Millions recently read about normal-guy Paul Conyngham’s resourcefulness when it was revealed he did what doctors couldn’t in creating an effective, customized vaccine for his dog stricken with terminal illness, but far fewer caught the later-revealed fact that while ChatGPT was credited as the AI model Conyngham used to navigate the labyrinth of mRNA vaccine creation, it was actually Grok that produced the final, winning design.
Perhaps “normal guy” is an understatement. Conyngham is an Australian tech entrepreneur. When his adopted dog Rosie was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he paid a lab $3,000 to perform DNA sequencing analysis on both Rosie and the precise cancer Rosie was fighting. Then, he used AI tools such as AlphaFold to process the sequencing analysis. Finally, he deployed Grok to design the bespoke mRNA vaccine, which was ultimately produced by university partners (evidently available for consult or perhaps inspired by Conyngham’s devotion to his dog).
What are the odds that this is all just going to spontaneously work out?
Despite his unusual skills and network, however, Conyngham didn’t go viral for those. Rather, his story resonated because his can-do sense of initiative is something anyone can tap into, with potentially lifesaving results. At the time of this writing, despite doctors’ predictions, Rosie the dog is alive and thriving. Her illness has not entirely abated, but her owner’s ingenuity and persistence, combined with his layman’s agility around LLMs, has reduced the most life-threatening tumors by 75%.
How then, from this straightforward set of events, did ChatGPT wind up taking the credit until the record was corrected weeks later? When I asked Grok (which, being made up of timelines, is pretty reliable in accessing and reassessing events), I got the rather noncommittal suggestion that the misattribution was due to institutional inertia.
Perhaps.
Hungry for more, I dug into a much deeper human analysis of the man-saves-dog episode. Jordan Hall, another tech entrepreneur-turned-philosopher, posted a series of viral X articles addressing the economic shift to a total, global AI underlayer to the economy (and thus, every aspect of human life). In his second installment, “The Great Transition: The Divine Economy,” Hall sketches his vision for a coherent implementation of AI into this overarching position of importance.
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Photo Credit Olga Novikova/Getty Images
Readers are strongly encouraged to read Hall’s series of articles in its entirety. It’s fascinating and endlessly ponderable. All told, in anticipation of a global upheaval of biblical proportions — yes, we’ve heard this for years; despite the wait, it’s coming — Hall suggests we’ll turn the wheel over to the Church.
“The Church has always been an economic institution,” he argues, “whether it acknowledged it or not. Mutual aid, vocational, formation, capital pooling, trust networks — these are ancient practices. What changes now is that AI collapses the constraints that made those practices uncompetitive against industrial-scale consolidation. On Earth as it is in Heaven.”
In the case of Rosie and her owner, just a few questions illustrate the complexity and potential for malfeasance in our AI age. Who owns the Grok-derived vaccine recipe? Who owns Rosie’s DNA? Can it be sold? Who should benefit? If DNA data is “scraped” in some manner similar to how novels, television shows, and musical recordings are more or less pilfered, what are the limits of DNA and data ownership, if any? Can it be simply destroyed, in the same way the owner of a patch of grass can burn it should he so desire?
Hall’s analysis implies that, in the end, these are spiritual questions that can only be answered spiritually — and people hungry for fast answers they can trust will turn to the place where such answers have been on offer for thousands of years.
For now, Rosie’s owner was able to slip through the cracks of institutional, veterinary, and judicial red tape using wit and, let’s face it, the collective human affection for dogs. Hall predicts a situation where the collective, decentralized power of human faculties — made hyper-potent via leveraging AI and functioning on the timeless spiritual foundation of the Church — robustly addresses the AI age’s vast issues of greed, misallocation, misuse, and abuse of resources. Restricted to the secular level, discussions about these problems almost always find themselves mired in the dialectic between Marx and Smith, communism versus capitalism. Unable to innovate our way out of the impasse, will our eyes turn at last to the divine economy?
If a few years pass, the AI compactor consolidating everything into data will likely squeeze out new, perhaps unimaginable forms of computational power. The fight to capture and control that power is raging right now. Looking at the brokers, politicians, and players, accounting for history and human nature, what are the odds that this is all just going to spontaneously work out — such that good-willed efforts like those of Conyngham continue freely, without surveillance or exploitation? We’ll soon see if we’re willing to adopt the forms of social organization it takes to keep cyberspace so free, open, and fruitful.
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