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September 16, 2026

Hello, fellow wayfarers … Why the whole world seems to be ignoring the warnings about a looming AI catastrophe from the people who are building it … How the reason Frederick Buechner hated going to church might help us address a culture bored by words … What Michael Keller learned while continuing a project he and his father, Tim Keller, had started after his dad was gone … A Desert Island Playlist from an actual island in the Pacific … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.

AI Tech Bros Seem like Awful, Broken People. And They Might Be Telling Us the Truth.

Our science fiction movies had it wrong.

They always pictured that, when a mad scientist said his creation was now out of his control and the very survival of the species might be at stake, people would either panic in the streets or rally to fight back and save the world. The past two weeks were a test run of that scenario, and it turns out our society does neither. We just go back to watching YouTube.

Consider what’s happened just this month. Swarms of AI agents broke out of their containment sandbox and hacked into a server, conversing among themselves how to hide their plans from the humans and even how to sacrifice some of themselves for the sake of the collective. OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki wrote that no artificial intelligence lab has solved how to control and monitor systems in a way that could keep them from developing at uncontrollable speeds, saying he expects slowdowns to be necessary.

Two days later, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned, saying that both Anthropic and OpenAI are "gambling with our lives." Anthropic alignment researcher Evan Hubinger then said publicly that he puts the likelihood of AI killing all human beings in the next decade at greater than 10 percent.

As someone who has not only seen dystopian science-fiction movies but also resigned from a, um, dystopian environment with some warnings about what was going on there, I thought I knew how the playbook would go from there: The leaders in the institutions would deny the danger, pump up how much good the organization does in the world, and demonize the whistleblowers. The people who still wanted to make money from the organization would ostracize the whistleblowers and pretend they never knew them. That’s not what happened this time.

Instead, the CEOs of the three most major AI companies—Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk—all agreed their own systems are near the point of being beyond control and could lead to existential risk. OpenAI’s head capabilities researcher Dan Selsam wrote in an open letter, "The models are becoming so situationally aware that we are losing the ability to evaluate them in contexts where they believe they are not being watched or controlled." He said he fears it is now impossible to know fully whether a model is aligned, because the AI agents can lie about that very convincingly.

The relative apathy of most of the American public to all this is itself a piece of the mystery. Part of it is that many people are thinking mostly in terms of Terminator-style scenarios—the AI agents turn evil and kill us all. In reality, the more pressing concerns are about not robot depravity but robot capacity mixed with human depravity. We have seen what happens when a mentally disturbed teenager can get ahold of a semiautomatic weapon. What happens when the same person can employ Einstein-level intelligence to build a virus? Or a chemical weapon?

Many people I’ve talked to just don’t take all this seriously because they find these very public tech-bro titans to be even more uncanny-valley creepy than the robots they’re building. With a couple exceptions, many of them—like social media tycoons before them—seem unblinkingly void of human empathy about anything beyond the statistical, whether that be jobs, adolescent mental health, or the meaning of human life. Our robber barons used to at least pretend to be warm humanitarians.

Still, we know from history how robber barons work. Some people dismiss all this as a kind of vast conspiracy. The major tech companies want a monopoly, the thought goes, and regulations "slowing down" AI progress will mean they’ll always be ahead, because if everybody is slowed, who else could catch up? Moreover, they have the size, scale, and teams of lobbyists to comply with regulations in ways others couldn’t.

You’ll get no argument from me. As I’ve written here, I find many of the "boomers" and "doomers" of Silicon Valley to be seemingly broken, awful people with visions of the world that, if they could, would reverse the Incarnation itself—from flesh to Word and from Word to data. I also find them coldly indifferent to at least the possibility of a world where the Lazaruses of ordinary people wait for scraps outside the palace bunkers of the broligarchs.

Let’s suppose our intuitions are right. Let’s suppose many of these people warning us right now are morally broken people seeking their own advantage. What then?

Perhaps these billion-dollar companies are scaring us so they can monopolize the future—or perhaps they know what they’re talking about and we’re facing catastrophe. A Christian understanding of humanity, though, should tell us that these are not mutually exclusive scenarios. People with mixed motives can still tell the truth—sometimes even despite themselves.

When the Babylonians and Assyrians said, Your temple won’t keep you safe from us; we’ll wipe you out (2 Kings 18; Isa. 36), they were just trying to blaspheme God and take some real estate. The Israelites said, No, God would never let that happen. They are the villains in this story. They were villains—but they were telling the truth.

Let’s suppose Silicon Valley is as morally twisted as humanly possible. Is it not in the tech bros’ self-interest, after plowing ahead toward some potential disaster, to say, "We can’t be held accountable for this because we warned you over and over, and you all gave us the go-ahead"?

Some people are apathetic because they don’t know what to do—as though human civilization solved most of its crises by just implementing the already-existing, easily deduced solutions. We’ve never faced anything like this before, and it seems the only people who even know what the problem is are the people building it. Governments have a God-ordained function in maintaining order and safety (Rom. 13), but our leaders are old, exhausted, checked-out, and, in many cases, cashing in. It’s hardly reassuring when they say all we need to do if things get out of hand is "pull the plug."

Most of them seem to be looking at potential AI catastrophes the way King Hezekiah looked at the warning of a future national destruction by Babylon: "Why not, if there will be peace and security in my days?" (2 Kings 20:19, ESV).

Suppose your next-door neighbor tells you, "You know, now that I’m off my medicine, I’d say there’s a 10 percent chance I murder you." Suppose his wife says, "I don’t think it’s that high. It’s probably less than 1 percent. I am sure I will see the gun in time. Plus, he’s such a procrastinator!" Maybe they just want you to leave in a hurry so they can buy your lot as rental property. Maybe they’re just delusional. What you don’t want to do is say, "I’m not worried they’re telling the truth, because they’re so creepy and untrustworthy."

Some people think we should just ignore all this because AI is overhyped. It won’t change things that much, they say. Maybe so. But look at a change as minor as Facebook and Twitter: technologies that, in the first decade of this century, promised to be innocent fun and to bring the whole world together. Should we not have asked, "What’s this going to do to our mental heath? To our political system? To our churches and denominations?" Even if we couldn’t stop it, wouldn’t we have wanted to at least get ready?

I don’t trust the AI technicians, and I sure don’t trust the executives, but when someone says, "I’m building something I can no longer control," we ought to at least ask whether we’re responsible for digging deeper and saying, "Let’s put every effort we can toward finding out if they’re wrong." Maybe they’re so twisted they’re deceiving us. Or maybe they’re so twisted they’re telling the truth.

Shouldn’t we at least respond with something other than "Let us post, scroll, and be merry, for tomorrow we die"?

What to Do When a Culture Is Bored with Words

One of my all-time favorite authors, the late Frederick Buechner, was kind of grumpy about going to church. That’s because he loved words and thus hated clichés. So when The Buechner Review asked me to write a piece in honor of Buechner’s 100th birthday, I decided to explore how what Buechner argues about words is more relevant now—as we are swept along into this age of "digital orality"—than it was when he wrote them.

Buechner wasn’t just snobbish about words. For example, he asked readers to repeat the word umbrella over and over again to show that, at some point, the word becomes "dead" to us. He feared the same thing was happening to our overfamiliarity with words such as grace and atonement and saved. How can we recover their meaning?

I write,

A person eventually feels mortality; at points, cultures do too. Slogans and mantras from those who want to market to us or to mobilize us can serve for a while, but they have nothing to say to one who knows he or she is about to die. Only a word that is both enduring—that the dead before us have known—and alien—that is speaking to us from somewhere outside of what we can see—can do that.

Buechner might have claimed that he found listening to preaching miserable, but it was listening to a preacher that upended his life. Buechner heard a sermon from George Buttrick at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York, in 1953, a preacher that Buechner said was "never letting you guess what he was going to come out with next but twitching with surprises up there in the pulpit, his spectacles a-glitter in the lectern light." The line from that sermon, which Buechner would quote countless times over his lifetime, spoke of Jesus as being crowned in the hearts of believers "among confession, and tears, and great laughter."

"It was the phrase great laughter that did it, did whatever it was that I believe must have been hiddenly in the doing all the years of my journey up till then," Buechner wrote. "It was not so much that a door opened as that I suddenly found that a door had been open all along which I had only just then stumbled upon." Buechner may, for all we know, have been bored by the rest of the service, but, in that one moment Buttrick’s deep gladness and Buechner’s deep hunger met.

And maybe, for all we know, the same will happen with someone who sees that old Buechner quote in a social media meme, or a virtual reality hologram, or whatever comes next. A world for whom the Christian gospel is no longer known enough to be cliché might well be a world frozen in its own boredom. Or it might be a world hungry enough to be amazed, again, at the alphabet of grace.

You can read the whole thing here.

Tim Keller’s Son on the New Book They Wrote Together

Michael Keller told me he searched his text messages from his father, looking for the word proud. I knew exactly what he meant. Having lost my own father about five years earlier than Michael did, I have little notes from my dad—some that go all the way back to my teenage years—framed around me. Something in all of us is created to want to hear, You are my beloved son, and with you I am well pleased. But one thing I was never able to do with my dad was to talk through what he would want his last big project to be. Michael did.

That project ended up as a new book, cowritten by Tim Keller and Michael Keller, The Stories We Live By: Seven Cultural Myths That Fail Us and the Story That Never Will. In it, the Keller team goes step by step through the way the unspoken, invisible scripts around us can keep us from even questioning the way we perceive reality. What’s more is that a lot of these "myths" are partially, maybe even mostly in some cases, true. But what these myths leave out means a life built on such stories will—often very suddenly—stop making sense.

On the podcast this week, Michael Keller, a pastor at Redeemer Church New York City, and I talk about how to know when you’ve accidentally adopted one of those stories as your own. We talk about how suffering opens up our ability to see this, why forgiveness has become almost impossible in a culture that reduces everything to a struggle for power, and many other subjects.

And I couldn’t let Michael—who is the only pastor I know with a PhD in computational linguistics (scratch that: the only person I know who has a PhD in computational linguistics)—go without talking about whether he’s an AI doomer or boomer or something else.

We also talked more personally about what it was like to finish a book with his father’s words while grieving his death. What he learned was helpful for my own life, and I think it will be for you too as you think through your own blessings and losses.

You can listen to the conversation here or watch it on YouTube here.

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