The Vocation of the Three Stooges

Last updated on: October 29, 2007 at 9:51 am By Gene Veith

The release of a DVD anthology of the first 19 Three Stooges episodes is the occasion of some much-deserved critical commentary. The funniest part of the article is the juxtaposition of the expert’s title with the topic that he is expounding:

“I call it their ‘triadic dynamic,’ ” says Jon Solomon, the Robert D. Novak professor of Western civilization and culture at the University of Illinois.”

But the commentary, with its background information, is quite revealing, such as this on the typical plot structure of a Stooge episode:

The basic premise of many a Stooges comedy wasn’t complicated: The three down-on-their-luck schmoes take on some job for which they are completely unqualified, making a complete mess of it. For example, after happening upon some wealthy homeowner with leaky pipes, Moe will declare, “Sure, we can do your plummin’, Toots. We’ll have you fixed up in a jiffy!” Typically, this is followed by more broken pipes, pipes clobbering heads and, of course, a flood.

See, even the Three Stooges are all about the doctrine of vocation!

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Revulsion against AI

Last updated on: July 5, 2025 at 1:15 pm By Gene Veith

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As companies, apps, agencies, and even schools are proudly announcing that they are going AI, the general public is feeling revulsion against Artificial Intelligence.

It isn’t just being creeped out by machine-generated personalities or sympathy for the workers being replaced, though that’s part of it. AI seems to be a violation.

Let me give an example from my own recent experience. An ad that popped up as I was checking my email. It was advertising an AI service that would rewrite your AI-generated writing so that it wouldn’t be detected as having been written by AI.

Out of curiosity, I clicked the link. Here is a screen shot of what I saw:

The teaser I had to click said that it was a way to get around AI “chekers”–that is to say, AI programs designed to detect AI writing–suggesting that one way it humanizes AI text is to insert misspellings.

OK, I’m a retired English professor and writing teacher. I’m thankful to be out of my profession due to the tsunami of AI-enabled cheating that makes teaching meaningless.

Academic integrity has been one of my core vocational values, and I have always abominated plagiarism in all its forms. Now AI has blown through all of that. And some educators have accepted this.

What bothers me in particular about this ad is that it is so brazen. It is promoting not only cheating but offering a way to avoid getting caught in public. The product is openly advertised on a reputable website. There is no no furtiveness, no shame.

And then there is this: Trusted by students at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and the University of Chicago? This makes me not trust students at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and the University of Chicago!

The ad uses the logos of those top universities. Usually, you can’t do that without getting permission. Did the schools give permission for this use by a plagiarism-enabling company? Maybe it was a routine approval, not knowing what “Humanize”–which is certainly sounds like an ethical company–is all about. Then again, we can hardly trust the plagiarism-enabling company to follow copyright and trademark laws. (The other possibility is that these are not really the universities’ logos but are themselves AI-generated. A quick check suggests, though, that these are legit.)

The point, is, the ad talks of “trust,” which is ironic because the product is designed specifically to deceive, to make a reader trust what should not be trusted. But can the very concept of trust survive in an AI universe?

My reaction to this ad ties into a broader phenomenon described in Wired Magazine, no less, in an article by Reece Rogers entitled The AI Backlash Keeps Growing Stronger. The teaser reads, “As generative artificial intelligence tools continue to proliferate, pushback against the technology and its negative impacts grows stronger.”

The article begins with describing what happened when a foreign-language learning app announced, proudly, that it was becoming an “AI-first company,” replacing human contractors with the latest AI technology. This prompted a backlash from users, who made it a social media phenomenon to post pictures of themselves deleting the app. Rogers goes on:

Many people were initially in awe of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools when they first arrived in late 2022. You could make a cartoon of a duck riding a motorcycle! But soon artists started speaking out, noting that their visual and textual works were being scraped to train these systems. The pushback from the creative community ramped up during the 2023 Hollywood writer’s strike, and continued to accelerate through the current wave of copyright lawsuits brought by publishers, creatives, and Hollywood studios.
. . .

This generalized animosity towards AI has not abated over time. Rather, it’s metastasized. LinkedIn users have complained about being constantly prompted with AI-generated questions. Spotify listeners have been frustrated to hear AI-generated podcasts recapping their top-listened songs. Reddit posters have been upset to see AI-generated images on their microwavable noodles at the grocery store.

Tensions are so high that even the suspicion of AI usage is now enough to draw criticism.

Diane Hamilton has written another article on the subject for Forbes entitled The Rise Of AI Resentment At Work: Why Employees Are Pushing Back. She writes,

AI has been positioned as a tool to make work easier, but many employees aren’t experiencing the benefits firsthand. A 2023 Pew Research study found that while nearly two-thirds of Americans expect AI to have a major impact on the workforce, only 13% believe it will personally help them. Instead, they fear job loss, increased surveillance, and a lack of control over their own work.

Some of this resentment stems from the fact that automation often prioritizes efficiency over employee well-being. When AI is implemented in a way that replaces rather than enhances human work, it can lead to job insecurity, increased pressure to adapt, and a sense of being devalued.

The resentment isn’t just coming from frontline workers—managers are feeling it too. AI-driven performance tracking, automated hiring tools, and decision-making algorithms can leave leaders feeling like they have less control over their own teams. Instead of empowering managers, AI can sometimes sideline their expertise, making them feel like their judgment is being replaced by machine-driven metrics.

She concludes, “AI resentment is about identity and purpose.” That is to say, AI undermines people’s sense of vocation!

Illustration: Artificial Intelligence Writing Code via FreeVectors.net, CC BY 4.0

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How C. S. Lewis Helped Make Me a Lutheran

Last updated on: July 9, 2025 at 10:43 am By Gene Veith

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Simul, the online journal of St. Paul Lutheran Seminary, was putting together an issue on C. S. Lewis from a Lutheran perspective and asked me to contribute. So I took that as an opportunity to write about how Lewis–although no Lutheran–was, in fact, instrumental in my becoming one.

The issue is up now and you can read my article here. You may well be interested in the other articles on the subject as well. (When you go to the site, you will be asked to give your name and email address. That will give you free access. When I did that, the pages were overly large, but clicking “view” and then “actual size” on my browser solved the problem.)

Let me get you started by posting the opening and the first two sections here, hoping you will “keep reading” by clicking the link. I’ll also tell you a little about the rest of what I wrote.

Here is how the article begins. . . .

How C. S. Lewis Helped Lead Me to Lutheranism

When I was a teenager, I was big fan of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. One of the blurbs on the back of my Ballantine edition of the trilogy expressed how the fantasy novels made me feel: “here are beauties that pierce like swords or burn like cold iron.” We lived in a small town in Oklahoma, but occasionally my parents would drive us all to Tulsa, the big city, and when we did, we would go to a bookstore. Randomly browsing the shelves on one visit, I saw a name that I recognized: C. S. Lewis. He was the one who wrote the line about beauties that pierce like swords and burn like cold iron!1 I opened the book and saw that it was dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien! I had to buy that book, so, using the money I earned from my job at the Dairy Queen, I bought Screwtape Letters. After reading Lewis’s preface, I remember marveling, “He really believes in the devil!” I found the novel itself, with its combination of satirical humor and ironic spiritual counsel, entrancing. I was raised in a mainline liberal Protestant denomination and had never heard anything like this. “Here is someone,” I thought, “who takes all of that old stuff in Christianity seriously.”

Mere Christianity

I had to read more. I next bought Mere Christianity. This one blew me away. My church had no creeds and let us believe whatever we wanted, though I was aware of Jesus and the Bible. But Lewis was showing me actual theology. When I got to the part in the book about the Incarnation, I was thunderstruck. Jesus is God? God became a human being! I had never even heard that before. This struck me as beyond wonderful, giving me a completely different way of thinking about God— not as an abstraction looking down on us from up above, but as a real person who came down from heaven to become one of us.

I was so stimulated by what I was learning from Lewis about the Incarnation that I wanted to talk to one of our ministers about it. I shared my excitement with a youth minister, fresh out of seminary. “Well,” he told me, “we don’t really stress that anymore.”

Deflated, I began to look elsewhere. Lewis said that he was simply writing about “mere Christianity,” the beliefs common to all Christians from all denominations. But I found mere Christianity hard to find. I saw traces in my Baptist friends, but they didn’t have much theology. I could see some of it in the Catholic church, but it was the 1960s and the services I visited and the priests I talked to were caught up in post-Vatican II modernism.

How the Anglican Lewis Led Me to Luther

I kept reading Lewis and then the books that he read that were instrumental in his coming to faith. I learned more and more, but books alone are no substitute for a church.

I went off to college, got married, went to grad school. Having exhausted my C. S. Lewis-inspired reading list, I finally read the Bible, which had a big impact. We started hanging out with campus evangelicals, though we still attended that same mainline Protestant church.

I wrote my dissertation about the 17th century Christian poet George Herbert, focusing on how he was influenced by the Reformation. This had me reading the Anglican Reformers, Puritans, Calvin, and my personal favorite Luther.

My first academic job took us back to small town Oklahoma. My wife and I resolved to find a church that believed in the Bible and in the Gospel, so we started church-shopping. We visited a Lutheran congregation, where we were overwhelmed with the liturgy—“It’s like stepping back into the Middle Ages,” my wife said, which for us was a good thing—and I was amazed to see that the church still taught what I had been studying in my dissertation. We took the adult instruction class and became Lutherans. Since then, I have been going deeper and deeper into the Lutheran tradition, which I have found unutterably satisfying. Though many factors and life experiences brought us to Lutheranism, I credit C. S. Lewis with starting me on my way. Lewis was not a Lutheran. Anglicans, even conservative ones like Lewis, are characterized by doctrinal latitude, their main point of unity being liturgical worship according to the Book of Common Prayer. I can now see clearly where Lewis falls short according to Lutheran confessional standards. And yet, Lewis is often helpful to a Lutheran perspective anyway.

[Keep reading. . .]

I go on to explain what I mean by that. Lewis was weak on the Atonement, but his description in The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe of Aslan dying for Edmund, offering himself to the White Witch as a substitute for a rotten little sinner, made me realize the significance of the Substitutionary Atonement.

Lewis didn’t believe in the Inerrancy of Scripture, yet his essay “Fern Seeds and Elephants” liberated me from the anti-supernatural Historical Critical approach to the Bible that was all I knew from the Bible scholars in my liberal denomination.

I go into other of his faults, such as his belief in an idiosyncratic, non-historical belief in Purgatory, but also how he supported a number of Lutheran teachings, such as the distinction between Law and Gospel, worship as receiving God’s gifts, the doctrine of vocation, and a high view of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

I also get into what Lewis, as a scholar specializing in 16th century literature, had to say about Luther. It was always positive. And Lewis clearly understood and appreciated Luther’s message: the joy and freedom of the Gospel.

I found in Lutheranism the “mere Christianity” that Lewis introduced me to. Not as an ecumenical lowest common denominator but as a theological tradition that, as I say in my conclusion, offers “a theology that embraces the whole scope and range of Christianity, being sacramental and liturgical like the Catholics, while also being Biblical and evangelical like the Protestants. Only a rigorous theology can hold such poles together.”

Photo: C. S. Lewis by Levan Ramishvili via Flickr, Public Domain

Theses on Love of Country

Last updated on: June 29, 2025 at 6:17 pm By Gene Veith

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Happy Independence Day! This year we celebrate the 4th of July, our nation’s 249th birthday, in a climate of controversy.

It isn’t just debates over the slogan “Make America Great Again” or the propriety of “Christian Nationalism.” The Left has long been demonizing America as a hotbed of capitalism, racism, colonialism, and their other sins.

But now elements of the Right seem as if they too have turned anti-American. This country and our vaunted Constitution are products of the Enlightenment! That’s why we have become so secularist! The American fixation on freedom has led to sexual license, the breakdown of the family, same-sex marriage, abortion, and transgenderism! Our radical individualism makes a true sense of community impossible!

Both Leftwingers and Rightwingers are saying that we are in a “post-liberal” era, in which democracy, capitalism, and Constitutional rights just don’t work.

And goodness knows, we conservative Christian culture critics are always complaining about how things are in the United States. So are progressive secularist culture critics, though we complain about different things.

So let’s think through what it means to love one’s country. Let’s avoid the loaded terms “patriotism” and “nationalism” for now–not that there is necessarily anything wrong with them–but just to set aside all of the ideologies for a moment to zero in on what we should be feeling on this Independence Day and beyond.

I would like to propose some theses on love of country. (I can’t think of 95 of them, but if you can think of others, please add them in the comments.)

Theses on Love of Country

(1) Love of country is a virtue. Just as we should love our family simply because it’s our family, we should love our country simply because it’s our country.

(2) Love of country does not mean thinking it is without faults. We may have a family member who has gone off the rails in one way or another. We love them anyway. Same with our country.

(3) Love of country means we want it to overcome its faults. We can criticize it while still loving it. In fact, our love for it motivates our concern. As G. K. Chesterton has said,

To one who loves his fatherland, for instance, our boasted indifference to the ethics of a national war is mere mysterious gibberism. It is like telling a man that a boy has committed murder, but that he need not mind because it is only his son. Here clearly the word ‘love’ is used unmeaningly. . . .‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’ No doubt if a decent man’s mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.

(4) Our country is not the same as our government. We can dislike our government without disliking our country. Our country has a government, which changes periodically.

(5) Our country consists of the land, its people, their history, and their civilization. This is not the same as “culture,” since every state and region has its own cultures and sub-cultures. “Culture” has to do with the organic customs and folkways of a people, but “Civilization” has to do with the people’s accomplishments and contributions to the world.

(6) Citizenship is a vocation; therefore, we should love and serve our country. Luther said that God has ordained three “estates” for human flourishing: the family, the church, and the state. God calls us to stations, duties, and responsibilities in each of the three. And the purpose of all of the vocations in all of the estates is the same: to love and serve our neighbors. The country in which we live consists of neighbors whom we are to love and serve.

(7) People from every country should love their country. Love of homeland is a universal virtue, so it applies to every nation. People from other countries love their countries too.

(8) Love of country works against emigration, but it does not completely preclude it. Thesis #6 and thesis #7 would indicate that, in general, people should not leave their own countries to live in a different one. But the United States is a nation of immigrants, as are other countries, so that loving America recognizes that sometimes emigration is justified, because. . .

(9) Love of country is not the highest good. Some things are more important than love of country, such as love of God and love of family. Some immigrants, including confessional Lutherans, came to America for religious reasons, out of their higher commitment to God. Some came for economic reasons to better the condition of their family. Some fled political oppression out of a craving for liberty. Some came out of necessity, because they were driven out of their homes (Russian Jews), stolen from their homes (African slaves) or to escape starvation (the Irish). Immigrants often retain a love for their old homeland. But insofar as they assimilate to their new homeland, they come to love their new country.

Illustration: Independence Day by by Arvin61r58 via Openclipart, Public domain, CC0 1.0

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“Commitment to Follow Jesus” Surges

Last updated on: June 22, 2025 at 7:50 pm By Gene Veith

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The Barna Group, the evangelical research organization, has issued a report entitled New Research: Belief in Jesus Rises, Fueled by Younger Adults. “This shift is not only statistically significant,” says the tag line, “it may be the clearest indication of meaningful spiritual renewal in the U.S.”

Barna surveyed Americans to measure how many agree with this statement: “I have made a personal commitment to follow Jesus that is still important in my life today.”

The study found that 66% of Americans say that they have made such a commitment. This is a 12 point rise since 2021, when only 54% said they had made a personal commitment to Christ.

To take a larger view, in 2009, a high of 77% made that claim. Then the numbers fell year after year until 2020, when it hit that 54% low, which held stead in 2021. But since then, the numbers have shot upward in each of the next four years, hitting the 66% mark in 2025.

Barna notes that the higher numbers are driven by young men. The highest rate and the sharpest growth is among Millennial men at 71% (women, 64%), followed by Generation Z at 67% (women, 61%). Generation X (men, 66%; women, 64%) and Boomer rates (men, 66%; women, 62%) have been relatively flat since 2019. This data is in line with other research that has shown the historically unusual finding that men have become more religious than women. Though this study suggests this is not just a young adult phenomenon but that it holds for each generational cohort.

But what does this mean? Evangelicals, like the Barna researchers, believe that what saves a person is “making a personal commitment to Christ.” So it’s not surprising that the Barna team is overjoyed at these numbers. If two-thirds of Americans have made a personal commitment to Christ, then two-thirds are evangelical Christians and secularism is finished!

But a commitment is not the same thing as faith. A commitment ties in to “decision theology,” a once-in-a-lifetime choice that supposedly sets up the person who made it for eternity. But faith is a continual trust and dependence, an ongoing belief, a gift from God, created and nourished by the Holy Spirit through the Word and the Sacraments.

Also, since we can have faith in all kinds of things including ourselves, what makes faith saving is the object of the faith. For a Christian, this means faith in Christ, that He is true God and true Man, who died on the cross as an atoning sacrifice for our sins and who rose from the dead to give us new life that will extend into eternity.

Barna’s statement says nothing about who the person believes Jesus to be. The incarnation of God? A great moral teacher? Another prophet, as Muslims believe? A spiritual avatar as New Agers will say?

The statement also says that the commitment is to “follow” Jesus. That puts the nature of the commitment into a moral promise, to live as He lived, to do as He said. Good luck with keeping that commitment! But this is the extent of many people’s admiration of Jesus.

Saving faith begins with the realization that I don’t follow Jesus as I should, and that I need Him to save me! I need Him as my savior above all, and then I can acknowledge Him as my Lord.

Now I don’t want to throw cold water on those who told Barna that they have made a “personal commitment”–well, maybe I’d like to throw Baptismal water on them–because people mean different things by that. And saving faith in Christ no doubt includes a personal commitment. The Christian life is full of commitments to Christ, as evident in Baptism, Confirmation, Absolution, marriage, vocation, prayer, and on and on, though these are framed above all in terms of His commitment to us.

But the Barna study itself shows a curious fact:

Barna’s study compares findings in two similar but not identical survey questions: Christian self-identity and commitment to Jesus—that is, whether a person self-describes as Christian and whether a respondent indicates a commitment to Christ. Interestingly, responses to the two questions are not always in lock-step, reflecting that people are often a patchwork of religious beliefs and identities.

In other words, some people identify as Christian and others express commitment to Jesus, but these groups don’t always overlap. Almost 3 in 10 people who don’t identify as Christian say they have made a personal commitment to Jesus. This number is currently near an all-time high. This may be due to a combination of people returning to their faith and new people becoming interested in Jesus, without identifying as Christian. Many people are now open to spirituality and Jesus, but hesitant to embrace organized religion or identify as Christian.

So nearly a third of non-Christians have made a personal commitment to follow Jesus? The Barna researchers think this is good news and, in a sense, it might suggest an openness to hearing the Christian gospel.

“At this time, we are seeing interest in Jesus that is growing among those who do not otherwise describe themselves as Christians,” says David Kinnaman, the CEO of Barna, “indicating that many of the new followers of Jesus are not just ‘recycled’ believers.” Well, it also indicates that many of the new followers of Jesus are not believers in Jesus at all.

If a personal commitment to follow Jesus is all that is necessary, there is really no need for the church or for the Christian religion, with its theology, the Word, and the Sacraments. But the church is the Body of Christ, so it’s hardly possible to follow Christ while rejecting His Body.

And yet, that Jesus is such a compelling figure even to non-believers is certainly significant. Those who want to follow Jesus can be taught who it is they are following and those who make a commitment to Him can come to understand His commitment to them.

Let’s talk about that tomorrow.

Illustration: Follow Jesus by New Life Church Collingwood via Flickr, CC BY 2.0

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Why Suffering Does Not Negate the Goodness of Life

Last updated on: June 2, 2025 at 5:30 pm By Gene Veith

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Yesterday I posted about the pro-mortalists, those who believe that death or non-existence is better than life, because life includes suffering. The view that the fact of suffering negates the goodness of life is becoming more and more commonplace.

In researching that post, I came across something I wrote back in 2019. I wrote about anti-natalism and then moved to the reasons why their basic assumption is faulty. I think it’s worth re-posting today.

Especially notice the end of the piece, introduced by “FURTHER THOUGHTS.” Here I apply the discussion to theodicy, to the arguments that God doesn’t exist (or isn’t good, or isn’t all-powerful) because of all the suffering in the world.

I point out that even if God doesn’t exist, the problem of suffering remains, that there is a secular theodicy that human beings must face up to. Conversely, if suffering doesn’t negate the goodness of existence, as I argue, it doesn’t negate the goodness or the existence of God.

Due to the importance of this issue, I am making this a free post.

From my post The Belief That Being Alive is Always Bad (20 November 20, 2019):

. . . .The even bigger problem with anti-natalism is the notion that any suffering takes away all of the value of life. How can non-existence be better than suffering? Someone who does not exist can neither suffer, nor benefit from not suffering. And how can suffering negate the good in life?

I went to the dentist last week. It hurt. But the rest of that day–in which I spent time with my grandchildren, got some good work done, enjoyed my meals, read a fascinating book, reveled in the beautiful fall colors–was very enjoyable and satisfying. The time in which I was squirming in the dentist’s chair did not take away from any of that. Much less would that painful moment spoil my whole life.

Suffering is not always bad. The dentist who hurt me was not harming me; rather, he was helping me. Loving someone is a good thing, but it nearly always entails suffering, as when we worry about those we care about. Empathy–when we share in someone’s suffering–is good, though feeling it is painful. Suffering is certainly not the worst thing there is, as the anti-natalists make it to be. Pride, greed, selfishness, lying, stealing, hatred–in a word, sins–are immoral, but suffering is not immoral. The anti-natalist mindset, which shrinks from any kind of suffering, repudiates the virtues of courage, fortitude, and compassion. Murder would become a virtuous act, as long as it could be carried out painlessly.

Why is suffering the sole criterion for evaluating life? Instead of saying that a single experience of suffering makes life not worth living, why not say that a single experience of joy does make life worth living?

I recognize that some people whose lives are completely taken over by suffering may feel that it would be better if they were never born. Yes, the Bible sometimes talks that way: Solomon in his moment of pleasure-surfeited despair. Job in his torment. Judas in his damnation. But these texts do not deny the goodness of God’s creation or of His gift of life.

What puzzles me the most about the anti-natalists is their alliance with environmentalists. Surely to oppose reproduction is to oppose nature, as Darwinists would agree. Suffering, in the struggle for survival, is endemic in the natural order. And [David] Benatar accepts the implication of his theory. “Taken to its logical conclusion,” says the Guardian article, “it implies that not only humans but all sentient beings should be spared from life. As Benatar writes toward the end of the book, ‘it would be better if humans (and other species) became extinct.”

If the goal is to turn the earth into a barren planet like Mars, why wouldn’t anti-natalists hope for and work towards an environmental catastrophe that would wipe out not only human beings but all life forms?

Why are so many anti-natalists vegans, as the article reports they are? By their logic, killing animals should be considered a good thing, again, as long as they are slaughtered in a way that minimizes suffering.

Of course, we might believe that the anti-natalists are not serious, that philosophers like Benatar are engaged in a theoretical exercise. But I think anti-natalism may be the defining philosophy of our time, as it descends into decay, nihilism, and despair.

FURTHER THOUGHTS: The belief that the fact of suffering means that life is not worth living strikes me also as a secularized version of theodicy, the theological question of how a loving and all-powerful God can allow suffering. To many people today (though, curiously, not so much in the past), the reality of suffering in the world means that God cannot exist. But as Oswald Bayer has pointed out, if you eliminate God, the problem of suffering remains. How can life, how can existence itself, allow suffering? If suffering renders the existence of God immoral, it also makes life–and the existence of anything–immoral. And that is the conclusion of the anti-natalists.

I would argue the other way. Since the existence of suffering does NOT negate the goodness of life, it does not negate the goodness of God either. What we need today is a way to come to grips with suffering–not try to escape it at any cost or be paralyzed by it–but to recognize it as a part, not the whole, of the human condition and the nature of life. Moreover, as something that, as we try to alleviate suffering for ourselves and others, can actually give meaning to that life, through the evocation of compassion, love, strength, and faith in the Incarnate God who bears our griefs as well as our iniquities (Isaiah 53).

Photo: Surface of Mars, NASA/JPL/Cornell [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons*

[I used this photo in the original post to address the view expressed in a quotation from yesterday’s post: “Antinatalism is a spectrum. Some believe that there should be no sentient life, including animals or even technology with the potential for sentience, like artificial intelligence. Others think it’s just humans that should go extinct.” So is the surface of Mars better (because there is no suffering there) than the surface of Earth, teeming with life (which sometimes suffers)?]