A Whole New World

Commencement Address for Logos Online, Class of 2025

To the graduates of Logos Online, class of 2025, congratulations. To the parents of these graduates, well done. To everyone else assembled here, greetings in the Lord. And my hearty thanks are extended to Larry Stephenson and the leadership of Logos Online for giving me the opportunity to address you all yet again.

You graduates are on the threshold of a new world, as countless graduates before you have been. These exercises are called a commencement for a reason, and that reason is that a new chapter in your life is about to commence. But for you all, and for the graduates a few years ahead of you and a few years behind, there is an additional layer that needs to be taken into account.

There were many centuries when graduates were looking out on a world that was new to them, but which was the same old predictable world to which their great grandfather had once been introduced. Such graduates were new arrivals in an old world. But you all are new arrivals in a world that is also a new arrival. Everybody’s new. Nobody knows anybody, and hardly anyone knows anything.

I am referring to a series of cultural and technological upheavals—some of which we falsely think we have gotten used to, and some of which haven’t actually hit us yet. There are many examples of this to which I could point, but let me just mention the one that is the hot topic right now—the world of AI. Anyone who believes that this will have no impact on the world of education needs to sit down and think a little bit harder for a bit.

Just think for a moment . . . your doctor of ten years from now is currently making his way through medical school with the help of ChatGPT and Grok—so you had better start eating healthy now.

The transformative waves are coming at us far more rapidly than they used to. Nothing is slowing down. Think about it. Julius Caesar got around in pretty much the same way that George Washington did—by foot, horse, or sail. But then the Industrial Revolution hit. The first American president to ride on a train was Andrew Jackson, in 1833. Seventy years later, in 1903, the Wright brothers took to flight. Just sixty-six years after that, Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the surface of the moon. And photos from that era show Houston Control manned by a bunch of engineers . . . and their slide rules. All of this was a function of the Industrial Revolution, but then in the latter half of the twentieth century the Digital Revolution started to rumble like a restive volcano, and then exploded. Most of you assembled here have more computing power in your pockets and purses than was available to Apollo 11. And now, even though we had barely caught our breath from all of that, the AI revolution has hit us from behind. Many of you from out of town made your way to this event thanks to directions from your phone. Not only so, but you can’t even remember how you used to get around in strange cities back before you had such a helpful phone.

So what are we to make of all this? If we are committed to classical Christian education, and to a recovery of the old ways of thinking and learning, what should our attitude be with regard to AI and education? You are obviously good with the use of technology, are you not? This is the graduation ceremony for Logos Online, is it not? What are we to do? How are we to navigate this?

If you were looking for a biblical worldview summary of all this, you are in luck. I have a biblical hot take right here. We live in a fallen, broken world, but one that is also under the sovereign governance of the Lord Jesus Christ. Two things follow from this. It means that we must not trust ourselves, and that we must put our trust in Him.

“Be not wise in thine own eyes: Fear the Lord, and depart from evil” (Proverbs 3:7).

“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; And lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths” (Proverbs 3:5–6).

Bringing it down to street level, this means these technological advances are the mortal enemy of every fool, and a godsend to everyone who is committed to a Puritan work ethic, and a zeal for the glory of God. These inventions, these devices, are being introduced into the real world—and the real world is governed by Christ. Reality as such is the foe of every fool, and the friend of everyone who loves Christ.

My prompt was: “Write me a short poem in rhymed couplets, iambic pentameter, one that is four lines long, and which congratulates graduates on their dubious achievements in a world influenced by AI.”

Within a second, Grok churned out this:

Congrats, dear grads, your dubious feats shine bright,
In AI's world, where truth and fiction blend;
Your skills, though grand, may dance in murky light,
Yet still you stride where human dreams transcend.

Okay, not bad. Kind of B minus level, but still . . . fulfilled the assignment.

So there are of course the great and obvious pitfalls—the temptations to laziness and dishonesty. In an online world, to cheat appears easy, and it is sometimes inviting . . . to the one aspiring to live like a fool. Confronted with hard work, students have always been tempted to fudge. But in the older world, such fudging sometimes involved a considerable amount of work in itself. What the new technology has done is greatly reduce the friction for fudging. All of this is true enough, but also obvious. Cheating is always cheating, whether old style or new, and so I shouldn’t need to belabor that point. But there is a more sinister temptation embedded in all of this that I want to warn you all about.

The great temptation is that of forgetting that God created man for work. Work existed in the Garden before the Fall, and is not a consequence of the Fall. Work will continue in the resurrection. God did not create us for standing around, and we will not be raised to life everlasting in order to stand around forever and ever.

True enough, sin has complicated things, including our work, and one of the central temptations that sin presents is that of tempting us to think that tools, and wealth, and prosperity are all given so that we can go live among the Lotus eaters. We think of them as introductions to a life of leisure, and they are not. People think that they should fast track their way to retirement, and that retirement should consist of thinking up different ways to suit yourself.

But no. God actually gives us tools so that we can work even harder, and at a higher level. Labor-saving devices have been very poorly named. They should not be thought of by us as labor-saving devices. They are labor-accelerating devices. Used rightly, the technological explosions that are happening all around us now should be taking us from kindergarten to grad school.

There will never be a technological development that makes wisdom stupid. There will never be a line of code that unwinds the book of Proverbs. And there will never be any device that turns folly and stupidity into a constitutional right, well-protected from any negative consequences of our actions. “Well, well, well,” you will someday say. “If it isn’t the consequences of my own choices.”

What you have in your basket now is an education. And an education is fruit. And do you know what? Fruit is heavy. You have to carry it. And when your education enables you to figure out the tools you have been given, if you conduct yourself in wisdom, the result will be that you start carrying things that are even heavier.

Thank you, and again, congratulations.