---

AI has been receiving lots of negative news lately. Two areas of concern include fears over the voracious appetite AI data centers have for electricity and water and the layoffs experienced by workers whose employers speculate that AI will improve their competitiveness by saving them money.

Some of the job losses were justified by company managers as a tradeoff, a reaction to counter the tremendous expenditures those companies made on AI services. The Financial Times reported in July that Amazon had spent $1.8 million using Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet tool, despite the deployment ultimately failing. This 860% budget overrun was not from a naive startup but from one of the largest and most sophisticated users of information technology. Likewise, another software intensive company, Uber, blew its entire annual AI coding budget by April of 2026.

I’ve been watching this phenomenon unfold from the sidelines. I am socially aware of the impact this can have on my fellow humans, not unlike the concern I share with them over the gargantuan $40,000,000,000 (Forty Trillion Dollar) debt my country has amassed. But I’ll admit to feeling a bit aloof since, being retired, I can’t lose MY job to an AI. Or so I thought…

A bit of background. I learned home repair by watching my dad. He was able to fix anything. His motto was “you can do any job with the right tools.” He rarely had the right tools so cobbling something to something so he could jigger it into working was his claim to fame. Together we set engine timing belts, repaired running toilets, fixed crackling light switches, got sluggish lawn mowers running again, and even quieted noisy garbage disposals. I watched and learned, often merely holding the flashlight and only occasionally needing to be shouted back into the here-and-now when my mind, and my flashlight’s aim, wandered.

Fast forward to the day I moved out on my own. My dad sent me on my way, armed me with years of witnessed memories and a thick copy of the “Time-Life Book of Home Repair”. At the time, this was the gospel of DIY (do it yourself). That book series had just about everything you’d need to know to be an effective handyman. I happily used it for years only to have its might and muscle supplanted by…YouTube! Rather than struggle reviewing lifeless still photos, YouTubers could show me, with one hand while juggling their camera in the other, how they fixed a leaky car radiator or replaced a flat bike tire tube. So long as my computer was nearby, I was confident a repairman, presuming I could find a relevant helpful video.

Now to the usurping of YouTube and its role as gospel in the DIY world. I first tried ChatGPT back in 2022, about ten generations ago in AI years (not really but it has advanced in leaps and bounds since then.) Initially, I asked it questions as a shortcut to doing my own Google research, like answering the question, how many miracles did Jesus perform in the Bible. Or what can be done about the country’s $30 Trillion debt (that’s right, it was ten trillion smaller just four years ago!). While hoping to learn something new I wanted to take into consideration the chronological sequence of Jesus’ miracles. I remember asking which of the miracles performed by Jesus was his first miracle. The AI responded that the first miracle Jesus performed was “the raising of John the Baptist from the dead”. I paused in shock and realized that despite costing billions and representing the pinnacle of human information systems, I would never be able to take what an AI said as, well, gospel.  (The first miracle was of course turning water into wine as detailed in John 2:1-11. The second was convincing his mother to not brag about him. But I digress…)

In the years since, ChatGPT has become a tool I use daily while helping friends and neighbors get printers printing, computers computing, and iPhones phoning. I am a pretend expert, performing near miracles of my own, far beyond what I could do if solely based on what I’ve personally learned firsthand.

As one day of retirement blended into all the others, I realized the number of “hey Dad, quick question” calls I was getting recently had plummeted dramatically. I used to get calls asking for my help combating running toilets, fixing flat tires, jumping dead batteries, and goading unresponsive dishwashers into doing their job. I also got questions about making safe investments, treating stomach ailments, and how to get the best deal on a new car.

As I’ve noticed the frequency of those calls has fallen off precipitously in recent years, I wondered aloud if I’d I lost my job as “Frankipedia”.  (This was a nickname given to me by middle schoolers in my Sunday School class for my ability to remain unstumped when discussing just about anything – hey, they were just kids!)

Maybe it’s the natural evolution of all things. Maybe becoming dispensable is a testimony to the good job I did preparing my kids for independence. If I am losing my job as “dad”, I hope those who used to turn to me and find themselves turning to AI for answers, remember, it is not the gospel.

To fill the growing void in having a purpose, I’ve taken to volunteering to help others with their home projects. As long as those projects are limited to computers, TV’s, phones, and other companions in our digital life, I think I have the right tool to help. And if they want to know the good news, I know I have the right tool to help. My heavenly father gave me that book.

---

Writers Block