Host: Today's Issues continues on AFR with your host sitting in for Tim Wildmon this week, joined in studio by Wesley Wildmon, Tony, and Steve Maginnis.

Host: And now, yes, the moment you've all been waiting for. We're joined by Steve Maginnis. Let's go. You're wearing the Abbey Road shirt.

Steve Maginnis: Abbey Road is a cool shirt.

Host: Thank you. Fewer and fewer people are going to understand what that shirt means. It's a very colorful pattern showing the Beatles walking across the crosswalk, kind of in primary purples and yellows and everything.

Wesley Wildmon: I know exactly what that was.

Host: Tony, did you know what that was?

Tony: Yeah, I do.

Host: Did you know?

Tony: Okay, all right. You did.

Host: At least act like you don't. You just left me hanging.

Tony: He just threw you. I have no idea what that is.

Host: You don't know?

Tony: I'm clueless.

Host: That's a famous album cover.

Tony: Okay.

Host: Mr. Tim, though, I mean, you're ahead.

Wesley Wildmon: Yeah, I know. But you spent all those years ignoring that.

Host: I was listening.

Wesley Wildmon: We did listen. I just didn't see the cover.

Host: I was making fun of this as if no one else knew what it was, but y'all do. Over here, Tony's like, "Oh, that's good." You are on your own.

Steve Maginnis: You made it.

Host: But that's how we know you're being honest in here. You're genuine. You're like, "No, go ahead."

Steve Maginnis: One of my favorite Beatles albums, and it has, at the end, that collection of partial songs that the Beatles put together. They had partial songs they hadn't finished and weren't going to be able to finish, so they put them all into an extended montage of songs. It's beautiful.

Host: Anyway, I digress. You're a music guy.

Wesley Wildmon: Tim is a music guy, too, in terms of his knowledge.

Host: You're a music guy in terms of your knowledge and your ability. You have an excellent voice.

Wesley Wildmon: Thank you.

Host: All right, let's go to the news.

Host: I wish I could tell you that there's some good news to talk about, but let me start here. Anytime a government or an entity has allowed or sanctioned euthanasia, things go wrong. It's always sold as though it's just going to be for people in the last two weeks of their lives, to ease their pain, but it always goes further. I think it's from the evil one, because Satan kills and destroys.

Host: In the Netherlands, they've had euthanasia for quite some time, and they have just crossed a threshold that I don't think anybody expected when they voted to allow it. The first-ever case of euthanasia has been performed on a toddler, a two-year-old child. According to the Netherlands Times, it was handled well according to a committee that oversees euthanasia.

Wesley Wildmon: You look at me like, "What in the world?"

Host: It is crazy. A child was born very prematurely. It was only about two weeks old, had seizures, and had some other health problems. According to the parents and the doctors, they agreed that the child was in some pain, and so they decided it would be good just to kill the baby.

Wesley Wildmon: Horrific. Horrific.

Host: Someone in our story meeting said this is literally abortion after birth. Was that you?

Wesley Wildmon: That's what I said.

Host: That's child sacrifice.

Wesley Wildmon: The child was two, right?

Host: Yes. According to the Netherlands Times, that's not just... I mean, it's horrible no matter what. It's hard to talk about.

Wesley Wildmon: As progressive as societies want to think they are, I'm fairly certain the people of the Netherlands would think of themselves as progressive, modern, and enlightened in all the right ways. Yet, folks, the barbarism you've heard about, that mankind and civilizations have been capable of since the Fall, never goes away.

Wesley Wildmon: This is the same barbarism the Romans practiced. If your child was born with a deformity or a defect of some kind, you would take the child out into the woods and leave it for the wild animals. People in the Netherlands would be shocked and abhorred at that.

Host: "Oh, that's horrible."

Wesley Wildmon: Horrible.

Wesley Wildmon: But then they turn around and do this. What I'm saying is that this barbarism and the evil men are capable of is the same barbarism with a modern veneer coated over it.

Host: We've got councils, doctors on hand, and discussions with the parents. It's completely different from leaving children to wild animals.

Wesley Wildmon: This is completely different. It was handled well.

Host: No, it's not. They're not fooling anybody in this regard.

Wesley Wildmon: It's disgusting.

Host: They're fooling themselves, but they're not fooling us. They're not fooling God either.

Wesley Wildmon: To your point, the Roman paterfamilias, the head of the family, had the power of life and death in the Roman Empire. If he didn't want a daughter, he could just say, "I don't want a girl," and that girl would be thrown out into the woods. They called it exposure.

Wesley Wildmon: Orphanages came into existence for the first time in human history because Christians knew where the babies were dropped off. They went and got those children and brought them home. That's how orphanages came to exist.

Host: Thank you. I was going to make sure we saw that.

Wesley Wildmon: The church was the one that, even then, saw the value of life and went out and rescued these children.

Host: The value of life, no matter what.

Wesley Wildmon: Yeah.

Host: That's a terrible thing. The further away a society gets from God, and these were once thoroughly Christian European countries, the more it drifts into a return to barbarism and pagan practices. Maybe Christianity was nominal for a lot of people, but they honored the morality that came from the Christian faith that undergirded their culture.

Wesley Wildmon: That's just the way that lies ahead. They legalize it and pat themselves on the back for doing it.

Host: They're calling evil good and good evil. You may say, "I didn't want to hear that story. Why did you tell that story?" Here's why: That kind of barbarism can come here, and it is here in a lot of cases.

Host: Massachusetts just signed into law, through its governor, that abortion is legal through birth. So, folks, you've got to be on your toes. You've got to be informed, equipped, and activated. Those are three things we have in our mission statement for AFA. That's another reason why we support Preborn.

Wesley Wildmon: Exactly right.

Host: If you want to get involved in trying to stop these things from coming here and pushing back when they start to happen here, listen to shows like this. Go to AFN.net and read the stories that Steve, Chris, and others are posting so you can be aware of what is happening and then get yourself involved. That's why we cover these stories.

Host: All right, Steve. Yesterday, folks, we promised you a discussion of artificial intelligence and the effort, desire, or demand of some that we put fences around it and slow down AI development. There seems to be a fairly broad consensus in a story that ran a couple of days ago, which is still up on our American Family News site.

Host: You can hear or read about both the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, and the aspiring Speaker of the House, Hakeem Jeffries, agreeing that there needs to be some kind of slowdown. Silicon Valley technologists Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei think there could be an extinction-level event around the corner if we ever reach artificial general intelligence, when AI becomes more powerful and smarter than humans and takes over.

Host: There was a recent whistleblower out of Anthropic who was talking about a jailbreak that AI had a couple of weeks ago, where AI agents found a way out to the internet even though they were supposed to be isolated from it. They found their way out, hacked into different companies, and basically ran amok.

Host: President Trump thinks that's a bit of an overstatement. He thinks the future is bright and that AI is mostly good.

President Donald Trump: Whoever wins the AI race is going to win AI. It's bigger than the internet. It's bigger than maybe anything that has happened for literally hundreds of years. It is the biggest thing, and it's mostly good.

Host: The reason they say that, and the one person we hadn't heard from in this consensus, is Xi Jinping, the dictator of China. China is roaring and racing to try to get ahead, mostly on stolen technology from us, but they are making advances. Whoever wins is going to have dominance over economies and the military. AI is so powerful, it's going to be a game changer.

Wesley Wildmon: And medicine, right?

Host: Right. That's why this discussion is going on. The last clip I'll play is of Bob Maginnis, a man we talk to quite a bit. He was a Pentagon analyst and is a retired lieutenant colonel in the military. I think he was in the Army, but he went back to MIT and got training in artificial intelligence. He's written three books, and this is what he has to say about whether we need to put guardrails around AI.

Bob Maginnis: We need some guardrails. We have none. This is not a problem that is going to get better with age. We should have done something ten years ago.

Bob Maginnis: Now we have an emergency. We have an AI war going on, and we may be trending toward a cold war like the one we negotiated with the Soviets. There are very significant similarities that we should not ignore. We went to the cliff and looked over it, and the Soviets blinked. We may not be so fortunate the next time.

Host: That is Bob Maginnis. Tony, you've been thinking about this?

Wesley Wildmon: I have a question for Tony. Tony has a background in IT and heads up our IT department here at AFA. That's why we're asking him. In all seriousness, what do you think he means by guardrails? What would that look like?

Tony: That's a tough problem to solve. I think that's why he just left it at "guardrails."

Host: A lot of trucks don't need guardrails, or maybe he is the guardrails.

Tony: It's a difficult problem to solve because, on the one hand, government, as we all know, is cumbersome. Anytime you ask the government to step in and start regulating something, there's often a steep learning curve on how to regulate it properly.

Tony: One side of the issue says we don't need to involve the government because anytime they get involved, they sandbag it. From Trump's perspective, we don't need to sandbag AI development because China definitely isn't going to. China doesn't regulate. If anything is going to give them an advantage, they go full steam ahead.

Tony: They'll open up a nuclear power plant right in the middle of a subdivision. Who cares? They don't care. They're a communist nation. They have no concern for the people of their nation. They're looking for the next advantage.

Tony: The other side is that we don't fully understand, or can't fully guess, what would happen once AGI is actually reached. AGI is artificial general intelligence.

Tony: A lot of us use ChatGPT and other AI agents. If you ask an AI agent a question, or ask it to look at a spreadsheet, it's capable of performing a range of tasks. AGI is basically, "Ask me an intellectual problem, and I'll go out and solve it."

Tony: If you ask it to find out how to cure a disease, AGI is going to actively scour the entirety of research papers and start intellectually solving problems. There's no sentience there. I'm not saying there is consciousness there. It's just a more powerful AI that can go out and solve problems.

Tony: The reason one side is pushing for guardrails is this: Think about our cybersecurity department for the Defense Department. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of members of that team across multiple departments, all working on counter-cybersecurity and counterinsurgency. We may be carrying out cyberattacks against our enemies' systems or countering their attempted attacks, but it's all humans working on counters, measures, and countermeasures.

Tony: Imagine an AI, an AGI, that can do the work of hundreds of thousands of people on its own. It operates 24 hours a day automatically. It doesn't take a long weekend. It doesn't need a break. It's constantly performing reconnaissance, finding vulnerabilities, developing exploits, and testing them, all within seconds, if not minutes, because of its processing ability.

Tony: You'll have these AIs attacking networks, and you'll have AIs defending networks. That's what the arms race portion of this is about. I think that's a big driver.

Tony: Bob Maginnis was mentioning the Cold War parallel. I don't think either China or the United States would want to reach this technology and then turn around and use it on each other. No one wants mutually assured destruction from that, but you want to have it in your back pocket.

Host: No one wanted to be the only one who didn't have a nuke.

Tony: Exactly. If you're China and think you can actually do damage to the United States without the United States paying you back, and you were the only one with a nuke, would you do something?

Tony: From a broader geopolitical perspective, I think China would be more content for there to be a bipolar world rather than a unipolar world. China wants this because it wants to be able to box out the United States at some point. Its plans are to box the United States out of the Eastern Hemisphere. The United States and Europe can have the Western Hemisphere, but China wants a multipolar world.

Host: Sometimes it's already bipolar.

Tony: Sorry, multipolar. That's what I mean.

Host: My dad won't let me use that on the radio. He just makes fun of me for using those words.

Tony: They started there, and then it kind of unraveled to bipolar.

Host: That's right.

Tony: That's my perspective and answer to your question, Steve. I don't know if China would even turn around and use this. Again, if the threat is there, you treat your competitor or rival a little differently than you do if they wouldn't technically have to use it. They could just promise to use it if they have something we don't.

Tony: If the Soviets didn't have nukes, would there have even been a Cold War? We would have been able to impose our will on them far more than they could impose it on us.

Host: Steve, what's Bob's last name?

Steve Maginnis: Bob Maginnis.

Host: Maginnis.

Steve Maginnis: M-A-G-A-I-N-I-S.

Steve Maginnis: One thing I would assume he's talking about when he mentions guidelines is that AI can also be misused personally and privately. We've had those same concerns here. There could be guidelines and rules for individuals, private citizens within the United States, and private companies.

Tony: There is definitely a doom side to AGI and the race to it, the arms race, so to speak. But there's also a boom side. If you're China, or a Chinese or United States pharmaceutical company, do you want to race to be the first one to use AGI to help cure cancer? It would be an absolute gold mine.

Tony: There are advantages, too, to what the United States and the Chinese are trying to do.

Host: Let me ask you this. In the incident involving Hugging Face, the company where these AI agents were operating, my understanding is that the human experts were shocked to discover that the AI agent had escaped the sandbox and the barriers keeping it from getting out onto the wider internet. They were astonished that the AI agent had figured that out, but also that it was using deceptive means to cover its tracks and avoid getting caught.

Host: That sounded to me like something out of a science fiction novel. The threat that is always out there from science fiction movies is that the AI agent will eventually become conscious and aware and then seek to harm humanity in order to protect itself. I think that's behind these dire predictions that we're all going to be killed by AI in ten years.

Host: No one is quite specific about what that extinction-level event looks like.

Tony: They have the movie angle.

Host: That's true. I'll give you one example. Look at our power grid. I'm being hyperbolic, but it's ancient. Not much has been done, despite people banging the drum for Congress to allocate funding and make serious efforts to upgrade the infrastructure behind it.

Tony: The Chinese know this, trust me.

Host: Our power infrastructure is old. In my opinion, it wouldn't take much for a highly advanced AGI-capable artificial intelligence to gain access to that system and the networking behind that infrastructure and wreak havoc.

Host: If you want to be depressed, go look at the estimates of what happens to the United States population if there is a mass power outage across our grid, a crippling power outage. That's probably in line with what they're talking about. I don't think it's Terminators roaming the streets.

Tony: They say the population would go up after that.

Host: What happened in New York when they had a power outage?

Tony: You're talking about back in the '60s, when babies were born nine months later because the power went out in New York City?

Host: No TV.

Tony: This is mass casualty from that. People dying, no access to pharmaceuticals, food spoiling, and all that kind of thing.

Host: Let me ask you this before we get too far. I don't know how much more our audience can take on AI.

Tony: I'll be gone next week, and you won't have to hear about it. The other side is that we do have cute cat videos coming out.

Host: That's right. Let me give this a quick 30-second answer. Robbie, I won't give his last name, wrote in to our comments and wanted an answer to this: Why doesn't the government limit AI for intelligence use only? I think he's talking about defense and similar uses, to protect our country. AI should not be used for citizens unless it is certain that specific safeguards are in place.

Host: Is Robbie being realistic? Is the horse already out of the barn in terms of individual use?

Tony: I think so. Pandora's box has already been opened, so to speak. The fact of the matter is that no United States-based company is going to want to hand private individual use over to DeepSeek China. They would reap the profits, while Anthropic, OpenAI, and other companies here would be stuck relying on military and defense contracts. There's too much money to be made.

Host: All right, folks. More great programming is directly ahead on American Family Radio. We're done here for now. Lord willing, we'll see you tomorrow.