand manager.

Ryan: All right, Gretchen, thank you.

Gretchen:  Ryan, Grant. Thank you.

Ryan: Next one of these we'll have to do live in the same studio.

Gretchen: I'm there so I can go to a dinner party in Pittsburgh. That's on my bucket list. All right. See you later.