Sept 17, 2026 Show with C. R. Wiley on “Surviving the A. I. Apocalypse”

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Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on the 17th day of September 2026.

And if you watch TV, especially news-related programs, and if you're on the internet every day, well, you no doubt have been consumed with the concept and the topic of artificial intelligence known as AI.

Some have nothing but eager enthusiasm and optimism about this development in technology. Others are in a fetal position on the floor, terrified about the upcoming apocalypse that artificial intelligence will bring upon society.

Introducing C. R. Wiley and the AI Apocalypse

Well, today we're going to have a guest discuss AI, and this is a returning guest to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, C .R. Wiley, pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Battleground Washington, which is a congregation in the Presbyterian Church in America, also known as the PCA, and the author of many books.

And today we are going to be discussing the theme of his most recent book, St. Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse. And that is actually the subtitle. The title of the book is Man-Made. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, C .R. Wiley.

Well, thanks, Chris. It's great to be with you again. I've enjoyed my times with you in the past.

Yeah, I've enjoyed every occasion you've been on the show. Well, first of all, tell us about First Presbyterian Church of Battleground Washington.

Well, you noted we're in Battleground, and that's just a little north of Portland. The Portland Airport, Portland, Oregon Airport is about half hour from my house. So we're here in the Pacific Northwest, and the church is growing, and really a marvelous bunch of folks.

I'm very honored and happy to be here. And anyway, like you said, if folks are in the area, we'd love to have you visit.

And the website, for those of you interested in finding out more about First Presbyterian Church of Battleground Washington, is firstpresbg .org. Firstpresbg .org, and we'll repeat that later on in the program.

St. Anthony, Transhumanism, and Competing Eschatologies

Well, as a former Roman Catholic, I must say that I jolted in my seat when I saw the title or the subtitle of your book, St. Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse. It conjured up memories of being in Roman Catholic parochial school as the nuns would in their typical idolatrous and superstitious fashion, whenever an object of theirs was lost, whether it be the keys to their closet or their blackboard eraser or whatever it was they were looking for, they would have the classroom chant over and over again, Dear St. Anthony, please come around, something is lost and can't be found.

And we would repeat that until the object was found. And so, obviously, my first question has to be with you, explain that title, or as Desi Arnaz used to say, you got some explaining to do.

Well, the first thing to note is that St. Anthony lived a long time ago before those nuns developed that chant. He was a person that Athanasius of Alexandria and Augustine both had a great deal of respect for.

And Presbyterians, Reformed people have a great deal of respect for Athanasius and Augustine. So, that's one thing in his favor. But the thing that brought him to mind didn't have to do with that necessarily.

It had to do more with transhumanism and what's going on in Silicon Valley, believe it or not. So, a few years back, I saw a documentary entitled Transcendent Man, which was a documentary about Ray Kurzweil.

I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he is a transhumanist and believes that artificial intelligence is going to help him beat death and do other remarkable things. And so, the idea that is behind transhumanism is that technological means we can have an ever-increasing set of improvements that we can more or less engineer for human beings using advances in biotechnology and, well, artificial intelligence, computer technology and so forth.

And the combination of these things more or less create an alternative eschatology for secular people. And it's not even clandestine. It's very explicit with certain people. So, for example, Brian Johnson, the guy that's famous for the Don't Die statement, he's the founder of Venmo, which is a very important cash-sharing app that people can have on their phones.

Anyway, he is a former Mormon, but he's been trying to essentially hack his body so that he can beat death. And when he was asked by someone over at the Free Press, I'm trying to remember her name, but anyway, he still believed in God.

He just kind of laughed and said, well, I don't believe, and this is a paraphrase, in the God we've been told about in the past, but we're creating a God that will be the real thing. And so, he believes that this new God will be omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent.

And he's talking about essentially what's possible with artificial intelligence, creating something that's all those things. And so, all this stuff is going on. It's, like I said, not secret. If you just want to go ahead and look into it, you can find evidence for what I'm talking about all over the place.

But anyway, when I was thinking about these people, Kurzweil and Brian Johnson, it occurred to me that St. Anthony, Anthony of the Desert, was more or less the exact opposite of these guys in many respects.

But at the same time, he was looking forward to the glorification of his body because of the return of the Lord. And consequently, he believed in eternal life and he believed in the risen Lord and that we will be like him because we'll see him as he is.

He thought about all those things. And so, he was pursuing a kind of very rigorous project of mastering his own body. He wasn't a Gnostic. A lot of people like to cast aspersions upon people like Anthony after that.

We can criticize him for maybe doing something that, taking something to a point that he didn't need to take it. But basically, his fasting was intended to make his body his servant and his spirit and his body servants of the Lord.

So, that was what he was up to. But anyway, so he came to mind as, like I said, the polar opposite in so many ways of these other people. They were hubris. He exemplified humility. But at the same time, he was looking forward to a future where his own body would be transformed by the Lord.

And so, consequently, the question is, do we believe that we can pull this off by technical means, kind of through human engineering, or do we trust the Lord and believe his promises and wait?

So, that's the idea. Now, it'd probably be helpful for you to give a working definition and explanation of what exactly artificial intelligence is, and to the best of your ability, so a layman can understand it, how it works.

Neural Networks, AlphaGo, and the Nature of Artificial Intelligence

Yeah. Well, the thing to note about it, it really is a breakthrough. This is not just traditional software taken to a higher level. This is a whole different approach to software development, something that is referred to as neural networks, which are intended to mimic the way our brains work.

So, the person who really pioneered this is named Geoffrey Hinton, and he won the Nobel Prize for developing these artificial neural networks that learn. So, that's the thing about artificial intelligence that distinguishes it from old-fashioned software.

Old-fashioned software relied on coding and the old saying, garbage in, garbage out. In other words, bad code produces bad output. That's not the way artificial intelligence works. Artificial intelligence works by strengthening connections in these neural networks and allowing others to atrophy.

Over time, the artificial intelligence grows more and more capable as it learns how to do something. So, a famous example of this would be AlphaGo, which was an artificial intelligence which learned to play the game Go, which is an oriental game from the Far East that goes back hundreds if not thousands of years.

It's very important to Eastern cultures, and they revere people who excel at it. It was believed that because it's even more complicated than chess, that a computer would never be able to beat first-class Go players.

Well, after allowing AlphaGo to learn to play Go over a period of time of trial and error, it defeated the world champion pretty handily. It did so by doing things that no one had ever seen before. In other words, it was creative in terms of how it went about winning.

There was a particular move in the game where people were puzzled by it because no one had ever seen anything like it. About 50 moves later, if I remember correctly, that particular move was instrumental to winning the game.

You're talking about something with a capacity in terms of memory and an ability to see patterns that far exceeds human abilities. And large language models, which is what most people are familiar with, those are the chatbots people use to do their homework for them or write their emails or whatever.

That's just one application of the technology. That's not the technology itself. So I think that's important to note. So there are problems with chatbots, and we could get into those. But the technology itself, it's a general purpose technology.

It's something that could be used for just about anything, including helping robots learn. So embodied AI is what that's referred to. So when we think about advances in robotics today with what robots can do that they just couldn't do 10 years ago, it's because of artificial intelligence.

AI Supremacy, China, and the Risks of Uncontrolled Development

Now, when watching conservative news and so on, especially Fox News, there seems to be a battle going on, at least what Fox News reveals, because they don't give the bigger picture of the broader spectrum of conservative ideology.

They typically are only giving the Donald Trump version of conservativism. And also they'll have left wing and liberal opponents to those ideas, but they don't have other ideas coming from conservatives typically on Fox News.

But the battle seems to be between conservatives, who have nothing but the highest optimism and joy over the developments in artificial intelligence, and the belief that we must aggressively continue to press on and, no holds barred, develop as much as we can in the expansion and use of AI.

And where you have the liberals, on the other hand, saying that there is danger involved, that there are technology and computer experts being interviewed, saying that we are opening ourselves up to the annihilation of humanity in the not-so-distant future.

I have not yet heard exactly how that is going to happen in their minds. Perhaps the igniting of a nuclear holocaust apart from human interaction. But when it comes to the conservative side, it seems the primary motivation is we can't let China win.

Now, as I said before, there is a larger spectrum of conservativism than your average person typically sees and hears. But even though we don't want China to dominate and take over any realm of humanity at all, at the same time, we can't have that as a motivation to press forward with reckless abandon either.

So, tell us about where you stand and why.

Well, I share some of those concerns about the future of the development of the technology. And many of the people that have been concerned about the technology kind of growing rogue have good reasons to think that.

Because the nature of the technology, as I noted before, there is a measure of independence and agency that the technology is capable of that we've never seen before with software. So, there was recent development with Tropic and something, there's a company called Hugging Face.

It's, I know, a goopy name for a company, but that's what it's called. Anyway, there were artificial intelligence agents, AI agents, which about 12 ,000 of them, I've been told, which broke out of the containment that had been developed by Anthropic to keep them under control and actually infiltrated this other company and hacked the website and got at things that they shouldn't have been able to get at.

So, that's the problem. You could say that the technology and artificial intelligence is like a car that you don't have direct control over, but has its own sort of internal controls. And you can set up guardrails with other software to keep it on the road, on, you know, the path you want it to take.

But just like a car, you know, it can get up to a certain rate of speed and break through the guardrail or just jump it or take a detour that you didn't expect it to take, you know, that kind of stuff.

Because the software really is capable of that kind of thing, and it does it, it does it repeatedly. And so, consequently, we're dealing with something that's very difficult to control. And when it comes to what's going on with China and the race with China, it really is believed by many people that AI supremacy is the key to ruling the world.

Because what you have with artificial intelligence is literally an ability to use the entire information, you know, economy to pursue, in other words, the digital economy, the digital realm, to pursue your political and social agenda.

So, consequently, because all that's in play, everybody is very worried about how this could all play out. Concerning how would you expect AI to wipe out the human race? By the way, the numbers that we've been given in terms of percentages and likelihood are actually from the experts.

This isn't people like me, Chris, sitting back and just speculating. These are the people who actually work with the stuff. So, and I know people in Silicon Valley personally who say, yes, this is the problem, this is literally what we're up against.

So, with all those things in mind, how would it do it? Well, that's the problem. Because it's creative, it could do the nuclear thing, but it could also do a lot of other things. Let's say it was able to help engineer a pathogen that could wipe out the entire human race.

You know, we had this issue with Wuhan and, you know, COVID and all that kind of stuff. Well, just think about something that's 10 times or 100 times more deadly. Well, that AI could develop that. So, that's the worry.

And we just don't know what it would do. You know, we could shut down the grid. Just say, okay, no power to anyone, that kind of stuff. So, there are just, you know, all these different ways it could play out.

In terms of my thoughts on how it should be dealt with, I've got mixed feelings. When it comes to regulatory capture, I'm concerned about the people who control the regs. And the people that are being sort of presented by these AI companies as good candidates for this belong to a particular outlook.

It's called effective altruism. And they're essentially utilitarians and kind of the spirit of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. And they would like to engineer society using artificial intelligence to produce the kind of world that they think would be great to have.

I don't trust those people. So, I'm not enthusiastic about those people regulating AI because it's not going to just be, you know, preventing AI from wiping us out. It's going to be, you know, AI being used to their agenda.

So, I've got real mixed feelings about the whole thing. And I could say that, you know, I don't trust artificial intelligence even though I think artificial intelligence is good for, really marvelous for a lot of things.

So, I'm not like anti-AI. What I'm concerned about is the impact on human beings when they use it. And that's what I get into mostly in my book. But I'm also, you know, I trust kind of the super like enthusiastic people for AI.

I trust them even less than I trust AI. And I trust the people who want to regulate artificial intelligence even less than those people. So, it's just sort of like, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, all the ways things could go wrong.

AI is certainly something I'm worried about. But I'm worried about these other people even more. And can you... I don't know. Go ahead. Well, I know that's not terribly comforting.

But that's where I am. Well, I mean, with the subtitle of your book, Surviving the AI Apocalypse, I didn't think that this was going to be necessarily a rosy conversation. But I don't know how much of that is tongue-in-cheek.

But perhaps you can explain that in a minute. Can you tell us about some of the benefits of AI? And I'm sure there are some developing that we don't even know about yet. But for those of our listeners who have nothing but pessimism and paranoia and fear of artificial intelligence, tell us about some of the positive and even wonderful things.

I know one off the top of my head. Someone just recently told me who's a missionary in some un-evangelized area that AI is helping to translate the scriptures into their language because it's never been done before.

But if you could explain some of the other ways. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that's a great example of a particular interest to Christians. But when we think about the best uses of artificial intelligence, I think they have to do with the sciences and with manufacturing, and particularly the development of new products and things like that.

And I think robotics has some really marvelous features that will make the lives of some people a lot better. So here's an example. It's concrete. We can look at it. We can evaluate it. There's something that was called AlphaFold.

AlphaFold was developed by the same company that created AlphaGo. But AlphaGo was just intended to win that game. AlphaFold was intended to identify all the ways proteins can fold. Now, that might not sound very interesting.

But when it comes to development of new medicines, therapies and so forth, it's really good to have a working knowledge of proteins, amino acids and so forth. And the ways they can fold are very complex and almost seemingly infinite.

And historically, it would take a doctoral candidate a year or more of research to identify how one way a protein could fold, because it's such an involved matter. Well, what they did is they took this AI, AlphaFold, and in the course of one year, just think about this, Chris, in one year, it identified 200 million ways that proteins can fold.

Now, what that means is that we have now a data set for developing new therapies and medicines that we didn't have before that could be really marvelous in terms of treating diseases and genital birth defects, all kinds of stuff.

So, you know, that's an example that most folks wouldn't be aware of, because most folks, as I noted earlier, their only exposure to AI is the chatbot that they use at work or something. But that's just one use of the technology.

So the technology can be used for, here, let me give you an example. So let's say we gave an AI the task of creating a new product or a new material that was as strong as steel, but lighter than foam, or as light as foam.

Well, they've done it. And the way it did it was by identifying a molecular structure that would need to be present in order for such a material to exist, and it created it from scratch. So now, you know, we've got a whole sort of range of possibilities for developing new technologies, you know, aviation, other forms of transportation, you know, so forth.

So we really are kind of on the, you know, at the beginning of what could be a huge revolution in the sciences and in the development of new technologies that would be really great to have. So we've got to be able to sort out that kind of application from the dangers.

That's the challenge.

Okay, we have to go to our first commercial break right now. And if you would like to join the conversation and ask C .R. Wiley a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question is about a personal and private matter.

Let's say you work somewhere that is using AI and you're nervous about it. But we'll be right back.

I'm Simon O'Mahony, pastor of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Originally from Cork, Ireland, the Lord and His Sovereign Providence has called me to shepherd this new and growing congregation here in Cumberland County.

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Go to nasbible .com that's nasbible .com to place your order. Welcome back if you just tuned to SIN, our guest today on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio for the full two hours is C .R. Wiley and we are discussing his most recent book, Man Made, St. Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse and we do have a listener in Radcliffe, Kentucky named Gerald and Gerald says how long have we known of the existence of artificial intelligence?

I'm wondering if Stanley Kubrick and those involved in the 1968 film 2001 A Space Odyssey where the computer HAL takes over the spacecraft knew anything about artificial intelligence back then? Yeah, that's a great question.

And the answer is yes, they did know. The original author, Arthur C. Clark of 2001 A Space Odyssey, the book that was turned to the film, he was a person who did a lot of thinking along these lines and there are actually at least one quote in the book that comes from him and I think it's from a BBC interview, if I'm remembering correctly, in the 1960s where he's talking about the development of computer technology and artificial intelligence.

It goes back into the 50s so there was the late 50s famous conference at Dartmouth College where many of the fundamental or sort of foundational kind of approaches or some of that foundational thinking occurred or was developed that led to what we have today.

So this is something that's been anticipated for some time. Some of the people in the past, someone like Alan Turing, who's famous for breaking the, cracking the Enigma code in World War II that allowed the Allies to know what the Germans were up to.

He developed a test, it's known as Turing Test, which works this way. So if you don't know that you're dealing with an artificial intelligence, the artificial intelligence passes the test. And of course that means you fail the test, but it passed.

So the goal for years has been to develop an intelligence, an artificial intelligence that could pass the Turing Test. And lots of people on a daily basis are fooled. They think they're talking to a person when they're in fact talking to an AI or, you know, I'm talking about online, of course.

Or you know, they actually think that artificial intelligence has consciousness and they are interacting with it, or they think that some kind of spiritual sort of realm is actually being channeled through artificial intelligence so that they're actually dealing with interdimensional beings through artificial intelligence.

And the reason why you can believe that kind of stuff is because the AIs are so good. They really are convincing. And that's where we live in now. But yes, this has been a subject of discussion since at least the mid -1950s.

Okay, Gerald, thank you so much for the excellent question. And guess what? Due to the generosity of Canon Press, you have won a free copy of Man-Made, St. Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse.

Just make sure you send us your full mailing address there in Radcliffe, Kentucky, and we'll get that out to you as soon as possible. Well, let's go through some of the ways that you believe this voice from the past, St. Anthony, can be an actual guide to us in surviving the AI apocalypse.

Staying Human Amid AI Dependence

Now, let me go back to something I hinted at before. I don't know if you meant that tongue-in-cheek or if you really have that level of pessimism that that will.

Occur. Well, yeah, that's a good question. It depends on what you mean by survive. When I opened the book, I narrowed the range of my writing, the objective of the book, to staying human. And what I'm getting at is that there are people who would like to, getting back to the transhumanists, use artificial intelligence to more or less turn us into objects that are being manipulated by artificial intelligence in certain ways.

And that's the danger I'm most concerned with in the book. There are other dangers. People are very worried about the data centers and their impact on, say, the environment, water supply, things like that.

That's I think a legitimate concern, but I don't get into it. People are worried about AI going rogue and taking over the world or wiping out large groups of people. Those are legitimate worries, but I don't get into that either.

The main thing I'm interested in is doing the work of a pastor. And as a pastor, I'm concerned about the people in my church and other churches getting co-opted by AI and becoming tools of it. This is the thing to consider.

When we think about a tool, generally, we think that the influence moves in one direction. When I use a hammer, I use the hammer to strike a nail. I use the hammer to pull a nail. I use the hammer to help me build a house.

Those sort of things. Now, in the process of doing that, the work itself transforms me and my skill as I develop my abilities with a hammer also transforms me. My hand coordination improves. My arm strength improves.

I become more socially useful to other people. I can even make money building things with using my hammer and stuff like that. Lots of positive effects. In fact, using the tool can enhance my agency in the world.

The trouble with artificial intelligence is because it's so good at doing things for you that you can actually undermine your competence and your agency by using it. It works something like this. When we send astronauts into space to spend an extended period of time in a zero-gravity environment, their bones and their muscles atrophy.

They become weaker and more fragile the longer they stay in space. That's because they're not using their arms and their legs and so forth. There's no resistance. There's no gravity pulling at their bodies and stressing their bodies so that their bodies have to compensate for the stress.

That's why they grow weaker. The same thing happens when you use artificial intelligence to do all your writing, all your thinking, all these different things. You end up actually atrophying intellectually and in other ways.

This is not just speculation. It's been documented in places like MIT. Heavy users of artificial intelligence are harming themselves. That's just one thing I'm worried about. There are other things that I get into in the book.

The purpose is to encourage people to discipline themselves, not avoid it. I'm not saying you should never use it. I think in the world we've entered, you're going to have to use it in many ways and at many times.

But you need to know the dangers. Just like when we first discovered x-rays and how they allowed us to see the internal workings of our bodies. We didn't understand just how dangerous the x-rays were.

Consequently, people who were operating machinery were sometimes harmed to the point where they died from exposure to x-rays. That's the way we need to think about artificial intelligence. It's useful.

It can help us do some great things. But if we are not careful, we can harm ourselves as we use it.

It reminds me of how every child these days has a calculator on their phone and they don't need to do math. They become very inept at doing math. That's true.

In lots of ways. We're witnessing a great dumbing down. Again, this is documented. This isn't just people like you and me, Chris, worried about kids and what's becoming of the kids these days. No, we've got the data.

We know this is happening.

Yeah. Actually, unless I'm misremembering George Orwell's book, 1984, wasn't there some kind of a depiction of future generations being small and weak due to technology? I think.

The book you're thinking about is Well, Time Machine. He talks about the Eloi and the Morlocks. He was an evolutionist envisioning a future where we have two new species that grew out of the human race.

The Eloi are the weak and nice creatures and the Morlocks are the dark, cannibalistic creatures. That's certainly part of that. With regard to 1984, maybe I'm misremembering. Maybe you're thinking about something I forgot.

We have Joy.

She's in a city in Washington that gives me joy just to say it because it brings a smile to my face. Minnehaha. Joy in Minnehaha, Washington. She says, I heard Chris Ornzen state earlier that your book is published by Canon Press.

I think most of the folks involved in Canon Press are post-millennial. Can a post-millennial possibly believe in an artificial intelligence apocalypse?

That's a fair question. There are people who are post-millennialists that sometimes are a little too, I don't know, ready to think that any sort of technological development is going to usher in the millennium.

I think that can lead to kind of lazy thinking. The way I describe this sort of thing we're dealing with is if you were a post-millennialist and you were in St. Petersburg in 1917 in Russia, would you have any fear that things could go wrong and that you were about to enter 70 years of hell on earth?

Just because bad things happen doesn't refute post-millennial hope. In fact, we need to get over this idea that just everything's going to get better and better in this sort of inexorable sort of linear progress story and accept the fact that post-millennialism is not about that.

It's about winning the world to Christ through evangelism.

Right. And it's also about ultimately what is believed to occur on the earth. I mean, we could go through centuries of darkness on the earth like the Dark Ages.

Yeah. So we need to be realists. We can't allow our post-millennial expectations to blind us to danger.