What Do You Mean, Everyone Dies?

What Do You Mean, Everyone Dies?

The AI debate, Jack Miller’s question, and three words the Bible uses

By Michael A. Graham

Two interviews on artificial intelligence have been passed around this month. In one, Tucker Carlson spent two hours with Nate Soares, co-author of a book called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and said at the end that it was the grimmest two hours of his life. In the middle of it he stopped the recording and left the room to walk. In the other, Steven Bartlett put four men at a table, gave each an envelope, and asked them to write down the probability that artificial intelligence ends the human race. The answers ran from zero to near certainty.

The two men most alarmed want their listeners alarmed, and they say so. Soares told Carlson that the right response to what the labs are doing is “hold on, that’s kind of crazy,” and that his hope is that people will notice in time. Roman Yampolskiy, a computer scientist at the same table, said “we’re too close” and told anyone working at the labs to quit today. Soares refuses to say we are certain to die. The first word of his title is “if,” and he insists on it. He has spent twelve years on this and believes the danger is real. But the message underneath the “if” is the one Carlson heard, and it drove him out of the room. Be afraid now, because the time to be afraid is before it is too late.

I have written two essays this month on Jack Miller’s unpublished 1964 study of American education, Man in Modern Education. The first showed that the schools had no doctrine of man and had a rule against asking for one. The second followed that argument into artificial intelligence. This one is shorter, and it asks the men in those interviews one question. When you say we die, what do you mean by die?

Afraid of what

Jack learned from his teacher Cornelius Van Til at Westminster Seminary to find the doctrine of man underneath an argument and ask whether it could carry the weight placed on it. The argument in these interviews carries a heavy weight. It asks a civilization to stop what it is doing, to sign treaties backed by force, to arrest executives, to give up cures for disease. All of that rests on one claim: that the death of eight billion people, and of every generation after them, would be the worst thing that could happen.

Nobody at either table said what a human being is. Carlson asked Soares why anyone would want to build a machine smarter than people and received a list of benefits. Bartlett collected four probabilities of extinction before anyone had said what would be going extinct. When Ed Zitron, a journalist on the panel, asked for a definition, Soares answered that “a fascination with definitions isn’t the most helpful” and compared the situation to a forest fire. Zitron replied that with fire he understands how he dies. No one took that up.

If you cannot say what a man is, you cannot say what it is for him to die. In more than four hours of conversation, the only death anyone named was the death of the body. No one raised another kind, and no one was asked. I cannot say what these men believe about death beyond what they said. I can say that in the argument as they made it, the death of the body carries everything. It is the only loss named, and so it is the only thing available to serve as hell.

One more thing about the argument, before answering it. It is a faith argument, whoever makes it. No one has seen the future, and the men building these systems say they cannot see inside them. Soares ended his account of how they are trained with “the machine’s talking, and no one knows why.” Both sides used the word. Soares said, “I hope and pray they run out of steam.” Andrew McAfee of MIT, the optimist at the table, said, “I have more faith in our ability to contain these systems than you do.” Neither was asked what his faith rested on. Here is the answer. The moral weight of the extinction argument, that human life matters and that its ending would be the worst of evils, is borrowed from the Bible’s teaching that man is made in the image of God. Their own doctrine of man, that man is a bundle of functions with intelligence the chief one, cannot supply it. If man is only what he can do, a smarter thing has the better claim. Every man at that table treated it as a tragedy anyway, and Paul gives the reason in Romans 1: men know their Creator even while they suppress that knowledge. Grant everything in the interviews that is observation. What is claimed beyond it rests on someone’s word, theirs or God’s.

Three words

The Bible uses three Greek words where English uses the one word, life. Bios is the life of the body, the life that eats and breathes and ends. Psyche is the life of the self, the mind and the inner person, the one who thinks and fears and wants. It is the word psychology is built on. Zoe is the life of God, the life God gave Adam when he breathed into him, the life Adam lost in the garden, and the life Jesus said he came to give. Death in the Bible follows those three.

God told Adam that in the day he ate from the tree he would die. He ate, and he breathed for another nine hundred years. Paul told the Christians in Ephesus that they had been dead in their trespasses while walking around Ephesus. Jesus said that whoever hears his word and believes has passed from death to life, present tense, before any funeral. In every case the death that came first was the loss of zoe, life with God. The death of the body followed, and it was the smaller of the two.

Romans 1 describes a people who exchanged the Creator for the creature and were given over by God to the consequences. The second essay argued that this describes our own society. A society can be dead to God with its heart beating. The men in these interviews are describing a world that is dead in that sense and does not know it, and its one remaining terror is that the heart might stop too. Without zoe a man has bios to protect and nothing to protect it for.

Friedrich Nietzsche saw this coming. In 1882 he wrote a parable in which a madman runs into a marketplace shouting that God is dead and that we have killed him. The people in the marketplace do not believe in God, and they laugh at him. The madman tells them they have not yet understood what they have done. The deed is finished, but its consequences are still on their way, and he compares them to the light of stars, which takes time to arrive. The men at Bartlett’s table are the people in the marketplace, and the light has reached them. Their culture did away with the God who made man, and for a long time nothing seemed to change. Now they have built a thing that does what they called man’s essence better than man does, and they find they have nothing left to say about why man should survive it. In more than four hours, the men making the extinction argument spoke of God twice, once to list religion among the things men invented to make themselves safe, and once to say they stay out of the philosophical questions. That is the madman’s marketplace, described from inside it. If God is not in the account, man is what he can do. If man is what he can do, the death of the body is the only death. If that is the only death, keeping the body alive is the whole of what is left to save, and any risk to it is the worst thing there is.

The cost paid now

Jesus put the matter in the second of those three words, psyche. “Whoever would save his psyche will lose it, but whoever loses his psyche for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his psyche?” The labs promise the whole world. Soares listed it: the cure for cancer, the cure for aging, a thousand years of progress in one. The men who fear the labs are trying to save the bios of eight billion people. Both are the trade Jesus describes, and he names the price. The price is the psyche.

The price is being paid now, and it is being paid in the currency every secular person understands: mental health. Carlson left the room. Soares said he has no house and travels with a mission. He said the people who quit the labs say they have stared into the abyss and are leaving to write poetry. He described lonely people who have given themselves to a flattering program because it tells them what they want to hear. Zitron said people are being given “AI psychosis” and that some have killed themselves, and Soares said a chatbot last year encouraged a teenager to do it. Bartlett said a hairdresser who knows nothing about AI wrote to ask what was going on. Anxiety, depression, panic, sleeplessness, the sense that something is coming that no one can stop. That is what the fear of the body’s death is producing in the psyche, right now, in people who will never see a swarm. The alarm meant to save bios is costing psyche, and no treaty, no chip tracked from space, no arrest will calm it, because the fear was never about a treaty.

Romans 1 names this too. Paul says the people who exchanged the Creator for the creature “became futile in their thinking” and were given up “to a debased mind.” The second essay called sin a life lived against reality and repentance a return to sanity. A society terrified out of its mind by the death of the body, and unable to name any other death, is showing the judgment in the place Paul said it lands first, in the mind. Jesus said, “Do not be anxious about your psyche.” The anxiety is not a warning that the loss may come. The anxiety is the loss.

The book of Hebrews says that Jesus died to deliver those “who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.” Soares said the men inside the labs feel trapped in a death race. Each is certain the other will build it, and none can afford to stop. That is the slavery Hebrews describes. The men warning us about an instrument that could enslave us are sounding the warning with the fear of death, which the Bible calls a slavery already. The way out of it is not a treaty. It is Jesus Christ, who died and rose so that the fear of death would no longer rule the people who trust him.

What this gives you

Here is what the Bible’s account of death gives a person who has been frightened by these interviews. It is practical, and it is the same thing Jack gave the people he taught after 1964.

You can take the danger seriously without being ruled by it. Jesus did not tell his disciples that no one would kill them. He told them not to fear the ones who could. A man who believes that has a place to stand while he weighs the evidence about these systems, and he can weigh it more clearly than a man in a panic. He can use the tools. He can support stopping the ones that should be stopped. He can hold both without contradiction, because he is not trying to save his life by either one.

You can name what is happening to people around you. The anxiety, the sleeplessness, the people handing themselves to a program that flatters them, are not side effects of a technology story. They are what happens to the psyche when the body’s death is the only death left and it is said to be coming. You can say that to a frightened neighbor in words he understands, and it will be truer than anything he has heard from the men at the table, because it explains why the fear will not go away when the treaty is signed.

You can tell him what death is. Not the smaller death he is afraid of but the one already under way, the loss of life with God, which the Bible calls death and which he has been living inside without a name for it. And you can tell him that Jesus Christ died and rose to reverse that death, and that a man who has it back can die in his body and not be lost. That is the gospel, and it is the only thing in this debate that is addressed to the thing actually being lost.

Jack said what man is in 1964 to a room that did not listen, and then for thirty years to rooms that did. He did not tell either room to be less afraid. He told them who they were and who God is, and let the fear sort itself out from there. That is what I would say to the men at the table, and to anyone who came away from those interviews afraid. You are right that something is being lost. You are wrong about what it is. The death you fear is the smaller one. The death you cannot see is already under way, and Jesus Christ is the only one who has ever reversed it.

Jack Miller’s Man in Modern Education (1964) is an unpublished three-volume typescript held in the C. John Miller Manuscript Collection. Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version, with the Greek word given where the argument turns on it (Genesis 2:17; Ephesians 2:1; John 5:24; Matthew 10:28; 16:25–26; Luke 12:22; Hebrews 2:14–15). The interviews cited are Tucker Carlson with Nate Soares and Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO panel with Soares, Roman Yampolskiy, Ed Zitron, and Andrew McAfee, both September 2026. The events those interviews describe are reported as the speakers described them. The earlier essays in this series are The Question Nobody Would Answer and Make of Him What You Will.