On our Comment pages, Sr. Helena Burns issues a robust call for a return to “old school” means of acquiring, developing and retaining knowledge in the age of AI.

Traditionalist though she might be in many ways, however, Sr. Burns’ appeal is not simply to revive the alliterative formula of Readin’, Writin’ and Arithmetic. Rather, she urges a return to the lost arts of using libraries, taking notes, listening to wiser heads, and above all using our own brains rather than relying on the post in the machine to explain the world. 

“We can rebuild a talking, thinking, literate, memorizing culture. But it’s a slow build. It always was, always will be, and it starts when you’re a kiddo. Children in school are now saying they don’t want to learn how to read and write because computers will do it for them. They don’t know that they’re surrendering their humanity,” she writes.

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The good news is that the much-rumoured surrender seems to be much further off than predicted in the recent frenzy over ChatGPT and its cohorts purportedly being thisclose to taking over the world and doing everything from producing perfect sour grapes to writing editorials. 

In facts, recent reports particularly in the financial press, suggest AI-mania is already plateauing, if not hitting a downward curve. That doesn’t mean it won’t still cause significant disruption in workplaces or in how we navigate the storm-tossed seas of daily life. It doesn’t mean we can simply shrug off the statistic Sr. Burns cites of a reported 47 per cent decline in neural engagement among those who relied on artificial intelligence to help complete an essay versus those who got ink under their fingernails. 

But as techno journalist Asa Fitch reported last week, Meta Platforms has delayed rollout of its next AI iteration, Llama 4 Behemoth, because of engineering failures to significantly improve the previous model. Open AI, meanwhile, overhyped its follow up ChatGPT 5 and saw it effectively flatline in the market.

Business leaders, already sceptical of security and privacy concerns with AI, have hardly been reassured by the “tendency of even the best AI models to occasionally hallucinate wrong answers,” Fitch writes.

More critically, many businesses looking at the allure of AI don’t yet know, in very practical terms, what it can do for their particular sector. We tend to forget that from the “future is now” advent of the Internet, it took the better part of a decade before society began to appreciate its ubiquitous uses.

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University of California, San Diego psychology professor Cory Miller points out there even more formidable barriers to broad AI adaptation. Not the least of such obstacles are the requirements for, as Miller says, “enormous hardware, constant access to vast training data, and unsustainable amounts of electrical power (emphasis added).”

How unsustainable? A human brain, Miller writes, “runs on 20 watts of power – less than a lightbulb.”

AI by contrast?

“To match the computational power of a single human brain, a leading AI system would require the same amount of energy that powers the entire city of Dallas. Let that sink in for a second. One lightbulb versus a city of 1.3 million people,” he says. 

The comparison is arithmetically sobering. It’s also ultimately a hallelujah chorus to the glory of creation that is humankind. We exist in a culture awash – it often seems perversely pridefully – in self-underestimation and outright denigration. Oh, to deploy Hamlet’s immortal phrase, what a piece of work is man.

Without question, evil lurks in our darker corners and threatens to beset our best and brightest achievements. But achieve we do as we collectively engage the unique phenomenal 20-watt light bulb brains that are the universal gift from God, our Sovereign Lord and Creator.

In another column in our Comment section, Mary Marrocco illuminates the dynamic of that gift and that engagement, quoting St. Athanasius’ observation that “when we forgot to look up to God, God came down to the low place we’d fixed our gaze on.”

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The outcome was the glorious rise of our Holy Mother the Church, whose cycle of liturgical years, year after year, reminds us of who we are, what we are, and to whom we truly belong.

There is not a shred of artificiality in the intelligence of the resulting library (biblio) of the Bible’s books, its Gospels, its Good News. There is only God’s Word, the most extraordinary conversation any child, any human being, could ever be invited to learn from