Science & Technology

This Is My Father’s World

Editor’s note: This address was given at the 2025 Grove City College Faculty Retreat. The famous hymn, “This Is My Father’s World,” was written about 125 years ago by a minister named Maltbie Babcock. The hymn expresses God’s creative power, … Continue reading

The Promise and Peril of DeepSeek

Editor’s note: This article first appeared at The American Spectator. There’s an old story that, sometime in the 1960s, NASA spent millions to create a pen that worked in space. American engineers worked for years on a high-tech marvel that could write … Continue reading

Tech, Talk, and TikTok

In August 2020, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency with an unlikely cause: the video-sharing app TikTok. At issue was TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and its close connections with the Chinese Communist Party. Trump argued that TikTok gave the CCP “access … Continue reading

The Measure of a Machine: Is LaMDA a Person?

In June 2022, Google suspended engineer Blake Lemoine from his work in artificial intelligence. Having previously assisted with a program called the Language Models for Dialog Applications (LaMDA), Lemoine was placed on leave after publishing confidential information about the project. … Continue reading

Genetically Modified Humans

You may remember the big news back in November 2018 about the birth of two Chinese baby girls who were born with the gene-edited trait for Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) resistance. The husband, the girls’ father, was HIV positive before … Continue reading

Power, Parler, and the Problem of Big Tech

Over the course of 2020, the previously minor social media application Parler rose to national prominence. The site served as a smaller, right-leaning mirror to Twitter, attracting an audience that included (among others) both U.S. senators and QAnon conspiracy theorists. … Continue reading

Bioethics in a Brave New World

In the late 1980s, as a pre-med major at the University of Pittsburgh, I pulled many all-nighters at Scaife Hall at Pitt’s School of Medicine. My friend Dirk and I knew the only way we would ever make breakfast at … Continue reading

When Humans Don’t Procreate

The “hook” of the story intrigued me: “This hasn’t happened in all of modern history…” An email from “The Crux” last month blared, “Global population growth to virtually stop by 2100.” According to a Pew Research Center analysis, “the world’s … Continue reading