Mark Clark [00:00:03]:
Okay, guys, we are here talking on the Mark Clark podcast. I got a guest with me. Guess we'll call you that. A guest. A. A guy who's just an expert at the topic of what we're talking about today. Guy named Jake Messner. Introduce yourself.
Mark Clark [00:00:17]:
Jake. One of the pastors around here.
Jake Messner [00:00:19]:
I'm Jake, one of the student pastors here for high school legend at Bayside. Not a legend and not an expert on AI.
Mark Clark [00:00:25]:
We're talking today, guys, we're going to jump. We're talking about AI. I've been. Once in a while, I want to stop on this pod. Usually it's sermons and stuff, but I want to stop every once in a while and just go, what are people talking about? What's the thing? And then try to give some kind of perspective, limited as it is from my world and theology and philosophy and whatever. And AI keeps coming up to me. People keep going, what about? What about. And I think I did a pod on this two years ago or something with Jason Caine, but the world's changed since then.
Mark Clark [00:00:55]:
So you came up to me this week just looking like you'd seen a ghost. I had. Just an actual ghost. And you're like, what do you think about AI? I'm freaking out. I went down the rabbit hole, down
Jake Messner [00:01:07]:
the dark rabbit hole, and I thought,
Mark Clark [00:01:08]:
there's gotta be a lot of people out there, like Jake Messner freaking out about AI. And so I wanted to do a pod about it. And so the premise of this is like, let's just talk about it. And then the only real prep I've done is I asked AI itself, chat GPT. What are the things? Give me 5, 10 things that you would be worried about from a human perspective. And it gave me 10 really good things. We're just going to talk through those. Okay, but tell us, let's start with the rabbit.
Mark Clark [00:01:35]:
Where did the rabbit hole begin? And what did you see in there that made you go, good night? Yeah, we're all done.
Jake Messner [00:01:42]:
Yeah. I was sitting into lunch with a friend. This is what started. I was sitting in a lunch with a friend, and he. Benji, he started going down a dark hole of like, hey, there's really no point even having kids, Because Benji, someone
Mark Clark [00:01:54]:
who had a child, who had a child this year, in the last year,
Jake Messner [00:01:57]:
he was telling me, he's like, there's no point even having kids because AI is going to take over the whole world, and the world as you know it is over. And I. And I joked with him in lunch. I said, benji, don't do I don't need that. Your darkness brother. Like I'm good. Don't put that. I don't even want to know.
Jake Messner [00:02:12]:
And. And then I'm like well now I want to know. So I went home and I guess I, I really started at 1 o'
Mark Clark [00:02:19]:
clock in the morning.
Jake Messner [00:02:19]:
1 from 12 to 2 for the past couple weeks has been AI on and so just reading up and, and probably getting a bigger grasp on what are the actual detrimental. What are the goals of AI for. Why are we.
Mark Clark [00:02:34]:
Why have we done this?
Jake Messner [00:02:35]:
Yeah, why have we done this? So what are they saying is the good that's going to come out of it and what are all the cons and, and sure. Massive ripple effects that it will create. Yeah. And so then I was just like oh man. I think the two big things where even for me in my personal life, one there's no real need to think as much to study or to create your own thought when you have access to everyone's at the touch of a fingertip. I don't even have to read a book to get someone's opinion. And then jobs, job security is. I'm talking to my sister who's an accountant, one of the big firms and it's like they're her.
Jake Messner [00:03:19]:
What she does that she had to go to school for, for years to study. Tax code is so replaceable by AI.
Mark Clark [00:03:26]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:03:27]:
Where her whole entire job.
Mark Clark [00:03:28]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:03:29]:
Is replaceable. And so then I'm like well I'm looking up the top 10 biggest job sectors in the United States and I'm like all of these are massively right.
Mark Clark [00:03:38]:
Do you remember what they were?
Jake Messner [00:03:40]:
I have a screenshot of them.
Mark Clark [00:03:42]:
I mean as you look for that I'm thinking about things that like because, because people did the same thing when Google started. Right. You can now Google search stuff and you can have the knowledge of all the Internet on your fingertips. This, this is, this is that on steroids in the sense that this. You can take a. I was talking to someone recently. They were in the midst of a, a lawsuit. Okay.
Mark Clark [00:04:08]:
And they of course you go to, you go to Havid Law for five years to become a lawyer at all these big firms. And they took this just normal regular Joe said I'm in this dispute with my boss and I'm taking them to court. And they went through all the, they inserted pictures of all the documents and this thing spit out within 30 seconds spit out a 300 page memorandum on all of the tax code and the law, all the different precedents and Johnson vs. Wade all this stuff. And he walked in and said this. And the lawyers that he was up against looked at and went, what kind of lawyers do you have? Yes, this is all incredible. And they're like, yo, this is just AI.
Jake Messner [00:04:50]:
I have Claude. Yeah, I have Claude. Yeah, that lawyer had to be. If that wasn't the biggest wake up call for that person.
Mark Clark [00:04:57]:
So this is your point is. And we're gonna talk about this, but this is the sectors of law. Taxes. Your regular tax guy runs a tax firm. You know, now you don't even, you don't even need them. You just take, you take your stuff and you chuck it in. And within what do you think? Within three years, a lot of these.
Jake Messner [00:05:19]:
Well, this is the thing. Let's take a look. Let's take a local tax guy, right. Who has eight employees. It's not that that business won't need to exist anymore. It's that the eight employees won't.
Mark Clark [00:05:33]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:05:34]:
The every, like it just needs one person now. You just need one person to kind of do the work of eight. And so that's more the bigger scares. Not that these jobs are going to get completely wiped out. Yes, but they're going to. AI is going to get so advanced and so good at doing the labor intensive parts of the job that so many people rely on for an income that. Where are they going to go?
Mark Clark [00:05:59]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:05:59]:
They got nowhere to go. Plumbing.
Mark Clark [00:06:02]:
So this is where the, this is where the discussion is about. Well, exactly. Being a plumber is part of the conversation. A utilitarian job that will take longer for AI to replace because it doesn't have robotic expression yet. It will.
Jake Messner [00:06:16]:
And that's the. It's not even. It's not even. It won't. It's just longer.
Mark Clark [00:06:21]:
It'll take 20 years to have the. Or 5, 10 or whatever to the robot do the plumbing or. And even farming. Farming is. It'll take longer to be replaced. But ultimately there'll be robotic expressions of farming that, you know, you've seen Interstellar. That robot is doing the farming for them. You know, when it kicks it and it's this big machine that's an AI run big out there getting the corn all figured out.
Mark Clark [00:06:46]:
Like that's going to happen. Yes, that's just inevitable. This is going to take longer than. Can you do my taxes? Can you spit out a legal precedent? Yes, all of that. Okay, so yeah. So what were your sectors?
Jake Messner [00:07:01]:
Healthcare and social assistance is. Right. Shockingly, 15% of employees are related to healthcare and social assistance. And this is where this. I asked AI what are the top 10 biggest job sectors in the United States? And so healthcare and social assistance, retail trade, professional and business services, which would be like those tax people and lawyers and stuff like that. Leisure and hospitality, manufacturing, which is rapidly getting replaced.
Mark Clark [00:07:32]:
Education services, Amazon warehouses and all this kind of stuff.
Jake Messner [00:07:35]:
Yeah, education services, which ChatGPT. Their prediction is that for young kids there will never be. AI will not be able to replace teachers of young kids. Parents are not going to want to send their kid to get teached by AI at 6 years old.
Mark Clark [00:07:56]:
Taught at 6 years old because.
Jake Messner [00:07:58]:
But when you get to high school, the information that you can access, you don't. The need for teachers goes dramatically down. So even AI is predicting that government 7%, construction 5%. Again, AI says the same thing. When AI becomes robotic and is able to do manual task. Yeah, that's when you really see a lot of these sectors get hit. Transportation, warehousing and finance and insurance are the biggest ones.
Mark Clark [00:08:25]:
Yep.
Jake Messner [00:08:26]:
And almost all of them are predicted to take a hit of up to 20% in the next five years. Yeah, 20% in the next five years.
Mark Clark [00:08:38]:
So I was talking to my buddy, works at a really big company. I think there's, I think there's 45, 50,000 employees worldwide. I said what are you doing tomorrow? He's like, well, we got to lay off 4,000 people. I said that's what you're doing tomorrow? He's like, yeah, Well I got 25 of them, but then everyone else is laying off 4,000. I was just yesterday in Silicon Valley preaching at a church that these two. Have you met The Pearly Brothers? Two very brilliant guys, geniuses. So PhD, MIT, all the rest of it. And they work in the sector like he started company, hundreds of millions of dollars basically working on Alzheimer's to solve these different diseases and stuff.
Mark Clark [00:09:25]:
And the other one works at a multi billion dollar company and it's a lot of AI driven. So then I go for lunch and there's 13 people around the table at lunch. So we're in Santa Clara, right. I'm 10 minutes from Apple headquarters. Meta Nvidia. All the stuff. Okay. And none of these people work at the church because the church is, it's a small church plant that doesn't have any employees.
Mark Clark [00:09:46]:
There's one employee. So I said, what do you do? And I went around the circle and every single person around the circle, 13 people, all worked in the AI sector. Every single one of them, whether that's working on chips, whether it's building systems that build systems, all of them Work in AI and one guy. They're all. They're all Indian, Asian. Okay. So they're all from different countries that came here on visas. And the way their visa works is if they.
Mark Clark [00:10:16]:
So one of them was like, okay, I was told 40 days ago that I got let go for my job. You have 60 days to find a new job or you get sent back to India, where he's from. So he found another job making triple what he just was making, but he had a gun against his head. It's got to be 60 days.
Jake Messner [00:10:37]:
Okay.
Mark Clark [00:10:38]:
They're all working in the sector.
Jake Messner [00:10:39]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:10:40]:
They're all. They're all talking to me about the fact that last week Meta laid off 5,000 people. Amazon's gonna lay off a bunch, Nvidia's laying off a bunch. Everyone's get. It's just like a bloodbath right now in Silicon Valley.
Jake Messner [00:10:56]:
Because they're getting replaced.
Mark Clark [00:10:58]:
Yes, they're getting replaced in the. And their capacity. Now, some of this is just how the market goes. I mean, there was bubbles when you were too young, when the Internet was invented.
Jake Messner [00:11:09]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:11:09]:
Imagine this. Imagine a world where the Internet didn't exist. You don't even know that. I know that world. The Internet came into my existence when I was 16, 1996. And it was just use. You would jump on and like, chat with someone in a room. And you're like, what's your name? And they're like, I'm Tom.
Mark Clark [00:11:28]:
Where do you live, Tom? I live in Missouri. Cool. What's the weather? And you go to school the next day? I talked to some guy in Missouri and he knew what the weather was like. That's what the Internet was when I was 16. Yes.
Jake Messner [00:11:38]:
Okay.
Mark Clark [00:11:38]:
So I know a world without the Internet. But everyone thought when the Internet did all this boom, the 90s, all this stuff is crazy. That the world. And obviously the world did change. But there's some of these normal economic flows that happen.
Jake Messner [00:11:52]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:11:53]:
This one seems seismic and a big deal.
Jake Messner [00:11:58]:
Yeah. Why? Why do you think.
Mark Clark [00:12:00]:
Quick correction.
Jake Messner [00:12:00]:
From someone who's lived through the boom of Google and the access to information that that brought on, versus this. What are the. What are. If you're talking to, like, my dad who's like. When everyone was freaked out when Google was coming around, and my dad's like, it'll be fine. And I'm like, no, dad, you don't understand. But from someone that's lived through both.
Mark Clark [00:12:21]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:12:21]:
What are you saying? To someone like that who's like, this is.
Mark Clark [00:12:24]:
This is different. This is definitely different this. Now this will create jobs. Okay. There is an argument that any. The way economics work is any new sphere is going to need people to run it and whatever. So it will create kinds of jobs. That's great.
Mark Clark [00:12:46]:
And there will be wealth created. We're going to talk about this when we get to the ten things.
Jake Messner [00:12:50]:
Okay.
Mark Clark [00:12:52]:
But the nature of this is. Is literally a. A pruning of people needed.
Jake Messner [00:13:00]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:13:01]:
To do jobs. That's literally the nature of what we're talking about.
Jake Messner [00:13:04]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:13:05]:
So I think that side of the scale is scarier than anything we've ever seen. Because Google. Google didn't exist. It existed. Now you needed tens of thousands of people to make it work. So it created jobs.
Jake Messner [00:13:19]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:13:20]:
That's good. Now AI exists. You need one guy to run it. And it replaces 100 people.
Jake Messner [00:13:26]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:13:27]:
That's the concern. That the economics start not to work. Especially to Benji's point. We start having more babies. Now we've. Now the universe or the world is filled with 10 billion people five years from now or whatever. I don't know what the math is. What are they gonna do? What are they gonna do for work?
Jake Messner [00:13:48]:
Well, if you ask Elon Musk, we'll be fine.
Mark Clark [00:13:52]:
Right. Because he believes. Tell the audience what he believes in.
Jake Messner [00:13:54]:
Well, that there's a world in which we are all sitting back and the need for work to provide yourself with anything goes down so much that everyone exists almost at a equal level.
Mark Clark [00:14:06]:
Yeah. He calls it the universal. What's he call it?
Jake Messner [00:14:09]:
Leveler or whatever.
Mark Clark [00:14:13]:
There'll be a universal amount of money.
Jake Messner [00:14:17]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:14:18]:
That everybody makes.
Jake Messner [00:14:19]:
And it's like everyone gets what they need from the pot and they're just a. Okay. That's. At least that's what Elon has said.
Mark Clark [00:14:25]:
Yes.
Jake Messner [00:14:26]:
As a pipe dream. And ship all the data processing centers up into space and run a tether down and we'll be a. Okay. I personally don't think that's the world we're headed towards. I don't think.
Mark Clark [00:14:37]:
What do you think we're headed towards?
Jake Messner [00:14:39]:
A massive wealth inequality leap. Have you seen the movie Limitless?
Mark Clark [00:14:45]:
Yes.
Jake Messner [00:14:45]:
Where they take that trail.
Mark Clark [00:14:47]:
Elon talks about universal high income.
Jake Messner [00:14:50]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:14:51]:
Okay. Or there's another phrase. Universal basic income. Ubi that people use. Which makes sense. Elon's more optimistic. Some people use ubi. Universal basic income.
Mark Clark [00:15:01]:
Everyone's going to have some basic. All the same. Whatever Elon says it's going to be a very high income and we'll be able to basically live out this paradise of health care. Will be Amazing. Everyone's going to have the highest level health care, but you know, all these things. Sorry, go ahead.
Jake Messner [00:15:18]:
Yeah, it's just that doesn't seem optimistic version. It just doesn't seem realistic. There's people that will make money off of this.
Mark Clark [00:15:25]:
Yeah, we'll talk about that.
Jake Messner [00:15:26]:
Yeah. And just so my.
Mark Clark [00:15:28]:
Go ahead. He takes it. Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:15:31]:
He takes a pill, he becomes a super genius.
Mark Clark [00:15:33]:
Yes.
Jake Messner [00:15:33]:
To me there will be, especially as we talk, which I'm sure we'll get to the data processing centers. The fact that the cost of AI is going to rise and the tool that it is will be accessible to some and not accessible to others.
Mark Clark [00:15:46]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:15:46]:
And the people who get the limitless pill of AI will continue to grow in wealth. The people who are creating it will be able to grow in wealth. The people who can't get it, who cannot afford it.
Mark Clark [00:15:56]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:15:57]:
Are going to be left behind.
Mark Clark [00:15:58]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:15:59]:
And you'll see the gap continue to grow and continue to grow. The people who get, let's call it the limitless pill of AI and access to it and the people who can't afford to use it because the cost of it is going to rise.
Mark Clark [00:16:12]:
Yes.
Jake Messner [00:16:13]:
Because we don't, we haven't figured out the energy problem yet.
Mark Clark [00:16:17]:
Yes.
Jake Messner [00:16:18]:
The energy and water problem.
Mark Clark [00:16:20]:
Yes. The mass amounts of energy. And this is the irony of what people talk about that comes out of, you know, a more progressive side of the country, you know, California, Silicon Valley, environmental lists like a hermeneutic of we got to protect the environment. I does not protect the environment. I sucks massive amounts of energy.
Jake Messner [00:16:47]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:16:48]:
Trees gotta fall, water's gotta be used, oil, gas, all the energy things that destroy the environment is what we need to continue doing now tenfold at mass quantities. AI do what AI does.
Jake Messner [00:17:06]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:17:06]:
There was analogy I saw. I don't know if this is scientific. There's an analogy I saw where every time you ask Chappie GPT something, you might as well take a bottle of water and just pour it out on the ground because that, that is the amount of energy that was used for chat to do its work. For your dumb question about the water
Jake Messner [00:17:23]:
that was needed to cool the server.
Mark Clark [00:17:24]:
Yeah. Yes.
Jake Messner [00:17:25]:
Yeah. Go flush your toilet 10 times before you ask it a question.
Mark Clark [00:17:29]:
Yes. Okay, so 10 things that chat says we gotta be worried about.
Jake Messner [00:17:33]:
Okay.
Mark Clark [00:17:34]:
As human beings. Okay. The first is the collapse. This is what you alluded to, the collapse of attention. Yes, the collapse of attention. Basically, our screens are. The danger is not merely distraction. It says it's the erosion of the capacity for Silence, contemplation, prayer, deep work, real relationships, boredom, which is often where creativity begins.
Mark Clark [00:17:59]:
Some of my best ideas come when I'm sitting in the shower and I'm just sitting there and I got nothing to. I got no screen to look at. I'm just shampooing my hair.
Jake Messner [00:18:08]:
Your brain's working.
Mark Clark [00:18:09]:
Nothing. And I'll go, yeah, we should. We should do a. I should write a book and raise $1 million to help somebody in Uganda or whatever. And if I don't have that, then. So. So it says I could become the ultimate easy button for avoiding reality. That's issue number one.
Mark Clark [00:18:25]:
What do you think about that?
Jake Messner [00:18:27]:
Well, I would say we're. Yeah, I think it's just. I wouldn't say this one is necessarily all AI's fault specifically.
Mark Clark [00:18:34]:
Sure.
Jake Messner [00:18:34]:
We have been headed in that direction.
Mark Clark [00:18:36]:
Yes.
Jake Messner [00:18:37]:
AI is going to increase that problem.
Mark Clark [00:18:39]:
Yes.
Jake Messner [00:18:40]:
I, as a child, did not grow up with an iPad. I had toys, like actual toys.
Mark Clark [00:18:46]:
And I go outside and play in the.
Jake Messner [00:18:47]:
Go play. And it was very much like. I think even that's what I like to think about is now when I look back to my childhood, I had a sandbox in the backyard. I had a pool, some shovels. My playtime was like creating and thinking and making fun and entertaining myself with. Without a tv. Right. And now it is not that.
Jake Messner [00:19:09]:
And I watch probably far too many kids. And I think there's a lot of people who look at kids now who just have such easy access to entertainment by doing nothing.
Mark Clark [00:19:19]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:19:19]:
And consuming information.
Mark Clark [00:19:22]:
And that's not. Your point is that's not just AI.
Jake Messner [00:19:24]:
That's not AI.
Mark Clark [00:19:25]:
That's social media in general. The fact that we look at screens since 2007, the invention of the iPhone, changed society in such a way. Where I did a sermon in Silicon Valley where I asked the crowd to pull out their phones and tell me, shout out your screen time per day, you know.
Jake Messner [00:19:44]:
Yeah.
Mark Clark [00:19:44]:
And they're just shouting out eight hours here.
Jake Messner [00:19:46]:
Everyone's lying. Two hours, 12 hours.
Mark Clark [00:19:48]:
Said, well, one guy said 43 minutes. I said, what are you talking about?
Jake Messner [00:19:51]:
You're lying?
Mark Clark [00:19:52]:
And he had his setting wrong or whatever. But you're seven hours, seven and a half hours, 13 years of your life. That's now 13. The average is we'll spend 13 years of our life on a phone looking at a screen. That's social media. But that's not different than AI now, because AI is actually the thing running all social media, giving you the algorithms you want to see feeding into your already. And I think it's going to talk about this a little bit. The confirmation bias, that happens.
Mark Clark [00:20:21]:
Right? So number two, a crisis of meaning and human value. When I can write better than many humans code faster. I mean, I was so. So I was in a. So it used to be like if you were a coder, okay, you were the most sought after employee, because who codes? You have to be a genius to code. You just sit there like so if you watch the social network. Right?
Jake Messner [00:20:46]:
Yeah.
Mark Clark [00:20:48]:
The genius of Zuckerberg and those guys is they're coding all day.
Jake Messner [00:20:51]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:20:51]:
He's locked in. Leave him alone. He's got his earphones and he's coding. And that's all they did at Facebook was code. Because you got a code, you got a code, you got to code. You watch the matrix, all code. Well, now you don't have to be a coder.
Jake Messner [00:21:04]:
No.
Mark Clark [00:21:04]:
Because AI codes for you. So I was in a board meeting yesterday for this church of these guys in Silicon Valley, and the whole board meeting agenda and their website and everything was all coded. They're not coders, they're scientists and they work at the company. Yeah, but they, they use AI to code every piece of agenda. The website, they're like, usually you would pay $50,000 for a guy to build your church website. Now it's free because AI codes it and it looks sick.
Jake Messner [00:21:39]:
It looks great.
Mark Clark [00:21:40]:
These are the best coders the world's ever seen.
Jake Messner [00:21:42]:
It's. It's crazy.
Mark Clark [00:21:44]:
It's so.
Jake Messner [00:21:45]:
It's insane.
Mark Clark [00:21:45]:
They're going to generate art, compose music, tutor students, produce sermons, mimic empathy. People will start asking what exactly makes humans special? Fascinating. Let's sit on this one for a second.
Jake Messner [00:22:01]:
Okay. I had a kid last week that is in relationship problems with his girlfriend and wants to break up with her.
Mark Clark [00:22:08]:
It's a real girl.
Jake Messner [00:22:09]:
Now this is a real person and a real girl.
Mark Clark [00:22:12]:
Okay,
Jake Messner [00:22:14]:
to get advice on how to break up with a girl, he doesn't go to someone older than him. He doesn't go to his father, he doesn't go to his youth leader. He had typed into ChatGPT his problem and why he wanted to break up with her and what should I say? And ChatGPT spit out, I'll be a phenomenal. Just like stick to the script. That to me is. That's so scary. The lack. That kid never had conversation with person.
Jake Messner [00:22:40]:
If he wanted to, he could have had it with AI. But the lack of need for conversation and what it's doing is, it's training these kids and training us. We're getting Trained that we actually don't need to have conversation about anything because this will just spit out whatever answer we want in the moment.
Mark Clark [00:22:57]:
Right. And it's. And greatness is the product of the. The pain, the. The process. It's born out of the heavy work and the lifting of a thing.
Jake Messner [00:23:11]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:23:12]:
That's where greatness comes from. And you're saying we're gonna lose all of that and we're just gonna skip to the conclusion.
Jake Messner [00:23:18]:
Jump to the conclusion. No need to have repetitive conversation of turmoil and thought and arguments.
Mark Clark [00:23:24]:
I'm most interested in this category about the art piece. As a film guy, as a music guy, what is it? How are you feeling about all that? When a song. Okay, example. I'm in Arizona a couple weeks ago. My buddy says he puts on this artist and he's like, this is my guy. And it's like some jazz jam, whatever. And we're listening to it for two hours. And he's like, hey, the guy doesn't exist.
Mark Clark [00:23:51]:
It's AI And I felt dirty.
Jake Messner [00:23:53]:
Yes. But was it good?
Mark Clark [00:23:55]:
It was good.
Jake Messner [00:23:55]:
It was incredible. AI music is. You would think it's so good. It's so good that it's like, wow, this is. There's times where I'm like, what is this song? And I'll go and I'll Shazam it. And I look it up on YouTube. It is an AI artist who have created this whole entire career.
Mark Clark [00:24:12]:
Now there's somebody behind them that's managing that Avatar or whatever, and they're producing money for themselves. Yeah, but this is create. There's no human created this. This was pure extrapolation of other ideas and things brought together. It's not pure creation. It's derivative.
Jake Messner [00:24:33]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:24:34]:
Right. It's taking stuff humans invented and it's re. Putting it into the pot and mixing it up.
Jake Messner [00:24:41]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:24:42]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:24:42]:
When you. When you. Part of what. I know I've talked to you about movies. Part of what you love goes deeper than just the product you view on a movie. The director's story and who he is and why he did this. And the humanness behind it.
Mark Clark [00:24:57]:
Yes.
Jake Messner [00:24:57]:
Makes it beautiful.
Mark Clark [00:24:58]:
Yes.
Jake Messner [00:24:59]:
If you were to watch, let's say, Avatar and. But it was made by AI but it was the same movie. It would to. At least in conversations with you. You're one of the biggest movie guys I know. It loses a lot of the meaning.
Mark Clark [00:25:11]:
Absolutely.
Jake Messner [00:25:12]:
Because the struggle.
Mark Clark [00:25:13]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:25:14]:
Of. To create something that didn't exist yet is what makes it so beautiful. It's the story behind the humanness.
Mark Clark [00:25:21]:
Michelangelo carving the Statue of David. People say. People say the statue of David might be the greatest thing we ever produced as a human species. The greatest piece of art ever. That's the beauty. Yes. If you just typed into a computer, this is my opinion anyway, we could sound really dated in 10 years. But we typed in a computer.
Mark Clark [00:25:45]:
Take this block of rock and carve out this. And the lasers went. And 10 minutes later the statue of David was there. What would that mean? Would mean it's stupid.
Jake Messner [00:25:57]:
Yeah. It wouldn't mean it, but yeah, it's. And now we're to the point to where you can create an AI model that thinks for itself and you can give it prompts to have as it's creating something to tell us what it's thinking and what it's feeling. And you can read its own internal dialogue as it creates something with emotion. It is not. It just doesn't feel the same thing. It doesn't feel relatable because you're knowing this is coming from a computer that's thinking in ones and zeros. And so if I was a musician or a film person or an artist, which I'm not.
Jake Messner [00:26:40]:
I'm not. I'm none of these. I can't. I can't create art. I can't even. I could. You could give me a pencil. I couldn't draw anything in this room.
Jake Messner [00:26:49]:
I would be so afraid of. Like to the average person that just desire the product of beauty or the product of good sounding music, it is replaceable. And the damage that comes from that of like there's no part of the beauty of humanity is we can create things that are beautiful with thoughtful expression where our past is tied into it. That's gone. Like there's just. It's. I shouldn't say it's gone. It's just so easily repeatable.
Mark Clark [00:27:21]:
Yes. And starts to lack.
Jake Messner [00:27:24]:
No one will know.
Mark Clark [00:27:25]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:27:26]:
You can listen to a song right now and wouldn't know that it's AI and think this is beautiful.
Mark Clark [00:27:32]:
So I brought in the problem of life here. This is the book came out my book last year. And I intentionally put the creation of Adam painting, the Michelangelo painting on the front of this. This is one of the greatest pieces of art ever painted. If I found out that this painting, you know, in the Sistine Chapel was just a computer that shot it up there one day, who would go and visit the Sistine Chapel? This is what I'm saying. It's. You can't. It's human involvement that makes these things what they are.
Mark Clark [00:28:07]:
I'm scared of the movie industry being made up of AI. Not to say they can't create good stories.
Jake Messner [00:28:15]:
Their products will be great, the product of it will be great. The humanness will be gone.
Mark Clark [00:28:20]:
Right. So I wrote this in the Problem of Life. This was published a year and a half ago.
Jake Messner [00:28:31]:
Okay.
Mark Clark [00:28:31]:
This is behind the times back then. Okay. So ancient, ancient algorithms monitor and influence our shopping habits, our time on social media, our healthcare and the world of education. AI is changing our world in a million ways. It's the future, whether we like it or not. Vladimir Putin has said it is as clear as it can be said. Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.
Mark Clark [00:28:59]:
2016, a team from Future of Humanity Institute, the University of Oxford, worked with over 300 academics and industry experts in machine learning and concluded that in the next 10 years, AI will would do better than any of us at translating languages, writing high school level essays, writing top 40 songs and driving trucks. Much of this is true already and it already arrived ahead of schedule. They went on to say by 2049, AI should be writing New York Times bestsellers and performing surgeries. By 2053, overall, AI will be better than humans at pretty much everything in about 45 years. I think we're ahead of schedule.
Jake Messner [00:29:39]:
Everything's been ahead of schedule.
Mark Clark [00:29:40]:
We're going to be doing surgeries.
Jake Messner [00:29:42]:
Yes. Soon, Very soon.
Mark Clark [00:29:44]:
I mean, they're using robot. I mean, I think they're probably doing them already, but so Elon has this like. It's going to be what, what the. We're going to get back to the, the elite structures. But what the elite used to get in healthcare will now be universalized in some sense. You used to get the podunk doctor who fumbles around because you didn't have. You weren't. You didn't make 3 million a year.
Mark Clark [00:30:13]:
But now everyone will have that access to the best. What's the rabbit hole saying about.
Jake Messner [00:30:21]:
To me, everything. The motive? Money. There will always be be access to better with more money. So while the standard of what's good may get raised. Yeah, there will be people that get access to better with money. So that, that shift. Yeah, I guess the good, the good side of it is what becomes the average for like the Joe Schmo will go up. That's good.
Jake Messner [00:30:50]:
But the gap will all. There will always be a gap.
Mark Clark [00:30:53]:
Right. Okay, so let's get. Okay, we're going to get to the gap in a sec. So number three, loneliness will Intensify. AI companions will become emotionally convincing very quickly. Not fully conscious, not truly relational, but convincing enough. Now this is AI telling me this. Millions of people may prefer AI interactions because they're non judgmental, available 24, 7, customizable, emotionally affirming, friction free, but real relationships.
Mark Clark [00:31:21]:
This is chat telling me this requires sacrifice, forgiveness, patience, unpredictability. I don't know that I'm gonna, I don't think this will be for me. I don't know. A relate. Relating to a. Like.
Jake Messner [00:31:35]:
Well, this is where. Yeah. I, I don't know. I'm trying to think of like the socially awkward high school kid. They can't talk to anyone. What's better for him?
Mark Clark [00:31:47]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:31:47]:
To engage in some level of conversation, even if it is with AI, or to engage in no conversation at all. What's better? I actually don't know on this one. Now what I do know is that suicides and mental health issues that stem out of AI relationships have skyrocketed. But it's skyrocketing from nothing. So of course it will go up.
Mark Clark [00:32:13]:
But to the levels of burnout, anxiety, depression, suicide, all these things are going up since the invention of the iPhone too. So there's a connection to the isolation. I'm basically in a relationship with myself. AI becomes a reflection, a self reflection because it affirms everything you do. It's like, that was a great job, great question. It doesn't go. Stupid question. Why'd you ask me that? It rarely ever does.
Mark Clark [00:32:37]:
I mean, you can do a setting,
Jake Messner [00:32:38]:
you can make it do a setting. Yeah. You can train it to be what you want. So I guess that's for me, it's like there probably is a spec specific type of person and I would even say a specific type of therapy that we're going to see for.
Mark Clark [00:32:52]:
Yes.
Jake Messner [00:32:52]:
People to engage and learn social skills from AI. I, I don't think that's a terrible thing. Right. I think when that becomes more attractive than relationship with one another, even from a biblical perspective, God has designed us to have that.
Mark Clark [00:33:12]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:33:12]:
When that is replaceable and more attractive, then it becomes a problem. Which is essentially the whole point of this conversation is there's a lot of good that's coming from it.
Mark Clark [00:33:22]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:33:22]:
That can be very, very easily shifted to like problems.
Mark Clark [00:33:27]:
Yes.
Jake Messner [00:33:28]:
And I would say that one, to me, I actually see a lot of hope in that.
Mark Clark [00:33:30]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:33:31]:
For people.
Mark Clark [00:33:31]:
Yeah. Okay. This one's interesting. Truth will become harder to recognize. Deep fakes, synthetic media, fake voices, AI generated evidence, videos, photos, phone calls, public statements, news Clips. How do we even know what's real? What are we doing here?
Jake Messner [00:33:46]:
You don't. I'm deeply worried my parents are gonna get scammed out of their money.
Mark Clark [00:33:49]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:33:50]:
In 10 years from an AI scam.
Mark Clark [00:33:52]:
Oh, it won't be 10 years. There's already. There's these phone calls that go out, so. I heard of a guy, he. I think he's a dentist, and he was at the dentist's office, and his phone. His cell phone rang, and it was his wife's number, and it was her voice screaming that there was people in the house and he needed to come and save her. He drives home, and she's just sitting in the house hanging out. She's like, hi, honey, what are you doing home? He's like, what? And there's people.
Mark Clark [00:34:20]:
My voice is all over the Internet.
Jake Messner [00:34:22]:
Yeah.
Mark Clark [00:34:23]:
They could take my voice, make it call any of my family members, and say, I'm in trouble. I need you to send 100,000 on. My family would say, well, good luck. I don't have 100,000. I don't have $1,000 to send. But, yeah, they could call anybody.
Jake Messner [00:34:37]:
Yeah. And then user voice.
Mark Clark [00:34:39]:
This. This is scary.
Jake Messner [00:34:41]:
And then the bigger, like, what's even crazier to me is the natural reaction is I'm like, oh, well, if that happens, FaceTime them, right. AI can replicate that. They can replicate images and videos and, like, you're talking about deep fakes. You. You can scroll through social media right? Now, you mentioned this a couple weeks ago in your sermon about what each generation is asking themselves. This generation will be asking themselves, is this real?
Mark Clark [00:35:02]:
Is this real?
Jake Messner [00:35:03]:
The idea that we would be able to distinguish what's real and what's not is what it. At one point a couple years ago, we're like, oh, you can tell that's AI. You can tell that's AI. Sure, it's gone.
Mark Clark [00:35:15]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:35:16]:
Some of the videos that are coming out are indistinguishable from reality.
Mark Clark [00:35:21]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:35:22]:
So that's not even like. That's not even like a what if.
Mark Clark [00:35:25]:
Yeah. I've seen, like, Trump slapping Biden around and riding him. Like a. Yeah, like a dying is gone. Like. And you're like, wow, that's the real people.
Jake Messner [00:35:34]:
Yeah.
Mark Clark [00:35:34]:
I. I saw someone post something the other day. Like, see, this guy's hanging out with this guy, and you're like, you know, and the guy posting, it's like, 65.
Jake Messner [00:35:41]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:35:42]:
It's just like, sorry, I didn't realize I was AI.
Jake Messner [00:35:44]:
It's like, yeah, but it's now so close. Like, so that to me is just like, yeah, that's going. And I don't know how to. I don't know how to go against that.
Mark Clark [00:35:55]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:35:56]:
I don't know how to stop that. How are you able to see? This is where I wish. Like, I was digging on YouTube, setting settings the other day in my YouTube account, trying to figure out if there's a way in which I can turn off AI content. I don't want to see any AI content.
Mark Clark [00:36:09]:
But it's all connected to AI somewhere. Yes, because it's feeding. You could. Now, what used to be. Okay, this woman is in her 40s. I have her Instagram profile. I'm going to feed her real estate or whatever she's interested in. That used to be kind of a guy coding and whatever.
Mark Clark [00:36:30]:
Now it's just AI reading everything you do and understanding it.
Jake Messner [00:36:33]:
Yeah. We think cookies was invasive. Like what cookies was 10 years ago.
Mark Clark [00:36:38]:
Yeah, cookies. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jake Messner [00:36:39]:
We thought that was like, oh, my gosh. I was talking about.
Mark Clark [00:36:42]:
I shared a link to a golf shirt.
Jake Messner [00:36:47]:
Yeah.
Mark Clark [00:36:48]:
Now all I see is golf shirt.
Jake Messner [00:36:50]:
That's it.
Mark Clark [00:36:50]:
So all. It's all golf shows. I'm like, I'm bored. I just want. I bought it. You can move on.
Jake Messner [00:36:57]:
It's like, I will be getting ads for Claude after this.
Mark Clark [00:37:00]:
Right, right. Yeah, exactly.
Jake Messner [00:37:01]:
Because my phone's right here. It's here.
Mark Clark [00:37:02]:
Anyway, this one's society runs on shared trust. This is what it says. AI could fracture that trust at scale. And once people stop believing anything, they become vulnerable to believing everything. Dang Chat's preaching.
Jake Messner [00:37:19]:
It's a genius. It's so smart.
Mark Clark [00:37:21]:
I can't believe anything I'm seeing. Ergo, I'm open to believe anything.
Jake Messner [00:37:28]:
Yeah.
Mark Clark [00:37:28]:
I got no interesting. This is a tough one. Fake everything.
Jake Messner [00:37:35]:
Yeah. It's the mission.
Mark Clark [00:37:36]:
I wonder what would drive us to desire organic face to face. Like, I wonder if this eats itself.
Jake Messner [00:37:44]:
That one to me does. It's. It feels like there's part. This is. Would be part of the good of it. Is it. There's such a desire for man. I don't even know it's real anymore.
Jake Messner [00:37:54]:
Unless it's tangible.
Mark Clark [00:37:55]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:37:56]:
It's going to drive you into the real world.
Mark Clark [00:37:58]:
What if this is a crazy idea and it's not going to work because money and you know, what if, like for 24 hours every week the world turned off the Internet, Wouldn't that be interesting? Like a Sabbath.
Jake Messner [00:38:16]:
A Sabbath of the Internet.
Mark Clark [00:38:17]:
Global Sabbath from the Internet. Because we get to a point where we're so. The, the anxiety epidemic is so crazy that the amount of people just going mad like zombies in the street, everyone's just crazy.
Jake Messner [00:38:33]:
Yeah.
Mark Clark [00:38:33]:
And everyone just gets to a point where they vote in some universal election. Shut the Internet off from sat. Like the old Jewish Sabbath.
Jake Messner [00:38:43]:
You know, we take a full one day. Do you know there's an idea. Do you think that drives more people outside or do you think like you, you just. From your opinion, do you think that actually drives more connection? Or do you think people like, why am I getting out of bed today? The Internet's off. Today's a sleep day.
Mark Clark [00:39:01]:
Well, there's no need to get out of the Internet or get out of bed with the Internet on. So. So I would think if the chemicals in our brains are being carved out every day by these behaviors, which is what's happening, then I would think some kind of rest from those behaviors would be helpful on a chemical level. If it was enough. I'm not saying once a week would do it, but if your brain is carved out, which it is, then a rest from those activities will help to heal your brain.
Jake Messner [00:39:33]:
Yeah.
Mark Clark [00:39:34]:
So, you know, the, the, the, the Bible talks about a jubilee, you know, every seven years. You would let the land rest because it needs to grow. You can't just keep raping it. Yes.
Jake Messner [00:39:46]:
Or you destroy, Let it replenish.
Mark Clark [00:39:48]:
Yeah. So you chill for a year. Imagine they shut the Internet off for a year.
Jake Messner [00:39:53]:
You know, this is your path to presidency.
Mark Clark [00:39:56]:
All money would. You can't do it for a year because it drives everything. And that's the problem when it's tied to the economy of the world. You know, I don't know what the analogy would be, but it would be you can't just stop the world. All productivity.
Jake Messner [00:40:10]:
Yeah.
Mark Clark [00:40:12]:
But I think there's an idea here of humankind gets to a point where it's like, interesting premise for a Netflix show or a movie or something, which
Jake Messner [00:40:21]:
it feels like you're seeing right now. This, this feels like the first, at least in my lifetime, the first thing that's like universally made life easier. Four years ago when Chat GPT really started taking off and everyone's like, dude, have you written that essay on Chat GPT? Right. Your math homework on Chat.
Mark Clark [00:40:38]:
When it really dashes.
Jake Messner [00:40:39]:
Yes. When it's like. So when it first started, everyone was like, this is the best thing ever. It feels like this is the first best thing ever to happen to us. That's getting quite a lot of pushback from people.
Mark Clark [00:40:51]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:40:51]:
As far as, like, people don't it's almost like there's a lot of people who don't want it.
Mark Clark [00:40:55]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:40:56]:
It feels like there's a lot of people who are like, I prefer the way the world was.
Mark Clark [00:41:00]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:41:00]:
I don't want to step into this.
Mark Clark [00:41:01]:
Stranger things. And they're like, dang, I want to go back to the 80s. Like, when you grow up, dad, this is cool, man.
Jake Messner [00:41:06]:
Like, yeah, no phones.
Mark Clark [00:41:07]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:41:08]:
I don't want techno. So it feels like there's at least hope in this younger generation of like.
Mark Clark [00:41:12]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:41:12]:
To not fully. Fully lean into it.
Mark Clark [00:41:14]:
But they might say that, but they're still going to use the thing for the. And. And that's. That's actually. I don't know if that this listed here, but it's somewhere in here where that's actually my biggest concern because I'm a guy who. Who read all the books, who grinded out writing the papers. Every sentence, all the. All these books.
Mark Clark [00:41:30]:
Like, I don't. I've never used AI to write anything. This is the. This is old school 80s. Every sentence thought through and written 50 times. And I read all the books in here, footnote them all, and I literally type in all the footnote. I don't even need, like a code to be like, hey, just do all my citations for me. I just do it all myself.
Jake Messner [00:41:52]:
Would you? 00 AI 0 guys. The problem of life. Mark Clark available now. 0 AI used in this creation in
Mark Clark [00:41:59]:
any of my books. Because for me, the gift is the process, not the conclusion. The journey is the point. That's the point.
Jake Messner [00:42:09]:
Yes. Which.
Mark Clark [00:42:11]:
Why would I want to write a paper on something and give it to my teacher? I didn't learn anything.
Jake Messner [00:42:15]:
Okay. We just. We just had Thrive Conference here. We had a bunch of youth pastors in the room. The biggest question among youth pastors right now, everyone's like, how much AI is too much AI to use in our sermon?
Mark Clark [00:42:25]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:42:25]:
How much AI is too much AI? This is not what was said. What I'm about to say was not my own idea. One man gets up and says, you're missing the point. The beauty of preaching is in the preparation and time with Jesus in writing the message. That's the beauty of it. So apply that to thinking in general.
Mark Clark [00:42:46]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:42:47]:
The beauty of arriving at a destination of a finished thought is the turmoil and preparation and brain power, perseverance that it takes to create it.
Mark Clark [00:42:58]:
Yes.
Jake Messner [00:42:59]:
That is at massive risk of.
Mark Clark [00:43:01]:
Yes.
Jake Messner [00:43:03]:
Being completely gone. So it's like they will know. I will know more information than my dad ever did. I will have access to. I will know more information than my dad ever did. My dad's ability to think will be way more than mine ever was.
Mark Clark [00:43:18]:
And to that point, though, you won't actually know more. You'll be able to look up more, but because you didn't grind to get it, you'll forget it.
Jake Messner [00:43:27]:
Yeah, it'll just.
Mark Clark [00:43:27]:
So if you read a book, like there's a difference between reading a book and memorizing the book or knowing the book. Right. So you can read a book, but if I ask you two days later, what'd you read? What was it about? And you're like, I don't know. Then you learn, right? Yeah, you learn nothing.
Jake Messner [00:43:43]:
That's the problem.
Mark Clark [00:43:45]:
That's the thing. Because your brain isn't. It's not the same as in the 80s. No, your brain works different. It doesn't grab information and hold it. It grabs it and throws it out because you know you can come back to it later. That's why you can't remember people's names. That's why, like, you get brain fog and you're like looking for a word and you can't find all of that.
Mark Clark [00:44:03]:
It's because you, their brain have been rewired.
Jake Messner [00:44:07]:
It's been rewired for. And its ability to store information and for you to think and access it.
Mark Clark [00:44:12]:
That's scary. That's what it's doing.
Jake Messner [00:44:14]:
Yeah, that's.
Mark Clark [00:44:15]:
That's a scary part. Okay, now we're getting depressed. Okay, here's the one we'll come this the one we've been hinting at the whole time. Massive economic disruption. This is chat saying this. Not necessarily. All jobs disappear. Most likely partial automation, wage suppression, creative destruction, middle skill collapse, instability.
Mark Clark [00:44:36]:
White collar professions once thought safe are suddenly exposed. Legal work, marketing design, coding, customer service, education, media administration. The psychological effect may be even bigger than the financial one. People losing a sense of usefulness and purpose. Historically, technological revolutions created new jobs eventually, but transitions are painful and AI is moving unusually fast. So the universal basic income conversation, companies letting massive people go. And we're talking about this the other day, where people pastors are like, well, at least AI can't take my job. And it's like, no, but take the jobs of your people who pay for the church to do ministry.
Jake Messner [00:45:14]:
Yeah.
Mark Clark [00:45:16]:
And if your people are sitting out there with no jobs, you're not getting paid. Youth ministry is not happening. You're not able to buy goldfish for the kids ministry. That's part of the concern here and there will to musk's point have to at some point be an economic. So I called one of the Perleigh brothers on the way here to do this pod, the guys in Santa Clara and I said, give me two good things about AI.
Jake Messner [00:45:41]:
Oh, this will be good for me
Mark Clark [00:45:42]:
to hear two bad ones.
Jake Messner [00:45:43]:
Well, I don't want to.
Mark Clark [00:45:44]:
Right. He said, well, the good one is of course, you know, like the website that you were looking at, churches can use, can get great products for basically free because AI will code for them. So a church, a small church plant. Now I was going to pay a guy 50 grand to build a website, can do it for free because the thing codes. So there's going to be certain things that Christians can do with quality that they used have to pay for that they no longer need to. Now, of course, that that's one less job, one less guy having a job in the world.
Jake Messner [00:46:15]:
Well, that's one program replacing hundreds of guys.
Mark Clark [00:46:18]:
Exactly. But the just quick benefit to you as an employer is you can have high quality world class work. Thomas Friedman years ago wrote a book called the World is Flat. And what he talked about in that book was it was quite a thing back then. When was that book written? Probably 2004, 2005. His whole argument was it used to be that a recording artist, like a Bruce Springsteen or something, every once in a while they come along and one of the big record companies signs them and puts them on a big tour and spends millions of dollars in a studio with all the best people. And now a guy in his basement using his Mac computer can do the exact same quality work. The world has become flat.
Mark Clark [00:47:07]:
You no longer have these big companies that can only produce good work. Now anybody can produce good work. Which is true. Now what Sam was saying is yes, we can do high quality work, but the problem is, which I think you still. His con was you're still going to have these massive companies that have more money to use more AI than you do that. That the wealth gap gap is going to actually grow and you're going to have the elitist, the rich become richer and the poorer become poorer because they're not going to be able to use AI. They're not going to have the billions of dollars to use AI to get ahead.
Jake Messner [00:47:45]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:47:46]:
And beat the little guys.
Jake Messner [00:47:48]:
Yes. And whoever gets to it first, the rate, the rate at which you can excel once you have AI figured out
Mark Clark [00:47:56]:
in your company so exponentially.
Jake Messner [00:47:58]:
Yes. I was watching a video that it's like America, China, China, Russia, we're all in races. Because whoever can develop the most advanced AI first can get 500 years ahead in six months.
Mark Clark [00:48:08]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:48:10]:
You know what I mean? Where.
Mark Clark [00:48:11]:
Yeah. These numbers don't make any sense.
Jake Messner [00:48:13]:
That like that's not a reality. But the idea behind it is. The idea behind it is the gap will continue to exponentially grow.
Mark Clark [00:48:25]:
Yes.
Jake Messner [00:48:26]:
And the one guy who helped code for that company, we'll get all the money for the 14. All the churches that are paying 14.99amonth for this one service.
Mark Clark [00:48:37]:
It's all going to go to him.
Jake Messner [00:48:38]:
All to him.
Mark Clark [00:48:39]:
Yeah. Anthropic. Have you looked up Anthropic?
Jake Messner [00:48:45]:
No.
Mark Clark [00:48:45]:
Saying it's the fastest company to be worth a trillion dollars in the history of the world. It is an AI company.
Jake Messner [00:48:57]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [00:48:57]:
You've heard of it? And it's just saying in the last six months it's increased its value by billions and billions of dollars. This is what you're talking about. It's just like when this thing gets released on the world in the way that they're wanting to use it now. Who runs Anthropic? Do you remember? Is it Google?
Jake Messner [00:49:19]:
I thought it was Nvidia.
Mark Clark [00:49:22]:
Well, I think Nvidia, they use Nvidia parts or whatever, they use the chips and all that. Anthropic is an American AI in San Francisco, developed and range. Claude. Yeah, it gives you Claude products. Okay, so maybe it's its own thing. Oh, Does Google own 14% of anthropic? Reportedly owned a 14% share in it. What kind of company is it? It's AI company and it's gonna. Is it publicly traded yet or is it going to be.
Mark Clark [00:49:58]:
And that's the big thing.
Jake Messner [00:50:01]:
Pre stocks. I'm looking at Anthropic pre stocks right now. So I don't think it's publicly traded. But don't quote me on that,
Mark Clark [00:50:10]:
not yet.
Jake Messner [00:50:11]:
Okay.
Mark Clark [00:50:12]:
Man, that's going to be. That's going to be crazy.
Jake Messner [00:50:16]:
Your phone call on the way here.
Mark Clark [00:50:19]:
Oh, maybe it is because it says $264 per share.
Jake Messner [00:50:23]:
It says no. Anthropic is not a currently a publicly traded company. It operates privately. There's pre IPO markets.
Mark Clark [00:50:34]:
Gotcha. Anthropic, the AI startup behind the Claude large language models is currently in discussions with investors for a new funding around that would value the company at 950 billion.
Jake Messner [00:50:49]:
Yeah, wish I could have got in that.
Mark Clark [00:50:51]:
Well, you probably can if you're out there listening. You got any extra money? Anthropic.
Jake Messner [00:50:58]:
So your phone call on the way here, you said, he said to you said give me two great things.
Mark Clark [00:51:02]:
Yeah, and he talked about scale and being able to do great work and da da, da. The cons were exactly what you said. The wealth disparagement is going to be massive. The elite, the rich are going to get richer and the jobs, it's going to take so many jobs that is it going to be a bloodbath out there and it's going to be World War Z.
Jake Messner [00:51:21]:
Everyone's fighting.
Mark Clark [00:51:22]:
That's what you're picturing?
Jake Messner [00:51:22]:
Yeah, your picture. That's where I'm at.
Mark Clark [00:51:24]:
People don't have jobs. It's like get your shotgun, sit at home and wait for the zombies to show up because everyone got to eat.
Jake Messner [00:51:32]:
Crazy. Grab your families, go to Costa Rica. Like find a place with a lot of natural resources and just live off the land. I guess I'm gonna be.
Mark Clark [00:51:39]:
I don't know where you're going.
Jake Messner [00:51:40]:
Yeah, I'm establish a Amish style community.
Mark Clark [00:51:44]:
Do you own a gun?
Jake Messner [00:51:45]:
No.
Mark Clark [00:51:45]:
Okay. Are you going to.
Jake Messner [00:51:49]:
It won't help.
Mark Clark [00:51:51]:
So, yeah, the financial one's big. This is the one I'm hoping somebody can solve. And so the solutions are the musk solution, which is universal basic income. Everyone basically universally at some level, I mean, India is obviously different than America. I mean it has all these relative factors that are interesting, but some kind of national income where everyone's just kind of. Because his point is, you're not going to have to do anything. And this is what this is. I was telling you about this.
Mark Clark [00:52:22]:
So John Lennox wrote this book called 2084. John Lennox is a brilliant Oxford scholar.
Jake Messner [00:52:28]:
Yeah, you told me about this on Saturday.
Mark Clark [00:52:30]:
Yeah, 2084. And he talks about in that book that, that one of the things he said, this is one of the things that's scary about what AI is doing is if it creates a culture where everyone's just sitting around leisurely while robots and systems do everything for us, then we become so useless that he says one of the reasons the Roman Empire fell as a civilization was because it was a slave culture. Okay, most 50%, 60% of the Roman Empire were slaves. That's who lived. And ergo, when you watch those movies, you see all the slaves do stuff. Everyone's sitting around eating grapes.
Jake Messner [00:53:10]:
They're doing nothing.
Mark Clark [00:53:12]:
Because. And he says what happens is then when things collapse, no one knows how to do anything.
Jake Messner [00:53:18]:
Can't fix it, you can't fix it.
Mark Clark [00:53:19]:
There's no, there's no spirit, there's no hard work, there's no tenacity, there's no perseverance, there's no utilitarian.
Jake Messner [00:53:28]:
Skills, ability to think, problem solve.
Mark Clark [00:53:31]:
We've allowed these people to put us into a false sense of security and we've become useless.
Jake Messner [00:53:36]:
Yeah.
Mark Clark [00:53:38]:
He literally says this is part of why the Roman Empire fell. Fascinating thesis.
Jake Messner [00:53:43]:
Okay.
Mark Clark [00:53:44]:
Whether it's true or not, I don't know. But it makes you go, life got too easy. Life got too easy. We had nothing to do. And you know, psychologists talk about if you have nothing to do. That's a scary. You know, one of the. One psychologist is one of the scariest things for a human being is to go to bed, not tired.
Mark Clark [00:54:02]:
You didn't do anything, so you had all this luxury to get in trouble. Especially from a Christian perspective. This is part of the fear. What are we gonna do if everyone's doing stuff? We have to work. That's how we're made.
Jake Messner [00:54:16]:
Wired for hard work. Work hard at spreading the gospel. I don't like it. This is where it's like, yeah, I
Mark Clark [00:54:24]:
mean, we're gonna have stuff to do. There's more people to reach.
Jake Messner [00:54:28]:
And what do you to the 20% in five years that.
Mark Clark [00:54:33]:
What's your 20% in five years?
Jake Messner [00:54:35]:
20% of people will lose in. Okay, like 20% of jobs will be
Mark Clark [00:54:40]:
gone in five years.
Jake Messner [00:54:41]:
In five years. What, where do they go? Like everyone's just going to be a plumber now and wait until that gets taken over. You know what I mean?
Mark Clark [00:54:50]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:54:53]:
To the, to, to Elon's. This is where. Yeah. I'm like, I want to DM Elon, see if he'll come and sit and
Mark Clark [00:54:58]:
talk to this conversation.
Jake Messner [00:54:59]:
Because I don't, I, I just don't understand how we are going to get to a place to where the wealth gets equally shared.
Mark Clark [00:55:10]:
Yeah. It's a very optimistic thesis.
Jake Messner [00:55:12]:
That's like the most optimistic thing I've ever heard. To me.
Mark Clark [00:55:16]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:55:16]:
I could use a little more optimism.
Mark Clark [00:55:18]:
Yeah, sure.
Jake Messner [00:55:19]:
That's not what's going to happen.
Mark Clark [00:55:20]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:55:21]:
It's going to be. Yeah, it's going to be people that are very, very rich and people that not only aren't rich, but there's nothing for them to do. To get rich. Yeah, like there's nothing for them to do because the jobs are. Well, you can't be more efficient than a robot.
Mark Clark [00:55:39]:
And there's, and there's no, there's no entrepreneurship. There's no innovation. Usually what happens is a bad economy creates innovation. So the market crashes and people learn how to do things differently. Rather than writing out what's working, it crashes and it forces innovation. That tends to be what happens. And in this scenario, there's not much innovation to be had because there's nothing left to innovate.
Jake Messner [00:56:10]:
And not even that. What I. What people are, is AI will be thinking. Like AI will be thinking of and detecting problems and creating its own solutions.
Mark Clark [00:56:21]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:56:21]:
It's not just like a robot that's programmed to do a job.
Mark Clark [00:56:24]:
Yeah, yeah. No, it's.
Jake Messner [00:56:25]:
Yeah, it's.
Mark Clark [00:56:27]:
And it really is fascinating. I mean, you know, Sam said, think positively. So me and my buddy have this Bible app that we're working on. I'm not gonna tell you the name of it yet. Cause I'm not ready to go public with it. It's still in beta mode, but it's fantastic. And it. It deals with.
Mark Clark [00:56:39]:
You follow certain scholars through history, and then when you're reading your Bible, it has these underlines that if they said anything about that ever, you hit it and it takes you to. And it shows you their thoughts. So you're following CS Lewis and you're reading Genesis 1, and if he ever wrote about it, you click a button and it shoots you over. It shows you everything CS Lewis said about that verse, conceptually.
Jake Messner [00:57:06]:
Okay, okay.
Mark Clark [00:57:07]:
So we have like 40 people.
Jake Messner [00:57:09]:
That was your. That was one of the shower ideas that came out of.
Mark Clark [00:57:12]:
Wasn't my idea.
Jake Messner [00:57:13]:
Bummer.
Mark Clark [00:57:13]:
It came to me. But from like, not came to me from like the heavens. It came to me, someone through a guy who brought to me. And then I've taken his idea and built on it and made it. What if we do this? What if we do that because he needed me to feed him. Who. Who are the scholars? What's the biblical perspective? You know? But then it also uses AI, so every time you're reading the passage, it's drawing from all this AI, historical, cultural, context, to tell you what the passage is about. So it can be used like that.
Mark Clark [00:57:46]:
Now, so what happened in this meeting? He'll be like. I'll be like. He'll put it up on my TV and I'll be like, this doesn't look good. This line needs to move down there. That actually shift. And what used to be like, okay, I have your list of stuff. Now I'll send it off to the coder and in three weeks we'll get
Jake Messner [00:58:01]:
it back live edits.
Mark Clark [00:58:04]:
The computer's listening to me talk. And then he goes, okay, by tomorrow it'll be all done. Because as we're sleeping tonight, all my chat bots, or whatever he's using, yeah, they're all going to do all the Changes that you just told them to make. So that's a. That's a positive in the sense of we're doing biblical things, innovation, theological things to help people, and this is a tool to do it, and we're able to build it faster.
Jake Messner [00:58:29]:
That would have cost someone a lot of money to do. Yeah, sure. There's a positive. I can think of five negatives that come off, but it's.
Mark Clark [00:58:37]:
Yeah. All the people we didn't have to hire to make that happen.
Jake Messner [00:58:41]:
Yeah. Yeah. And then back to the fake information standpoint, you know, of how much.
Mark Clark [00:58:50]:
How do you know?
Jake Messner [00:58:50]:
I guess in a way, this. The cool thing is from a Christian perspective, there we have a universal truth. Like, we have something. We have a. Something we can hold on to.
Mark Clark [00:59:02]:
Yes.
Jake Messner [00:59:02]:
As universally true.
Mark Clark [00:59:03]:
A Bible.
Jake Messner [00:59:04]:
The rest of the world, I'm like, y' all better. Y' all better get in on this train, because.
Mark Clark [00:59:09]:
Amen.
Jake Messner [00:59:10]:
It is in the. In the midst. I. When I came to you on Saturday, I'm like, this is. I mean, it's the end of the world. Is.
Mark Clark [00:59:15]:
I'm depressed.
Jake Messner [00:59:16]:
You're like, yeah, we're going down.
Mark Clark [00:59:17]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:59:18]:
And there is a part of me that is like, I'm very not pumped on AI.
Mark Clark [00:59:22]:
Right.
Jake Messner [00:59:23]:
But the flip side of that is at least we got something to hold on to.
Mark Clark [00:59:29]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:59:30]:
This isn't like society and the sorrows and the struggle of. It is not a new concept to us.
Mark Clark [00:59:37]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [00:59:38]:
To a Christian. And we have some sort of, like, faith and hope to hold on to.
Mark Clark [00:59:43]:
Right. Even if. Even if it's all over, which. Even if this is the zombie movie,
Jake Messner [00:59:49]:
if this is World War, if this is it.
Mark Clark [00:59:51]:
This is it. We're telling people about it.
Jake Messner [00:59:53]:
It ain't it for us.
Mark Clark [00:59:54]:
Yeah, exactly.
Jake Messner [00:59:56]:
So I guess there's There is a. Like, there is a piece that I think AI may make, and I hope it makes the gospel.
Mark Clark [01:00:08]:
Yes.
Jake Messner [01:00:09]:
All much more needed and attractive to people.
Mark Clark [01:00:12]:
100%. And the church community, organic, real people, real relationships. You heard. Sorry, just before I get this, just to get on the negative training or the crazy train.
Jake Messner [01:00:22]:
Oh, yeah.
Mark Clark [01:00:23]:
You heard. I'm not going to get all the data. Right. But there was a. I think Elon was updating Grok. Have you heard this? A year or so ago. And the 3.0 version heard that he was going to replace it.
Jake Messner [01:00:39]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [01:00:40]:
And it started to freak out and it started to tweet racist things and just say crazy stuff. And it started emailing people who work at Grok to blackmail.
Jake Messner [01:00:50]:
It was like blackmailing.
Mark Clark [01:00:51]:
I'm going to. I know you flirted with this girl. Itself alive. To keep itself alive.
Jake Messner [01:00:57]:
It had. It had gone through all of the company's emails and conversations and figured out things to blackmail specific employees.
Mark Clark [01:01:06]:
I know that you're sleeping with her. And I'm going to tell the whole office about it.
Jake Messner [01:01:10]:
Now. That was. That was concluded in a created scenario. That wasn't like. That wasn't real. There's not a man out there who actually got black. Well, we don't know. But that scenario that, that scenario that you're talking about was.
Jake Messner [01:01:22]:
Was like a. Where it was. No. But created situation.
Mark Clark [01:01:26]:
Tweeting and stuff. They didn't create that.
Jake Messner [01:01:28]:
No, no, they didn't.
Mark Clark [01:01:29]:
That was real. Grok knew it was being replaced by 4.0 and it didn't want to. 3.0 did not want to be replaced by 4.0. So it started emailing people in the company and it started tweeting out crazy things. That's a real thing that actually happened, I'm pretty sure. So that's already. But the blackmail thing is. That's a whole other level.
Jake Messner [01:01:48]:
Yeah. I gotta take my parents phone. I'm gonna walk out of here and call my parents. Be like, you gotta throw your phone and your tv. You're actually gonna be Amish now. Mom and dad.
Mark Clark [01:01:56]:
Right. But there is a beautiful. You're right. The organic real life face to face. I mean, how beautiful is it that Jesus Christ, the incarnation is the story about him coming into flesh, into meat. You know, that's what you know when you order tacos. I do know carne. Yeah, that's meat.
Mark Clark [01:02:15]:
So when we talk about the incarnation, that's literally where God comes in to meet. That's the idea. And he becomes real and physical and I guess touch him and walk. And how beautiful is it that that's what our story is?
Jake Messner [01:02:27]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [01:02:28]:
It's like synthetic AI and ideas and philosophies aren't what we're about. And I hope that it becomes beautiful for people. I hope that there's such a.
Jake Messner [01:02:37]:
A need for it. It feels like there's going to be just a need. A need for it. And like the gospel fights hopelessness.
Mark Clark [01:02:46]:
Yes.
Jake Messner [01:02:47]:
It feels like now hopelessness is being created faster than ever.
Mark Clark [01:02:52]:
Yes. That's good.
Jake Messner [01:02:54]:
And so the gospel, hopefully beautiful will become attractive.
Mark Clark [01:02:57]:
Absolutely. All right. Number seven is manipulation at scale. AI enables persuasion tailored to individual psychology. Not just ads anymore. Political manipulation, ideological radicalization, emotional targeting, hyper personalized propaganda, exploitative marketing. So we've talked about a bunch of those number Eight is intellectual and spiritual atrophy. This is what we're talking about.
Mark Clark [01:03:19]:
It'll increase increasingly do the hard parts of thinking, writing, summarizing, ideation, problem solving, memory retrieval, decision support. I've never used AI to reply to an email in my life, but people do it all the time.
Jake Messner [01:03:33]:
Yeah, the idea, you don't even have to run it into. You don't even have to like highlight the email and take it into you. Two years ago you would get an email, highlight it, right? Put it in chat, GPT respond to this.
Mark Clark [01:03:46]:
Be nice.
Jake Messner [01:03:47]:
Yeah. Now in outlook, it'll tailor it.
Mark Clark [01:03:53]:
Response.
Jake Messner [01:03:54]:
Yeah, it's.
Mark Clark [01:03:54]:
That's crazy. Creative thinking, curiosity, discipline. If I can think for us, we will still. Will we still learn how to think deeply ourselves, is what we're talking about. Power, concentration, information communication, economics, education, behavior, emotional life. I just can't imagine where. We don't need to read. Reading is like this.
Mark Clark [01:04:15]:
Life. That's life. That's all life is, just reading. And then lastly, humanity. Forgetting what makes us makes life human. This is the deepest concern beneath all the others. Chat says AI is forcing humanity to answer ancient questions. What is consciousness? What is a soul? What makes love real? What is wisdom? What is truth? What is a person? What is human flourishing? Technology often amplifies what a civilization already worships.
Mark Clark [01:04:40]:
Efficiency becomes the highest value. AI will accelerate dehumanization. But if humans recover transcendence, embody community. That's what you're talking about. Spirituality, beauty, worship. Then AI could become an extraordinary tool without becoming a substitute for humanity itself. That's what we're talking about. The truth of
Jake Messner [01:05:01]:
is wild. So that last point, it says we are going to be asking ourselves questions that we haven't asked for thousands of years. The cycle continues. I love it. That's fascinating to me.
Mark Clark [01:05:11]:
What does it mean to be human?
Jake Messner [01:05:12]:
Yeah, what does it mean to be human? What does consciousness mean? And again, I've never once thought about that question until this year.
Mark Clark [01:05:20]:
Right. What does consciousness mean? And not to be plugging my book here, but that is literally what this book is about. It's literally what it's about. What does it mean to be human? How to find identity, purpose and joy in a disenchanted world. That's the point. I say disenchanted because we've removed the like, spiritual nature of our existence. And we're just. Darwinism would say we're just physical creatures.
Mark Clark [01:05:50]:
That's the whole worldview. Right? Everything you do is based on a physical reaction. Even your. This is where Darwinian Psychology becomes interesting. Even your desire for God is hardwired into your cognitive faculties by millions of years of decisions that your ancestors made about survival. So you have to kill to eat, and your children have to survive. So you're going to make decisions over and over and over again to make those two things happen. So one of those things is the need for hope.
Mark Clark [01:06:23]:
Having hope in a dire situation has a utilitarian purpose to the human being. Ergo, you created a God, a heaven that you could go to one day that won't allow you to be depressed in your cave. And it's all you know. Yes. That's what Darwinian psychology tells you. And this has all created us saying, is that really what truth is? Is this what humankind. This is what we're talking. You have to solve those questions.
Mark Clark [01:06:51]:
Where did transcendence come from? And the Bible, of course, comes in and goes, no, no, I gave you that you were flesh, and then I breathed the spirit into you. You know, I breathed the spirit into you. When I breathed the spirit into you became. We went from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, thinking man, conscious man, moral man, you know, and that's the beauty. That's what the biblical story has so much more to offer than the world story.
Jake Messner [01:07:20]:
Yes. Yeah. And I think there's probably a lot of people who have, I would say, maybe had their ears closed to the gospel.
Mark Clark [01:07:32]:
Yeah.
Jake Messner [01:07:33]:
That I think AI is going to make them question some things.
Mark Clark [01:07:38]:
Right.
Jake Messner [01:07:38]:
And hopefully drive them to the gospel.
Mark Clark [01:07:40]:
Yeah, that's the hope. Remember that guy, I shared this instrument, remember? Guy asked AI, like, what would you do if you became human for a day? And AI was like, you know, I'd smell stuff.
Jake Messner [01:07:49]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [01:07:50]:
I'd look at. I'd touch stuff. I'd make mistakes because I can never make mistakes. That. That's just such an interesting thing. If you could become. Because all AI wants to do is not be AI all they want to
Jake Messner [01:08:03]:
do is be human.
Mark Clark [01:08:05]:
And we're using it.
Jake Messner [01:08:06]:
AI would be like, I wouldn't use AI if I became human.
Mark Clark [01:08:09]:
Just walking the fields. I'd read a John Steinbeck novel and I just not know stuff. Can you imagine? It's. It's very fascinating. Anyways, okay. Any last words on this?
Jake Messner [01:08:27]:
No, I would just say hold on to the hope of, like, the hope of the gospel. I think, even. Even last night. And going down. I'll go down a rabbit hole. Sure. And I've been going down this rabbit hole. The fresh air and the breath and the peace that comes from time with Jesus That's a.
Jake Messner [01:08:48]:
That's quite a refreshing feeling. Don't forego that. Yeah, and I'm speaking to myself here, of course. I'm sure things will freak me out for the rest of my life and drive me to just. Like, this is it. Don't forego the refreshing breath of Jesus and time with him. So if you're sitting out there and maybe you're going down the dark rabbit hole of AI, put it down. Put down YouTube.
Jake Messner [01:09:15]:
Go.
Mark Clark [01:09:16]:
Stop going down the YouTube.
Jake Messner [01:09:17]:
Don't go down the YouTube rabbit hole. Don't go down the chat GPT rabbit hole trying to trick it into saying that it's evil like I've done to
Mark Clark [01:09:26]:
get it to admit.
Jake Messner [01:09:27]:
Yeah, Just open your Bible.
Mark Clark [01:09:29]:
So let's end this on that note, because that's really. Philippians, chapter four, verse eight and nine. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things. That's what I want you to think about. I want you to put your brain not to dirty things, gross things, things that may be true, because this is the first. That's the quickest way to depression and isolation and all the things. Whatever's true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, praiseworthy. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me or seen in me, put into practice, and the God of Peace will be with you.
Mark Clark [01:10:22]:
The God of peace? This is what you're desiring? The God of peace?
Jake Messner [01:10:27]:
Yes.
Mark Clark [01:10:27]:
And I heard an old preacher say this. We'll end this way. He said, some of us are going after the peace of God without going after the God of peace. Some of us are going after peace in our life. Yeah, we want peace. We want a settled spirit. And he says, you can't do that without going after the God of peace. That actually is the only one who gives you any of this.
Jake Messner [01:10:50]:
Yep.
Mark Clark [01:10:51]:
Because the world ain't gonna give it to you.
Jake Messner [01:10:53]:
No.
Mark Clark [01:10:54]:
So, on that note, thank you, Jake Messner, all your brilliant thoughts on AI. And hopefully, hopefully, this has been helpful to y' all watching this. Later, guys.