A few days ago, I listened to Megyn Kelly press the investor Chamath Palihapitiya on the fear we all feel about artificial intelligence. The machines are coming for our jobs, our kids, our future. She named it honestly. He pushed back hard, and one line stuck with me. He said the computer needs human judgment to sit on top of it. The human is the operator.
He was right, and he was not finished.
He walked through history to prove it. Chamath pointed back to the day the first animated film was built on computers, when the artists panicked. They thought the machine had come to replace them. A decade later, there were ten times as many animators. The same fear hit radiology. Surely a computer could spot a tumor better than a tired set of human eyes. Instead, the field learned that the machine needs a person sitting on top of it, deciding what the data means. The work multiplied. His point was simple. The machine handles the tedium. The human keeps the judgment.
I believe him, but I want to ask a question he did not ask.
What kind of human are we putting on top?
The Question Underneath the Question
A scalpel in a healer’s hand saves a life. The same scalpel in a cruel hand takes one. The tool did not change. The person holding it did. We are about to hand the most powerful tools in human history to a generation, and we keep asking whether they will know how to use them. That is the wrong question, or at least the small one.
The real question is who they are becoming.
Judgment is not a skill you download. It is the fruit of a formed soul. A person can be brilliant and still be a fool. A person can be efficient and still be cruel. The machine can sharpen what is already there, but it cannot put goodness where goodness was never grown. This is the heart of the parable we built MindWolves on. Two wolves war inside every one of us. One is fed by God. One is fed by the world. AI does not settle that war. It hands more power to whichever wolf you have been feeding.
So the most urgent project of our time is not better machines. It is better people. Wiser people. More virtuous people. The human on top has to be worth being on top.
Where Scripture Stands
Solomon already saw this. He asked God for one thing when he could have asked for anything, and he asked for wisdom. “So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong.” (1 Kings 3:9). Notice he did not ask for more information. He asked for discernment. He understood that a ruler with knowledge and no virtue is a danger, and a ruler with virtue is a gift.
Paul says it plainly to the church at Philippi. “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things.” (Philippians 4:8). That is a curriculum. That is the shaping of a mind that will one day hold real power. The world is busy training children in what to know. God has always been more interested in who they are becoming.
The Void and What’s Filling It
Here is what worries me, and I say it as a father, not a critic. Much of our public education has quietly stopped asking the question that matters most. It measures what a child knows. It rarely asks who a child is becoming. It can produce a graduate who can code, calculate, and compete, and never once ask whether that graduate is honest, humble, or kind.
We have built a system fluent in skill and silent on character.
Into that silence a machine is now speaking. We are handing enormous capability to young people we have trained to be capable and forgotten to make good. That is the void, and a void always gets filled by something.
There is a quieter movement filling that void, and it is worth your attention. Classical education has recovered the old conviction that schooling is not just the transfer of information. It is the formation of a person. Hillsdale College, which now supports a national network of K-12 schools, describes a classical education as one that cultivates moral virtue and guides students into freedom by making them self-reliant and responsible, capable of governing themselves and taking part in the self-government of their communities. Read that again. The goal is not just a smart student. The goal is a free and self-governing soul.
That model rests on a quiet but radical claim. It teaches that there are real standards of truth, goodness, and beauty worth pursuing, and that a child is built to seek them. It does not just fill a mind. It forms a person.
This is not a distant idea for me. Right here near Pittsburgh, in the South Hills, there is a school living this out. Penn Woods Classical Academy is a Christ-centered classical school whose mission is to train the mind, improve the heart, and nurture the spirit. They put children in device-free classrooms that foster deep concentration and authentic face-to-face interaction, and they aim to help students grow in wisdom and virtue, prepared in mind, heart, body, and soul to live and lead with holy purpose. That is the human we need on top. Not just trained. Formed.
I love their work so much that I donated my podcast, Neighborly Love, to their mission. You can hear it on their site. They are doing the exact thing the moment demands. They are not racing the machine. They are raising the person who will one day stand above it.
The Call
So the future does not need fewer humans. It needs better ones. The machine will do the work. It cannot do the wisdom. It cannot love its neighbor. It cannot lay down its life. It cannot fear God. Those belong to us, and they only grow in a soul that someone took the time to cultivate.
Which wolf are we feeding in our children? That is the question that will outlast every headline about jobs. We can raise a generation that is capable and hollow, or we can raise one that is capable and good. The tools will be the same. The people will not.
Start at home. You are the first and most important school your child will ever attend. Read the Word together. Fifteen minutes a day. Name the virtues out loud. Tell them the truth about who God made them to be. If you want help building that habit, I would love to send you a free copy of The Family Wins Devotional. It is a simple, daily way to feed the good wolf as a family.
Also, if you are near Pittsburgh and you want to see what it looks like when a whole school commits to forming souls and not just filling them, go visit Penn Woods Classical Academy.
The machines are getting stronger. Let us make sure the people on top of them are getting better.
Feed the Good Wolf.
The exchange that sparked this piece is from Megyn Kelly’s June 24 interview with Chamath Palihapitiya on The Megyn Kelly Show.