Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth for the Colson Center on John Stone Street. Recently, Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder of NVIDIA, was asked the name the smartest person he knew. He replied by suggesting that the meaning of smart has been made obsolete by machines. He then offered this updated definition, quote, I think long-term the definition of smart is someone who sits at the intersection of being technically astute but human empathy and having the ability to infer the unspoken around the corners, the unknowables, end quote. Recently, my Colson Center colleague Glenn Sunshine suggested that if a scholar from hundreds of years ago was shown what AI could do, He'd be both impressed but also disappointed.
You know a lot, he might observe, but you understand nothing. You see, as much as our machines can do, more is not always better. Having all the information and all the data from history, science, literature, art, philosophy, and medicine from across the centuries constantly accessible at our fingertips is not making us wiser. Last month, a quote from the novel Dune went viral on X. It read this, quote, once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free.
But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them, end quote.
Now, of course, Frank Herbert, who wrote that sci-fi series, was basically repeating an earlier observation from C.S. Lewis. Also, in a recent controversial essay entitled Something Big Is Happening, the CEO of OtherSide AI, Matt Schumer, sparked an intense and wide-ranging conversation with this stark admission, quote, I'm no longer needed for the actual technical work of my I describe what I want built in plain English and it just appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix, the finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours and come back to find the work done, done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed.
A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits.
Now I just describe the outcome and leave. ⁇ Schumer's not bragging here. Rather he's alarmed about the future of work and the need for humans to do it in the world he's helping to create. You could say that he's concerned that AI will replace human work. But we should also consider just how our technologies have replaced human wisdom.
Nearly a century ago, in his Choruses from the Rock, TS Eliot foresaw this confusion when he wrote, and I quote, endless invention, endless experiment, brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness, knowledge of speech, but not of silence. knowledge of words, and ignorance of the word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance. All our ignorance brings us nearer to death. But nearness to death, no nearer to God.
Or, as C.S. Lewis put it in the abolition of man, quote, for the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality. And the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique. ⁇ You see, what's been lost in the uncritical embrace of technological advancement over the past couple centuries are the insights of ancient wisdom.
Lost in the consistent pursuit of ease and pleasure are habits that cultivate virtue. It's not fundamentally a question of being for or against technology. It's that it's not sufficient to be technically smart if we're also not morally wise. What matters most for our collective futures are not which capacities and tools we're able to develop, it's what sort of people we are. Knowledge is dangerous when in the hands of the foolish, the immoral, and the wicked.
Wisdom is not just the ability to quote unquote see around the corners of life. Rather, it's the ability to live in light of what's true, what's good. It's about knowing the realities of the world, both seen and unseen. It's about bowing to the one who created all of it this way. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint.
Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for more resources to live like a Christian today, go to Breakpoint.org. Hi, Breakpoint listeners.
Here's a reminder that you're invited to join us in honoring Dr. Oz Guinness when he's presented with the 2026 Wilberforce Award at the Colson Center National Conference later this month. We at the Colson Center are grateful for Dr. Guinness's life work and friendship, and we'd like to include your tributes and encouragement and thanks as we honor him with this award. You can share how his writing or speaking has impacted your faith at colsoncenter.org/slash tribute.
That's colsoncenter.org slash tribute.
