A Blessing, a Curse, and a Coming Crisis

Every generation faces new transformative technologies that reshape civilization. The plow enabled agriculture. Sailing ships enabled exploration, colonization, and trade in distant lands. The printing press enabled increased literacy, education, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution. Electricity enabled modern technology, the likes of which this world had never seen. And today, artificial intelligence stands as the next great threshold—full of potential, full of peril, and full of potentially devastating consequences for modern civilization as we know it.

AI is not merely a tool; it is an amplifier. It magnifies not only human capacity, but also human weakness. It quickens productivity but also accelerates moral degradation and corruption. It can uplift the humble or empower the wicked. It is a servant that can become a master, depending upon who wields it, why, and with what spirit.

As with all powerful instruments, AI is not neutral. It can expedite social trends, gratify human passions, and accelerate all forms of destruction. It rewards the wise and destroys the foolish. Thus, before embracing AI blindly, or rejecting it fearfully, we must understand what it truly is: a double-edged sword offered to a generation already teetering on the edge of an abyss.

[If you are reading this via the subscription email, please click here to visit this post on my website to help out my website stats.]

I. The Benefits of Properly Used AI

1. AI Increases the Quality and Quantity of Human Production

Used with skill and discipline, AI enables individuals to produce more and produce better. It refines writing, organizes data, analyzes trends, accelerates planning, and improves clarity. It allows a single creator to accomplish the work of an entire team. Properly used, AI becomes a multiplier of production and industry.

2. AI Expands Access to the World’s Best Information

Where elites once controlled learning, AI now democratizes it. Advanced explanations, historical analysis, scientific insight, and specialized knowledge become accessible to ordinary families. This empowers individuals to govern their lives with greater intelligence, awareness, and discernment.

3. AI Offers Cutting-Edge Diagnostic and Problem-Solving Tools

In medicine, engineering, and scientific research, AI discerns patterns too complex for the human eye. It assists in diagnosis, optimization, and forecasting—tools that, in the hands of wise and moral leaders, could bless millions.

Recently, I used AI to analyze my lab work data, giving me insight into my medical condition that my doctor either couldn’t or wouldn’t share with me. In my case, it dynamically affirmed what years of my own research had slowly been revealing: that I have a problem with insulin resistance.

4. AI Makes High-Level Professional Skill Accessible to Ordinary People

AI offers assistance in composition, legal phrasing, editing, tutoring, contract analysis, and strategic guidance that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive. It gives ordinary people access to expertise once reserved only for the wealthy.

5. AI Automates Tedious Work and Frees Humans for Higher Purposes

Transcription, formatting, sorting, scheduling, calculation, and data compilation can be offloaded to AI. It can be used to track finances, do bookkeeping, and accounting. It can be used to organize and track all aspects of modern life.

6. AI Reduces Human Error in Routine Tasks

Where the rules are clear, AI is consistently accurate. It can outperform human workers in anomaly detection, proofreading, process verification, and administrative consistency. It can analyze and make complex suggestions, and often perform such suggestions in seconds.

7. AI Is Available Constantly

AI does not sleep. It provides support, tutoring, or creative assistance at any hour. For those managing households, projects, or ministries, this can be a genuine blessing.

8. AI Accelerates Scientific and Medical Discovery

Large datasets—once impossible to analyze manually—can now be interpreted swiftly. AI accelerates breakthroughs in medicine, engineering, materials science, biological and physical science, as well as environmental research. AI can be used to program and run simulations and to predict outcomes, often quite accurately, or with accurate probability factors.

9. AI Strengthens Cybersecurity

While AI can be used by hackers, it also strengthens defenses, detects threats early, and shields digital infrastructure when deployed responsibly.

10. AI Improves Accessibility

AI-based tools help the blind read, the deaf hear, the elderly remember, and non-native speakers communicate. This inclusivity is a noble use of the technology.

11. AI Supports Better Decision-Making

AI can model scenarios, analyze consequences, reveal hidden patterns, and inform decision-makers—when paired with moral judgment.

12. AI Reduces Human Exposure to Dangerous Environments

AI-driven robotics can enter disaster zones, contaminated sites, or combat environments, reducing human risk and casualties.

13. AI Can Improve Economic Productivity

If guided by ethical principles, AI could reduce costs, increase output, create new industries, and raise living standards.

II. The Dangers of AI

The blessings above are real. But the risks are equally real—and often far more severe.

1. AI Undermines Personal Development When Used Lazily

If a man lets AI think for him instead of with him, his mind weakens. Discipline dies. Creativity atrophies. The tool becomes a crutch that one becomes dependent on.

2. AI Can Decrease Cognitive Ability Through Over-Reliance

The more we outsource our memory, attention, analysis, and creativity, the weaker these faculties become. A generation raised on AI risks becoming intellectually fragile and increasingly manipulable.

3. AI Often Produces False or Inaccurate Information

Even the best systems hallucinate facts, omit context, or present confident falsehoods. Blind trust in AI becomes a doorway to deception, embarrassing mistakes, and potentially catastrophic legal or health outcomes.

4. AI Can Be Weaponized for Propaganda and Mind Control

Micro-targeted messaging, emotional manipulation, behavioral nudging, and algorithmic persuasion are now scalable. Political and ideological elites can engineer public opinion with frightening precision.

The Book of Mormon warns repeatedly of societies where the wicked “plot in darkness” and use “secret plans” to control the minds of the people (Helaman 6:28–30; Ether 8:18).

5. AI Algorithms Are Often Agenda-Driven and Used for PSYOPS

AI systems inherit the biases of their creators. Political, ideological, or corporate agendas shape the outputs and hide dissenting information. Institutions use these tools to promote their worldview under the guise of neutrality.

6. AI Can Replace Human Connection with Synthetic Counterfeits

AI companions and digital relationships mimic affection without sacrifice, loyalty, accountability, or covenantal love. These counterfeits hollow out families and communities.

7. AI Displaces Jobs and Restructures Economies

Millions of jobs—especially the administrative and mid-skill ones that hold society together—are being automated. Without moral leadership, this becomes a catalyst for dependency and national vulnerability.

8. AI Amplifies Bias and Institutional Prejudice

AI learns from human data. If the data is biased, the AI produces amplified bias, disguised as objective truth.

9. AI Expands Surveillance and Eliminates Privacy

Facial recognition, voice mapping, predictive patterning, and behavioral scoring allow institutions to monitor individuals at a depth never before imagined. Freedom cannot thrive in a world where privacy no longer exists.

10. AI Concentrates Power into the Hands of the Few

Only a handful of corporations and governments possess the money, talent, energy, and hardware necessary to build frontier AI systems. This bottleneck centralizes global power.

11. AI Enables Deepfakes and Digital Fraud

AI-generated video, voice replication, and identity forgery make deception nearly indistinguishable from truth.

12. AI Introduces Safety Risks in Critical Infrastructure

AI failures in medicine, aviation, energy grids, or military systems could result in catastrophic consequences.

13. AI Consumes Enormous Energy and Resources

AI demands massive power grids, water for cooling, rare minerals, and constant hardware upgrades. Ironically, citizens are told to limit basic utilities while AI infrastructure expands without restraint.

14. AI Creates Dependency and Fragility

As society embeds AI into every system, we become vulnerable to cascading failures, outages, and attacks. A civilization dependent on a machine cannot survive the machine’s collapse.

III. The Palantir Model: AI as the Engine of a Global Totalitarian State

There is an even darker dimension to artificial intelligence—one openly pursued by the world’s most powerful institutions. Technologies like Palantir were originally built for counter-terrorism and military intelligence. Today they function as the digital nervous systems of nations, with ambitions far beyond national borders.

Their architects envision an AI-driven global governance grid capable of monitoring, predicting, and controlling human behavior at a planetary scale. This is not guesswork. It is their stated mission: to analyze all data, everywhere, in real time.

What the tyrants of the past dreamed of, AI makes possible.

As the Book of Mormon warns, secret combinations “seek to overthrow the freedom of all lands, nations, and countries” (Ether 8:25). The technological architecture of such domination is already being built.

1. AI as the Centralized Mind of a Totalitarian System

Palantir-like systems unify surveillance feeds, financial transactions, medical records, social media posts, geolocation histories, and personal communication patterns into a single omniscient platform. With enough data, AI can:

• Map your relationships
• Predict your actions
• Score your loyalty
• Flag you as a threat
• Silence your dissent
• Freeze your accounts
• Control your access
• Engineer your beliefs

This is not futuristic speculation. This is the present trajectory of AI governance.

2. AI Governance Requires the Elimination of Privacy

A totalitarian system cannot function without total visibility. Thus, privacy becomes an obstacle to be engineered out of society. Surveillance becomes the default. Secrecy becomes criminal. Independent thought becomes subversive.

The Nephite prophets foresaw governments that “trample under their feet the freedom of the people” (Mosiah 29:26–27). AI gives them the machinery to do so.

3. The Massive Energy Requirements of Global AI Will Be Paid by Citizens

Running a worldwide AI control grid requires enormous energy—more than entire nations currently consume. And so, the public is told:

• Drive less
• Travel less
• Cool your home less
• Use less electricity
• Abandon gas
• Accept energy rationing

Not because the environment demands it…
but because the AI infrastructure demands it.

Human freedom must shrink so the machine can grow.

4. AI Will Regulate Human Behavior Like a Utility

AI-driven digital governance envisions a world where everything is conditional:

• Movement
• Purchases
• Employment
• Internet access
• Medical care
• Travel
• Communication

Your compliance becomes your currency. Your “social reliability score” becomes your passport to normal life.

This is the very captivity the Book of Mormon warns about, where the people become “in bondage” to systems they created (Alma 12:11; 2 Nephi 1:7).

5. The Endgame: A Planet Where Man Serves the Machine

Without intervention, this AI–Palantir model leads to a civilization where:

• Privacy is abolished
• Resistance is impossible
• Speech is regulated
• Movement is restricted
• Currency is programmable
• Compliance is mandatory
• Freedom is obsolete

This is the fulfillment of secret combinations rising to “get power and gain” and to “destroy the freedom of the people” (Helaman 2:8; Ether 8:22–23).

IV. The Conclusion is Grim, but Hopeful

So where does all this lead? Where does it end? How far down this road will mankind travel before the system collapses beneath its own weight?

The trajectory is dark. The technology is ominous. The intentions of the powerful are unmistakable. And the captivity described by the Book of Mormon is no longer theoretical—it is technological, operational, and rapidly approaching maturity.

Yet the scriptures do not end in despair. They end in justice. They end in deliverance. They end with the collapse of the very systems built to enslave us.

The Book of Mormon describes, in stunning prophetic clarity, what happens to nations and institutions that construct systems of deception, control, and domination:

“And that great pit, which hath been digged for them by that great and abominable church,
which was founded by the devil and his children,
that he might lead away the souls of men down to hell—
yea, that great pit which hath been digged for the destruction of men
shall be filled by those who digged it,
unto their utter destruction, saith the Lamb of God…
For behold, this is according to the captivity of the devil,
and also according to the justice of God,
upon all those who will work wickedness and abomination before him.”
(1 Nephi 14:3–4)

The pattern is unmistakable:
Tyranny destroys itself. Captivity is in the mind and will eventually self-destruct. Secret combinations consume their own kind.

The tools of oppression are always forged with the intent to capture others, but they end up capturing the very men who built them.

Artificial intelligence, global surveillance grids, digital tyranny, predictive policing, financial control systems, and algorithmic governance are all modern expressions of “the great pit.” And as the Lord declared, those who dig it will fall into it.

The prophecy continues with even greater detail about the self-destruction of corrupt world powers:

“And the blood of that great and abominable church… shall turn upon their own heads;
for they shall war among themselves,
and the sword of their own hands shall fall upon their own heads,
and they shall be drunken with their own blood.
And every nation which shall war against thee, O house of Israel,
shall be turned one against another,
and they shall fall into the pit which they digged to ensnare the people of the Lord.
And all that fight against Zion shall be destroyed,
and that great whore… shall tumble to the dust,
and great shall be the fall of it.”
(1 Nephi 22:13–14)

These are not vague religious platitudes; they are explicit descriptions of the internal collapse of the end-times global totalitarian system.

The scriptures teach that:

• The totalitarian machine will cannibalize its own operators.
• The surveillance state will turn on those who built it.
• The alliances of the wicked will fracture into mutual destruction.
• The world system that seeks to enslave mankind will not endure—it will implode.

A big part of the end-times destruction will be war—one big, massive, global, nuclear war! How and when this corresponds with the AI revolution and demise is anyone’s guess. But no matter how it plays out, the conclusion will be the same. Most of humanity will die. A few will survive. And Zion, small as it may be, scattered as it may appear, will outlast all of it.

This is where the hope is found.
Not in technology.
Not in governments.
Not in political saviors.
Not in the collapse itself.

The hope lies in the absolute, unbreakable justice of God: that every system of captivity will eventually be destroyed, every chain broken, every oppressor cast down, and every righteous soul shall be exalted.

The conclusion is grim for the wicked, but hopeful for the humble and faithful. It is grim for the architects of the digital prison, but glorious for those who refuse to bow to it. It is grim for Babylon, but redemptive for Zion.

Artificial intelligence will not overthrow God’s purposes.
Global governance will not outsmart Him.
Secret combinations will not prevail against Him.

In the end, the technological tower of Babel will fall.
The pit will swallow its diggers.
The sword will return upon the heads of those who forged it.
And the people of the Lord will rejoice in the glory of the Lord that is Zion, which eventually fills the earth.

---