Jay W. Richards

Senior Fellow at Discovery, Senior Research Fellow at Heritage Foundation

Archives

Why Did Americans Agree to a National Lockdown?

Jay W. Richards
April 27, 2020
Americans take our liberty seriously. We have the idea of limited government enshrined in our founding documents. We say we don’t like the Nanny State. So, why did we agree without a fight or a protest to shelter-in-place orders? To a total lockdown? It’s one thing to agree it would be best to work from home and avoid large crowds, or to quarantine people who are sick or at severe risk. It’s another for cities and states to order healthy, low-risk people not to go to work or church, or even to leave their houses, and to arrest them if they don’t comply. States can rightly do this only in the most extreme emergencies. Most Americans have never witnessed this, or anything like it — even in the middle of a hurricane.

New Evangelical Statement on AI is Balanced and Well-Informed

The signers are clearly (and rightly) skeptical that computers can become conscious moral agents
Jay Richards
April 23, 2019

Too much of the debate over AI is dictated by prior metaphysical commitments that are rarely examined. This Evangelical Statement is a welcome contrast because it makes the theological issues explicit.

Universal Basic Income? Fear of AI Fuels a New Argument for Socialism

Jay W. Richards
March 15, 2019
With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democratic candidates for president floating wilder trial balloons than a psychedelic circus, I’m surprised they have not (yet) picked up on the universal basic income (UBI). The UBI (guaranteed income for employable people who choose not to work) is far and away the favorite “solution” among those strong AI enthusiasts who expect machines to replace human work. They expect vast swaths of the country to be out of work for good. So far, the only candidate plugging UBI is entrepreneur Andrew Yang. Yang is more idea-oriented than his Democratic opponents and he has made UBI central to his presidential campaign in the key state of Iowa. His plan would offer $1,000 a month per person. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before other Democratic candidates pick up on this platform plank, on the assumption that their likely voters will imagine it as free money.

Universal Basic Income? Fear of AI Fuels Bad Economics

If new technology led to mass permanent unemployment, history would be an endless saga of expanding joblessness
Jay Richards
March 11, 2019

Although the coming shift will be abrupt, new technologies enable us to focus, as economists would put it, on our comparative advantage over machines. 

That Robot Is Not Self-Aware

The way the media cover AI, you'd almost think they had invented being hopelessly naïve
Jay Richards
February 5, 2019
If this is how The Telegraph reports on a robotic arm, can you imagine what it will sound like when we get humanoid robots who seem to carry on conversations? We had best inoculate ourselves now against AI hype from science reporters while most of us still have enough self-awareness to realize what’s going on.

A Short Argument Against the Materialist Account of the Mind

You can simply picture yourself eating a chocolate ice cream sundae.
Jay Richards
October 12, 2018
We have thoughts and ideas—what philosophers call “intentional” states—that are about things other than themselves. We don’t really know how this works. But whenever we speak to another person, we assume it must be true. And in our own case, we know it’s true. Even to deny it is to affirm it.

Trump Calls for a Reform of Perverse Welfare System. Media (Mostly) Ignore It

Jay W. Richards
April 13, 2018
On Tuesday, President Trump issued an executive order calling on secretaries in eight federal departments to work on reforming their bloated welfare bureaucracies. They are to spend the next month looking for ways to fix the programs under their charge, and report back. You can be forgiven if you didn’t hear about this. Insofar as the media covered it, they mostly painted Trump as a mean old rich guy who doesn’t care about the poor. Check out this “explainer” piece at Vox for one example. In truth, this move is Trump at his best. Reversing Obama But what can he do by way of executive order? Quite a lot as it turns out. President Obama spent his two terms gutting the Welfare Reform Act of Read More ›

Revisionist History in Cosmos

Jay Richards
April 23, 2014
On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin talks with Senior Fellow Jay Richards about distortions and outright falsehoods presented in the re-vamped Cosmos TV series. Dr. Richards discusses how Cosmos presents science and religion as enemies by misrepresenting the lives of Giordano Bruno, Isaac Newton, and Mozi.

Introduction: God and Evolution

Jay W. Richards
July 5, 2013
Editor of God and Evolution, Jay Richards, discusses the main themes of the book and places the book in the larger context of the debate over Darwinian evolution.

Icons of Evolution 10th Anniversary: Jay Richards

Jay W. Richards
July 5, 2013
In Icons of Evolution, biologist Jonathan Wells compared icons of evolution — such as homology in vertebrate limbs — with published scientific evidence, and revealed that much of what we teach about evolution is wrong. Published in 2000, the book raised troubling questions about the status of Darwinian evolution that are still plaguing scientists today.

The Scariest Federal Agency You’ve Never Heard Of

Jay W. Richards
July 20, 2012
The CFPB is the progeny of the Dodd-Frank Act, which was supposed to fix the problems that led to the 2008 financial crisis. For some reason, however, the CFPB has been given unprecedented control over financial institutions that didn't have a darn thing to do with the crisis.

Scott Powell: Debt now funds gov’s core duties

Jay W. Richards
June 20, 2012
Scott Powell points out that the defense budget, plus general government operations--including police, prisons and courts, transportation, agriculture and basic research--are already being funded by debt-financed deficit spending."

Anne Bradley on Income Inequality

Jay W. Richards
May 25, 2012
Economist Anne Bradley at the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics has just released a new research paper dealing with both the economic and biblical/theological issues involved in income inequality.