June 5, 2025

By Jim Towey

It was good to be in Jacksonville, Florida this morning where many of my life’s earliest memories began, on the grounds of Assumption Catholic School where I attended K-8, and across the same chain-link fence from Bishop Kenny High School where I spent the four years that followed. Being on the grounds of where I learned to read and write, add and subtract, imagine and create, think and experiment, pray and believe, made for a very sentimental morning.

Indeed, as soon as I sat down in the church this morning, I looked over to the area where the Towey children and our mom typically sat for Sunday Mass while my dad sang in the choir in the back loft. Those were the days before my parents separated. I gazed at the altar where my twin sister and I had our first Communion together. She is now home with the Lord, adorned in the same white dress and innocence as then.

My eyes also wandered over to the wooden doors on the front left side of the sanctuary where I entered to make my first confession. In those days, I was a frequent visitor to that little cubicle because I got into so much mischief at Assumption. In fact, I was once asked to pack up all my books and proceed to the principal’s office to be dismissed from the school. The teacher was bluffing but she fooled me. I emerged from the experience a bit shaken but entirely unrepentant!

All of these memories descended upon me anew like a gentle baptism of  remembrance. A rabbi once said that, in the Pharoah’s time, it took one day to get the Jews out of Egypt, and 40 years to get Egypt out of the Jews. So, yes, I still have a lot of Jacksonville left in me. I may have traveled to India recently and seen how vast and mysterious the world is, but coming home to Jacksonville makes it feel so incredibly small and accessible.

The AI Stampede

So much has changed since the halcyon days at Assumption and Kenny. I see ever more clearly the immediate dangers of the artificial intelligence stampede now underway.

And it is a stampede. We are being forced into an AI world with no ethical guard rails or human accountability. The inventors of AI now admit this. If new advances can be developed, they must be, come what may, whether we like it or not. That big sucking sound you hear is the white-collar jobs disappearing from the global economy, the ones not being filled when they become vacant. AI will do to white collar jobs in America what the outsourcing of manufacturing did to blue-collar ones, as abandoned factories and empty office buildings merge into one wasteland. Every single day AI gobbles up more decent paying jobs requiring writing skills, data analysis, legal, medical and accounting expertise, and customer service that were once filled by skilled laborers.

The founders of AI promised that this would not happen but of course they lied. They had to tell this lie to distract the public, to buy some time, while they nudged the camel’s nose beneath the skirts of the public tent. Well, the AI monster is nearly firmly embedded in every aspect of American life. I warned about the dangers of AI in previous posts, here and here and here.

Why educate people?

I looked at the school yard at Assumption this morning and thought of the little kids matriculating there. Why should they learn to think and write when AI can do it for them, and do it better and faster? Why learn a foreign language when Google can translate what another says for you, instantly? Human creativity seems superfluous if AI can write poems, short stories and such on demand.

So, are these kids at Assumption who are learning reading, writing and arithmetic wasting their time? Are they being taught skills they won’t be able to use one day to make a living for themselves and a difference in the world? And what about the questions of the meaning and purpose of life that first arise in childhood and adolescence? AI has no answers.

All AI can do is imitate and regurgitate. Its sentience is phony. It can’t wonder at the world, grieve you when you die, or feel nostalgia for days gone by. It can only pretend to. It has no entrepreneurial genius except for that which has amalgamated through the churning of large language models. However, if we want to unplug the AI monster, humans will have to fight and insist that we come first. This will happen when mainstream America awakens to universal low-wage employment and a lifetime of renting.

As I wrote in 2021, AI isn’t God. Humans remain the summit of creation and God remains in command. How do I know this? Assumption and Bishop Kenny taught me that.

(The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Aging with Dignity and/or its Board of Directors.)