AI Will Not Doom Us (Nor Climate Change) (#364)

Religion on the Mind

Religion & Spirituality, Religion, Spirituality

4.7 • 542 Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2025

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We ease into today’s topic with a Top of Mind segment on two competing narratives: does having children make the future better? Or worse? From right-leaning fears of population collapse to left-leaning concerns about overpopulation and climate impact, both arguments rely on catastrophizing about opposing dystopian predictions, and I myself have not been immune to them. For our main interview, I’m joined by Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine and author of the "thousand true fans" theory (yes, that Kevin Kelly), to explore his concept of "protopia"—a vision of the future that's neither utopian nor dystopian, but rather a steady 1-2% improvement compounded over time. We get into the weeds on process theology, the cosmic Christ appearing on trillions of planets, why we'll need a "catechism for robots" within 100 years, and how AI might actually make us better humans by forcing us to codify what "better than us" even means. Kevin's technological optimism isn't naive—he fully acknowledges that more powerful technologies create more powerful problems—but he argues our capacity to solve problems consistently outpaces our ability to create them, and that technology itself carries something divine in how it expands the possibility space for human flourishing. From personal anxiety about parenthood to cosmic theology to the future of consciousness itself—this is exactly the kind of conversation we love to have on this show. Kevin Kelly's Website | Kk.org Article Mentions: https://skepticalscience.com/moving-away-high-end-emission-scenarios.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com ___________________________________________ Follow Dan on IG: www.instagram.com/dancoke/ Or Twitter: twitter.com/DanKoch Faith deconstruction resources: www.soyouredeconstructing.com/ Join the Patreon for exclusive episodes (and more) every month: patreon.com/dankoch Email about the "sliding scale" for the Patreon: youhavepermissionpodcast@gmail.com YHP Patron-only FB group: tinyurl.com/ycvbbf98 Website: www.dankochwords.com/yhp.html Join Dan's email list: www.dankochwords.com/ Artwork by sprungle.co/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	What I've dedicated my life to is revenge.
0:04.0	A brand new drama based on the best-selling novel.
0:07.0	They think they're better than us.
0:08.0	Who do you think you are?
0:10.0	I'm going to prove to them that they're wrong.
0:12.0	She's punishing me.
0:13.0	You destroyed my family.
0:14.0	I will not rest until I've destroyed yours.
0:17.0	A Woman of Substance on Channel 4 starts tonight at 9.
0:39.0	Welcome back, everybody, to Religion on the Mind, a conversational show about psychology, religion, and spirituality that values careful thinking and good faith engagement over self-satisfied tribalism. I am your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist. And today I've
0:47.3	got a little top of mind segment for you. The question here is, should you have children? Now, I'm not addressing people who have already
0:57.7	chosen to have children or who have already chosen not to have children. This is really addressed
1:03.0	directly at people for whom this is a live question. Feel free to share this episode with somebody
1:08.6	who you think this might be helpful for. But even those of us who are beyond asking this question or who are not there yet, perhaps,
1:15.4	depending on where we are at in life, I think the thing I want to talk about is still going to be
1:19.2	interesting, basically for anybody who finds this podcast interesting.
1:22.0	The question here is about whether having children will make the future a better place or a worse place.
1:32.3	And I have realized that there are competing arguments on either side.
1:38.8	One is sort of a left-leaning argument and one is a right-leaning argument,
1:42.7	but both of them are actually empirical
1:45.2	arguments. They are, or they are questions that do not need to be partisan, left coded, right
1:51.6	coded, et cetera, and yet, yet they are, of course, because fucking everything in our life is.
	...

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