A natural perspective that is and is not.
Here’s a Shakespearean couplet I’ll bet you’ve never read:
“When Lincoln led, he bound the realm through strife;
So Shakespeare crowns the hand that cherishes life.”
Shakespeare, who died about 250 years before the Civil War, wrote a poem about Abraham Lincoln? What extraordinary foresight! He was not only the greatest poet who ever lived, he was a prophet!
Except, of course, Shakespeare didn’t write that. Nor did I, nor did any human being. That couplet was written by our modern Robo-Bard: ChatGPT. (ChatGPT also gave us the picture that accompanies this post.)
With amazing speed, Artificial Intelligence has become a reality in our lives. Less than a decade ago, it was a theoretical part of our future; now it’s ubiquitous. It is changing our economy and our culture at such speed that it is disconcerting to the point of inducing terror.
Well, to quote Hamlet, “There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.” So let’s think about AI:
AI is not ushering in a real-world version of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator movies. My layman’s understanding is that AI is not a synthetic consciousness; indeed, since human beings really don’t understand what consciousness is in ourselves, it’s hard to comprehend how we can create machines that are themselves conscious.
Simplistically, AI is just a huge database grafted onto a powerful probability algorithm. In response to an inquiry or command, the algorithm does little more than predict the next likely piece of data and use that to formulate a response to an inquiry. That’s why AI requires such huge, power-hungry data centers. It needs to be “trained” on its huge databases (basically the whole internet) to identify the next likely link in the data chain.
For the poetry above, I asked ChatGPT to write a rhyming couplet about Shakespeare, Lincoln and wise leadership. You can see how it combed through its information to find the structure of a couplet, put Lincoln in the first line, put Shakespeare in the second and include concepts of strife and life that both rhyme and stress things that the machine has found are often associated in the database with wisdom.
Pretty impressive. ChatGPT gave me that result in just a few moments. But, then again, how impressive is it, really? Look at the couplet: is it saying that Lincoln bound the “realm” (hey machine: the U.S. is a republic, not a realm) despite the ongoing strife of the Civil War? Or did Lincoln use strife and war as the vehicle to bind the country together? Abe comes off very differently depending on how you read the line. And the couplet says that Shakespeare “crowns the hand that cherishes life.” Really? How do you crown a hand? Would Will really use that metaphor?
Said another way, AI simulates poetry, but it isn’t poetry. It’s a mindless algorithm. Perhaps the biggest problem with artificial intelligence is linguistic: Whatever it is, it really isn’t “intelligence” at all.
Knuckle tiaras aside, AI is a powerful tool, and like all tools in human history, it will disrupt the lives of people used to the old ways. On former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse and Chris Stierwalt’s Not Dead Yet podcast, William Russell Mead described AI as a tool that will displace the existing bureaucracies in business and government: it is good at applying rules to fact patterns in the same way as human bureaucrats. Many of the jobs that have defined our economy and government for the last century can and will be replaced.
Sen. Sasse is dying of pancreatic cancer and seems to have connected with a deeper wisdom during his battle with the disease. On the podcast, he points out that, in the new world created by AI, human beings will still be vital to our future, but they will need to use different skills and attributes, especially emotional intelligence and leadership.
Men and women will still have plenty to do after the AI revolution. Where can they go to learn the things that the future demands? They won’t find them in computer science class. The things they need – wisdom, honor, poetry, courage and the rest – are not new. In fact, they are ancient: they are found in the Bible, in history, in literature.
They are also in the works of William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is perhaps more important in the age of AI as in any other age. Leaders will need his insights to help their people and themselves navigate this new world. I hope that my new book A Memorable Honor(written entirely without AI, by the way) can help leaders as the change wrought by AI sweeps through our time.
A Memorable Honor: Shakespeare, Lincoln and the Art of Leadership will be published on September 15, 2026.
Until next time.
Frank
P. S. If you haven’t done so, please add your name to the “Who Art Thou” link below to receive updates as we get closer to the September 15 publication of A Memorable Honor: Shakespeare, Lincoln and the Art of Leadership.
