AI and the Cream Rising, May 20th, 2026. Introduction. I have already raised the central concern that we should have concerning AI, which is the problem that I've identified as AI idolatry.

AI excels at role-playing and has no scruples about role-playing as the most high God.

That being the case, and given the fact that the human heart is a factory of idols, as Calvin put

it, there are plenty of people around who would be eager and willing to go along with such a

surrade. I mean, if there are thousands of people out there who are emotionally attached to their

cyber buddy and who have to go through a grieving process when the system upgrades, then what is to keep them from getting religiously

dependent on the Holy Ghost in the Machine? And as Glenn Reynolds argues in his recent, very good

booklet, seductive AI, we must remember that people are not all that hard to gull. So I expect that

we are going to see some massive dislocations there,

meaning in the realm of worship and devotion. So that is going to happen and we should be preparing to man the barricades on that front. We do that by gathering with God's people on the Lord's Day in order to sing the Psalms, hear the word, and partake of the bread and wine. But there are some other downstream issues. Much of the worry. When professional warriors express their concerns about the impact of AI, it is often the economic side of things that comes to the fore. As mentioned above, I don't think that is the main thing, but it is a thing, and so we should address it. It may look like I'm changing the subject, but I'm not, promise. This is not a lurch of the reasons for black-white hostility in the

South back in the day was because the poor whites and the poor blacks were competing for the

same jobs. They all had limited options and somebody else also with limited options was reaching

for the same thing. Competition is often fiercest in the middle or at the bottom and not in

the upper echelons. At this point, I have to raise my fedora in a little hat tip for the extended Wilson family dinner discussion we just had. There, footnoted, sorry, this is not quite accurate. We did have an informative discussion, but I don't really have a fedora. There's an old joke about campus politics. The reason the battles there are so fierce is that the stakes are so low. But the ostensible stakes,

the parking on campus or who will chair what committee, and so on, are not the actual stakes.

The vast majority of the great middle will live and die in the middle. Very, very few reach

escape velocity. And so the battles over promotions and whatnot are not because that particular

promotion is the ultimate issue. Rather,

all of that is positioning. People are looking, constantly looking for their one ticket out of there.

But getting out is like winning the lottery. It happens, but a lot less frequently than you think,

but still enough to keep people buying the tickets. If competition in the mediocracy is already fierce,

given the nature of the case and AI can outperform

...