Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

In Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, would you tell me please which way I ought to go from here?

The Wiley Cat replies, well, that depends a good deal on where you want to get to. Alice then replies, well, as long as I get somewhere,

to which the cat says, oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough. The inseparable

and the essential relationship between the destination and the journey should be obvious to us all,

but it often is not. That's especially true when it comes to technology, something that has

progressed at a dizzying

pace and has taken us all along for the ride, but without any clear idea of where we're going

or why we're going there. From artificial intelligence to assisted reproduction, to social media,

to automation, to assisted suicide, to all kinds of other things, new developments in technology are transforming

how we live, how we love, how we communicate, procreate, and yes, even die. And few who are leading

all of these technologies seem willing or able to explain our destination. What's the purpose? Efficiency,

maximizing utility and pleasure, making tech billionaires richer, with technology

so pervasive and powerful, it's essential to ask, like the cat did, just where society should

go before deciding where it will go. A brand new project to explore just how technological

progress should serve human flourishing has now united a stellar group of conservative leaders.

A future for the family, a new technology agenda for the right, is a project that is asking where

technology should take us. And a statement of principles published just recently in First Things,

these leaders state, and I quote, a new era of technological changes upon us,

it threatens to supplant the human person and make the family functionally and biologically

unnecessary. But this anti-human outcome is not inevitable. Conservatives must welcome,

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