Jay W. Richards

Senior Fellow at Discovery, Senior Research Fellow at Heritage Foundation

Archives

Bingecast: Jay Richards on The Human Advantage

Jay Richards and Larry L. Linenschmidt
May 28, 2020
Will machines take over human jobs? Jay Richards discusses artificial intelligence, virtue, job displacement, and collaboration using technology with Larry L. Linenschmidt. This interview is about Jay’s book, The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines. This interview was originally aired by the Hill Country Institute and is included here in its entirety. This rebroadcast is offered with the permission of Larry L. Linenschmidt and the Hill Country Institute. Other Larry L. Linenschmidt podcasts from the Hill Country Institute are available at HillCountryInstitute.org. We appreciate the permission of the Hill Country Institute to rebroadcast this podcast on Mind Matters. Show Notes 02:24 | Introducing Jay Richards, Research Assistant …

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 Cosmos Series Preaches the Religion of Materialism

Jay Richards
April 15, 2020
On this episode of ID the Future, guest host Jay Richards interviews science historian Michael Keas about the new Neil deGrasse Tyson Cosmos television series and its “very impressionistic storytelling.” Starting with an episode titled “Ladder to the Stars,” Cosmos: Possible Worlds weaves a tale of chemical evolution that, according to Keas, fails to engage the tough problems required to build the first self-reproducing biological entity. Keas says it then it moves into a glib explanation for the origin of mind and human intelligence. As Richards and Keas show, evidence takes a back seat to storytelling in both this latest version of Cosmos and in its …

Why Does the Vatican Need Microsoft?

Should the Church really partner with IBM and Microsoft to make pronouncements on tech regulation?
Jay Richards
March 22, 2020

When giant corporate actors like IBM and Microsoft promote “transparency and compliance with ethical principles?”, we run the risk that they are helping to craft regulations that hinder future competitors (“regulatory capture”). Rather than partner with them in making statements, the Church should stay clear.

Jay Richards on Eat, Fast, Feast and Human Design

Jay Richards
January 6, 2020
On this episode of ID the Future, Jay Richards discusses his new book Eat, Fast, Feast. Fasting is a traditional religious practice “that’s fallen on hard times,” he says. We “graze” instead. But there’s scientific evidence for the value of intermittent fasting: it reduces total calories while upping adrenaline and human growth hormone, and without reducing metabolic rates. All this in addition to the spiritual benefits that have been recognized across cultures for many centuries. There are simplistic “just-so” evolutionary stories in other diet and health books attempting to explain how our bodies became well adapted for intermittent fasting, but he argues that a much better explanation is that we were intelligently designed this way. In his conversation with host Rob …

Will Self-Driving Cars Change Moral Decision-Making?

It’s time to separate science fact from science fiction about self-driving cars
Jay Richards
December 6, 2019

Irish playwright John Waters warns of a time when we might have to grant moral discretion to computer algorithms, just as Christians now grant to the all-knowing but often inscrutable decrees of God. Not likely.

Jay Richards at COSM Talks Kurzweil and Strong AI

Jay Richards
October 29, 2019
On this episode of ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid catches up with philosopher Jay Richards at the recent COSM conference in greater Seattle. The two discuss the history of George Gilder’s Telecosm conferences and how the first one gave birth to a book Richards edited and contributed to 18 years ago, Are We Spiritual Machines? Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong A.I. Is the “singularity” coming, as Kurzweil argues there and elsewhere, when machines equal and then quickly surpass human intelligence? Does “machine learning” really mean learning? Will “Skynet” wake up? Jay describes Kurzweil’s sunny version of strong AI and the dystopian version. Then he argues the other side, namely that human beings possess something beyond the purely material, something even the …

Jay Richards: Prepare For AI, But Don’t Panic — Part II

Larry L. Linenschmidt and Jay Richards
October 24, 2019
Will machines take over human jobs? Larry L. Linenschmidt discusses Artificial Intelligence, job displacement, and collaboration using technology with Jay Richards. This interview is about Jay’s book, The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines. This interview was originally aired by the Hill Country Institute and is included here in its entirety. This rebroadcast is offered with the permission of Larry L. Linenschmidt and the Hill Country Institute. This is Part 2 of 2 parts. Part 1 is available here. Other Larry L. Linenschmidt podcasts from the Hill Country Institute are available at HillCountryInstitute.org. We appreciate the permission of the Hill Country Institute to rebroadcast this podcast on Mind Matters. Show Notes 02:01 | Virtues …

Jay Richards on the Greatly Exaggerated Death of Human Jobs — Part I

Larry L. Linenschmidt and Jay Richards
October 17, 2019
Rumor has it, artificial intelligence and robotics will make humans obsolete. Larry L. Linenschmidt discusses artificial intelligence, job displacement, virtue, and machines with Jay Richards. This interview is about Jay’s book, The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines. This interview was originally aired by the Hill Country Institute and is included here in its entirety. This rebroadcast is offered with the permission of Larry L. Linenschmidt and the Hill Country Institute. This is Part 1 of 2 parts. Other Larry L. Linenschmidt podcasts from the Hill Country Institute are available at HillCountryInstitute.org. We appreciate the permission of the Hill Country Institute to rebroadcast this podcast on Mind Matters. Show Notes 02:26 | …

If the Mind Is Immaterial, Is Human Cloning Impossible?

I agree with Mike Egnor that the mind is immaterial but I don’t think human cloning is impossible
Jay Richards
July 12, 2019

There are, of course, empirical implications of both the materialist and non-materialist understanding of the human mind. But the success of human cloning won’t weigh on the question one way or the other.

Jay Richards on How Materialism Dismantles Itself, and the Self

Jay Richards
June 19, 2019
On this episode of ID the Future, philosopher and Discovery Institute senior fellow Jay Richards shows how materialism is an acid that eats itself along with the self. Richards argues that it also eats all the immaterial things that make science work — all while posing as objective science. The interview is taken from Discovery Institute’s new Science Uprising initiative, featuring high-concept short YouTube videos and single-expert interviews touch on a wide range of subjects related to intelligent design, philosophical materialism, theism, atheism and modern Darwinism. Richards and other familiar faces are among the experts, along with two or three distinguished scientists who may be new to followers of ID the Future. Check it out here. …

Science Uprising 01: Reality

Real vs. Material
Guy, Michael Egnor and Jay W. Richards
June 3, 2019
Has science proven we are all just matter? Or does reality extend beyond what we can see and touch? Be sure to visit scienceuprising.com to find more videos and explore related articles and books. This transmission of Science Uprising investigates claims by scientists and professors like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, and Daniel Dennett, who try to hijack science to promote materialism — the idea that physical reality is all there is. Hear from experts who challenge this view of science, and learn about scientists who have to hide behind a mask because they face intimidation and censorship from dissenting from materialism. People featured in this episode include Jay Richards, PhD, Assistant Professor at The Catholic University of America, filmmaker, and author or co-author of …

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.