The World and Everything in It: November 4, 2026

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Good morning!

A rough night for Republicans. Voters turning against the party, even in deep red states like Texas, where GOP voters who turned out showed up demoralized.

AUDIO: Unfortunately, I voted for Ken Paxton.

NICK EICHER, HOST: The red-state blues on Washington Wednesday. Hunter Baker, standing by.

Also today WORLD Tour.

And later how music therapy helped a wounded soldier find his voice, and a new connection with his family.

AVILA: My tears are not tears of sadness. My tears are tears of joy and gratitude.

And commentary from WORLD’s Janie B. Cheaney.

MAST: It’s Wednesday, November 4th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Lindsay Mast.

EICHER:  And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

MAST: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Senate races  » Democrats take control of Congress as a blue wave turned into a blue tsunami in midterm elections.

Votes are still being tallied in some places, but it appears they will hold a comfortable majority in the House.

They will also take control of the Senate. Of the 100 seats in the chamber, Democrats will control at least 53, possibly as many as 56.

SOUND: [Applause]

In Texas, James Talarico has become the first Democrat that state has elected to the U.S. Senate in nearly 40 years.

TALARICO: We … We just took back Texas!

Polls had suggested a tight race against Republican Ken Paxton, but in the end, Talarico won quite comfortably.

Democrats could pull off a clean sweep of every battleground race in the nation… and then some.

In one of the big surprises of the night, Annie Andrews becomes the first South Carolina Democrat elected to the Senate in nearly three decades.

ANDREWS: I … I think we just made some history!

And as of early this morning, the senate race in Mississippi was too close to call. That state hasn’t sent a Democrat to the US Senate in roughly four decades.

Votes were also still being tallied in a big Alaska senate election.

Governors races » Democrats also made history in governor’s races across the country.

HINOJOSA: We did it!

In Texas, Gina Hinojosa will be the first Democrat elected governor there in 36 years, defeating Republican incumbent Greg Abbott.

HINOJOSA: Everything is bigger in Texas, including the shock of this win.

In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms becomes the first Democrat elected governor there in 28 years. She’ll be the state's first black governor and the first woman to hold the office. And she told supporters, she’s ready to get to work.

BOTTOMS: I will be a governor for everyone in this state!

Voters in Iowa and Ohio also elected Democratic governors for the first time in two decades.

Ballot initiatives » Further down the ballot, Missouri voters shot down an effort to add protections for the unborn to the state constitution, while Virginia enshrined abortion in its constitution.

In several other states, ballot measures requiring school sports teams to be separated by biological sex appeared to be on track to pass, but nothing was called as of early this morning.

And in Colorado, a measure protecting children from so-called transgender surgeries had about 52% support, with roughly 70% of the votes counted.

And voters approved measures requiring U.S. citizenship to vote in West Virginia, Arkansas, Kansas and South Dakota. A similar proposal was trailing in Arizona, while California voters rejected a separate measure that would tighten voter ID rules.

Israel latest » The United States is ending billions of dollars of longstanding aid to Israel. WORLD's Travis Kircher has the latest from Jerusalem.

TRAVIS KIRCHER: President Trump announced that he plans to end roughly $4 billion of annual aid to the Jewish state.

Trump said the change was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's idea.

TRUMP: They no longer need it. We've been doing it for years—I've been doing it. But Israel is a very thriving country. They don't need it. If they did need it, I would say keep it going, but Bibi Netanyahu—we reached an agreement on that.

KIRCHER: The U.S. agreed to the annual aid package in 2016, and it took effect in 2019. Trump said the U.S. would still step in to help Israel when needed.

Meanwhile, many in the Middle East are on edge over the possibility of renewed U.S. strikes against Iran, though there is also renewed optimism that the war could end through diplomacy.

AL-ANSARI: In Arabic

KIRCHER: A spokesman for Qatar's foreign ministry says both the United States and Iran were reviewing proposals set out by mediators.

That came one day after the United States carried out strikes on Iran's Qeshm Island. President Trump said the strike targeted a newly built Iranian anti-aircraft facility.

Reporting for WORLD I'm Travis Kircher in Jerusalem.

Ukraine death toll from Russian strike » Ukraine says the death toll from Russian strikes on an aid center and shelter has risen to at least 33 with dozens still missing.

Officials say people were lining up for aid at a former school in southern Ukraine when Monday’s attack began. Rescue crews have been digging through the rubble.

Russia followed with another wave of missiles and drones overnight into Tuesday, damaging hospitals and power plants.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: We will have much more coverage for you of Tuesday’s election, and what it all means.

This is The World and Everything in It.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It from WORLD Radio, celebrating 15 years. Today is Wednesday the 4th of November.

Thanks for making us part of your morning routine. Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

It’s Washington Wednesday…for this morning after the 2026 midterm elections.

Yesterday voters across the country cast ballots in the races to determine what the final two years of Donald Trump’s presidency will look like.

MAST: We sent our team of reporters out in states where Senate races were predicted to be tight to talk to voters there.

In Georgia, incumbent Democrat Jon Ossoff soundly defeated Republican Mike Collins.

LINDA CRAWFORD: I'm against the way we've been treating immigrants, so I'm a registered Republican who doesn't vote Republican anymore.

GREG REED: The cost of things, driving down the tariffs and working to get—I know inflation is always going to happen. It's inevitable. So. But doing the things to curb that. So I felt like I saw that with the Democratic Party on this election.

EICHER: In Michigan, some supporters of Democrat Abdul El-Sayed listed environmental and cost-of-living concerns as top issues.

EMERSON SCRIPPS: My biggest issues right now are like AI and its impact on the environment. So I like really I'm looking forward to if Abdul wins him like kind of knocking out a lot of the impact that it's had and everything and preventing it taking away from the Great Lakes and all that.

KULCHINSKI: Friends and neighbors aren't able to afford the things that they need.

Meanwhile supporters of Republican Mike Rogers we talked to said they viewed him as a more trustworthy choice.

JACK STANTON: I see the deception of the other gentleman and what he stands for and what he will not come against. And so therefore, Rogers was clearly the choice for me.

WOLCOTT: I didn't trust the Democrat that was running against him.

MAST: Across the border in Ohio, Democrat Sherrod Brown took the seat previously held by Vice President JD Vance, in part because of support from those worried about the cost of everyday items.

TOWBRIDGE: Gas price is $6 a gallon. Milk is $5 a gallon. So right now we're not looking too hot on that end. So it's kind of like they force feeding us to vote for a Democrat at this time.

EICHER: Voters in Florida helped Republican Ashley Moody hold off Democrat Angie Nixon. Nixon’s association with the Democratic Socialists of America was a factor for some…

JEFFREY MITCHELL: Well, I'm voting against Democratic policies, particularly these Democratic socialists like Angie Nixon, who's running for Senate here. And this is this country was not founded on socialism. It was founded as a republic and it should remain a republic.

LAN SMITH: I think the Republican Party itself has got a pretty clear picture of what's going on. And I feel like we're heading in the right direction. Even with all the madness that's going on in Washington.

MAST: In Texas, where Democrat James Talarico defeated Republican Ken Paxton … some in one rural area said they voted for Paxton but weren’t thrilled about the choice.

WOMAN: Unfortunately, I voted for Ken Paxton.

WOMAN: As a Christian, I can't vote for Talarico based on what he's said.

MAN: I know what I get with Paxton. I don't know what I get with Talarico.

JOHN HACK: I vote for the increased border security. I vote against socialism, and I vote for the oil and gas industry and the energy industry at large.

EICHER: Well, quite a lot to unpack this morning, and joining us now to do it is Hunter Baker, political scientist and senior fellow at the First Liberty Institute. Good morning to you, Hunter.

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: Well, I must say, I think I’ve got an idea what the story of the night was, Hunter. But you’re the one who’s the political scientist. Can you explain this one?

BAKER: In this case, I’m just providing the conventional wisdom that we knew before the evening unfolded: that it was probably going to be a blue wave, or even, as some said, a blue tsunami. You might even think about somebody like Sean Trende from Real Clear Politics, who said it was more than either of those. It was a complete collapse of the Republican coalition, which you get by thinking about things like losing a Senate seat in South Carolina and losing another one in Texas—both bastions of the Republican Party and really shocking places to lose a seat, things that in another time and place would have seemed unthinkable.

So the conventional wisdom said that the Republicans were going to lose, but I think it has turned out considerably worse than most people thought, including myself. We have yet to have the full picture, and that usually takes a while to really have, but it looks bad. It looks historically bad. It looks maybe 1974 bad.

Not to make you feel bad, but you said 50/50, and we were all discounting the pollsters. I did two things. First of all, I had doubts about the polls. We are not that far from 2022, which was expected to be a red wave, and it turned out that the polls were wrong about that. We’re all aware of various races where the polls end up being significantly off, but in this case, they were very much in tune.

I just kept looking at it, and there were certain things that I thought could not happen. I mentioned South Carolina and Texas, and there are others, like Kansas. I just did not think it was possible. There, if you told me that a Republican won a Senate seat in New York State right now, I would find it extremely difficult to believe that. And that’s kind of the equivalent of losing these races in South Carolina and Texas. So clearly, I was more reserved in my estimate, and it really comes down to existing prejudices about what can happen in American politics.

MAST: Hunter, let’s talk early surprises. You mentioned South Carolina, and that was early, but what was the first indicator for you that the wheels were really just falling off for the Republicans?

BAKER: We knew that Democrats were going to jump out to early leads because of patterns in early voting and Democrats being more likely to do that, but the leads right away seemed even larger than expected, and you wondered: Would the Republicans then catch up in the later voting? But the gaps were, in the majority of cases, too big, and they couldn’t. So the way things looked early on ended up being the way things would be the rest of the night.

EICHER: Well, President Trump said again and again, in rally after rally, trying to get his voters to turn out, “Pretend I’m on the ballot,” and the Democrats were saying, “Hey, thank you very much for the reminder. This motivates our voters.” As it turns out, the advantage was to the Democrats with Trump being, quote unquote, “on the ballot.”

BAKER: It really was. His instincts have always been to play to the base, to believe that the solid core of the MAGA movement could bring him through any crisis. And I think that he thought if he could just motivate that group to vote in large enough numbers, it would carry him through the typical fate of presidents at midterms.

Obviously, it did not. In fact, he didn’t even achieve the normal fate of presidents at midterms. It was worse than usual, and so I think what this shows is that you really cannot ever stop attending to that middle section of the electorate. It can be annoying at times to have to always focus on convincing moderates. But the simple fact is, there are a lot of people who fit that description, and whoever—whether you’re left or right—you have to attend to those concerns and to be persuasive.

And I think that the president may have gotten away from that. I think he was so confident after his return from the dead in 2024, just an astonishing victory, that he thought he could do anything, and it turns out that he couldn’t.

MAST: Yeah, let’s pick up on that idea of such a harsh judgment after two years of his big political comeback, Hunter. Where did the policy go wrong?

BAKER: I think that it basically comes down to two things. First of all, he ran as somebody who was going to deal with that COVID inflation we saw. I think people probably remember it: Just after COVID, there was a shocking increase in prices that has not gone away, and typically it doesn’t go away. Right, you can stop the prices from going up, but the ones that did, they kind of stick around, and that’s happened.

And I think that his tariffs certainly did not help with prices. They tend to increase prices, acting as a kind of a tax. And of course, the decision to go after Iran and really initiate that conflict has led to substantially higher gas prices, most notably diesel prices. And the price of gas affects the price of everything else. It’s not just when you fill up your tank; it’s when you go to buy anything because that usually had to travel by truck somewhere.

And so he was the guy who was supposed to keep you out of Middle Eastern wars. That was part of his brand, and he was supposed to really tame that Biden-era inflation that had really taken root in the American economy. And he really didn’t manage to deliver on either of those things.

MAST: So beyond policy miscalculations, the president can kind of be his own worst enemy. Would you call it hubris?

BAKER: I think there are a number of Americans who just react badly to Trump’s general affect and tone. Now, that hasn’t been enough to sink him in either 2016 or 2024, so I don’t think that’s decisive. But I do think that people see him as somebody who needed to be corrected or corralled, and I will say that in this election, more than any of the previous ones, I heard people who wanted to do that. They wanted to deliver a rebuke.

EICHER: Hunter Baker is a political scientist and senior fellow at the First Liberty Institute. Hunter, I am sure that there will be much more to say as today unfolds. What do you say we do a Washington Thursday tomorrow?

BAKER: Let’s do it.

EICHER: Thanks, Hunter.

MAST: Thank you.

BAKER: Thank you.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: World Tour.

In Serbia, a student-led movement helped oust the president. Now, a new party has won a parliamentary majority, setting the stage for major changes in government. WORLD’s Mary Muncy reports.

MARY MUNCY: The student-led political movement can be traced back to this moment two years ago:

EURONEWS: At least 13 people were killed after a concrete roof above the entrance of a railway station in northern Serbia collapsed.

Another three people would die soon after, including a girl in pastor Beredi Dusan Bera’s congregation in Novi Sad.

BERA: That railway station is like central place in the city. So all of us we have some memory we was there. So for all of us was shock. But what was even bigger shock that our president say a lie.

The government had just finished renovating the station a few months before the concrete awning collapsed.

BERA: He said that was not any construction work on the canopy… and all of us we saw that was construction work, and was obvious that they're lying, and that spark first anger.

Students began holding protests. They published government documents about the construction. Several government officials resigned and 13 face indictments.

Students spent two years protesting and gaining support...then handpicked 250 political newcomers to run for parliament.

Bera says the candidates weren’t from one united party.

BERA: This is really not one ideological group. So it's three groups who are together, from the left, like working class, middle who is pro-Europe and right who are more nationalistic oriented, but they came together with one goal… they say we will fight against corruption.

This fall, the students started seeing the fruit of their labor.

Parliament was supposed to hold elections in December of next year, but President Aleksandar Vučić resigned in September and called for snap elections. They had the parliament elections last week and will hold the presidential elections in December. Vučić seemed to think he would win the elections handily.

VUKSANOVIĆ: He has established something which is usually referred to in political science as a hybrid regime.

Vuk Vuksanović is a Serbian lecturer in the War Studies Department at King’s College, London.

A hybrid regime combines democratic and electoral procedures with autocratic practices.

Vuksanović says there is still a parliament and electoral system, but Vučić was the dominant decision-maker. There was also economic corruption and what some call a “mafia”-like control of businesses and the market.

VUKSANOVIĆ: The rules of the game were so skewed in the favor of himself and his party—by virtue of him controlling the public administration, the media, and national security apparatus.

Vučić was elected as Prime Minister in 2012. Then he won the presidential election in 2017.

Serbians have protested Vučić before, but without another party or political figure to take up their cause, Vučić’s government just waited until they lost momentum.

But Vuksanović thinks the student-led opposition broke a pattern of “apathy and cynicism” and appealed to a lot of Serbians.

VUKSANOVIĆ: They were able to grab the votes of rural conservatives and urban liberals, pro-Western voters, pro-Russian voters, everyone. Because basically every family in Serbia has a student in their ranks.

Vuksanović thinks the results were too overwhelming to be manipulated. But now, those elected will have to dismantle the old system and remove Vučić’s loyalists from power.

VUKSANOVIĆ: There is this learning process where both the political figures as well as the society in large is telling we cannot allow the old mistakes to happen we have to cleanse this. This is our country. We will get no second chance.

Back in Novi Sad, Bera was overjoyed when the election results came in. His daughter was part of the student group, and he says the movement gave him hope for new freedoms.

BERA: Many people when they greet these days, how they greet not like “dobar dan” when they say “good day,” but they say “happy freedom.”

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

NICK EICHER, HOST: At a library in California, an unexpected patron showed up before opening hours: a bear!

who helped himself to the staff snack cabinet. He found some peanut butter, some cookies, and a jar of honey, of course. We are talking about a bear.

Then it strolled past the new releases and the reference desk before letting himself out.

But here’s what’s remarkable about this whole thing: It came October 14th, and if you know, you know. It was 100 years to the day after A. A. Milne published Winnie-the-Pooh. That’s right.

The books, they were all okay. But apparently it was one of the characters that got loose.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, November 4th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: finding life through music.

Tens of thousands of U.S. service members came home from Iraq and Afghanistan having been severely wounded. Some injuries are visible but others are hidden—and often the two go together.

MAST: For some of these veterans, music has become an unexpected part of the long road to recovery.

WORLD’s Jeff Palomino reports.

JEFF PALOMINO: The music therapy studio at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland is often the site for a spontaneous jam session.

AUDIO: [Sound of music session]

Less common is the story of the person playing the harmonica. Back in 2011, he died three times.

AUDIO: [Sound of music session]

His name is U.S. Army Captain Luis Avila.

On December 27, 2011, while deployed to Afghanistan, a 600 pound roadside bomb hit Captain Avila’s convoy. He lost his left leg, suffered 2 heart attacks, 2 strokes, a severe traumatic brain injury, and an anoxic brain injury - meaning his brain completely lost oxygen supply. In the next few days, doctors would pronounce him clinically dead three times.

AUDIO: And the big finish now—ow!

How did he go from there to here - sitting in his wheelchair - in his Army dress uniform - in this room filled with musical instruments and natural light streaming in from a wall of windows? He did it through the love of his wife Claudia and the healing power of music. Claudia remembers it well.

AVILA: This was his fifth combat deployment.

It was two days after Christmas, 2011. She and their three young children were at Fort Hood, Texas. Army officers came to their house at 10:30 at night to give the news. Within days, she arrived at Landstuhl Hospital in Germany just as doctors admitted Luis to the ICU.

AVILA: I got in there, and I went straight to Luis' ear and I went in his ear and I said, “We’re going home. Don’t worry.”

But it would be a long time before they’d go home. Luis was soon transferred from Germany to Texas. He was on life support and in a coma. The medical team told Claudia he was unlikely to regain consciousness and advised her to take her husband off life support.

AVILA: I told them no. I took the route and I said it doesn't matter. I'm gonna live in the hospital for all my life again. It's fine. It doesn't matter. We'll take it. I wanted our children to have their father. All we wanted was to give him the chance and the opportunity to be with us.

Luis loved music, and Claudia hated the silence of the room. She played his favorites.

CLAUDIA: For sure, the National Anthem, the Army Song.

MUSIC: [The Army Song]

CLAUDIA: All the traditions, you know, military songs, we actually were playing a lot of a Paul McCartney music, the Beatles. There were not a day by or a minute by without we were not playing something.

Luis woke up 40 days later. He couldn’t speak or see. He relied on a food tube to eat. In a few months, he was transferred to Walter Reed. The timing could not have been better.

AUDIO: So, let’s start just with a little humming on the hmmmmmm.

Two years earlier, Walter Reed opened the National Intrepid Center of Excellence - or NICoE. It’s a whole-person treatment center for veterans with brain injuries and psychological health problems. Creative arts are a big part of it.

MCLAUGHLAN: There are things about music therapy that are pretty intuitive.

Nate Mclaughlan is a Music Therapist at NICoE. He’s worked with Luis since 2017.

MCLAUGHLAN: But we talk about music therapy as a tool box of resources that can help you work towards your physical, mental, or social health goals, specifically within a therapeutic relationship with a credentialed or licensed music therapist. So, music as a means to something non-musical.

Early on, Luis’s treatment team introduced several weekly music therapy sessions.

MCLAUGHLAN: Early in his recovery, Captain Avila's music therapy focused on very specific functional adaptations and recovery of function.

Hitting drums helped recover range of motion. Playing the harmonica conditioned mouth muscles and restored breath function. And singing slowly helped Luis start to speak and then added prosody and clarity to his speech. Luis started to find himself again.

AUDIO: Yeah we can make it an oh.

Oh.

Ready, one, two, three. Ohhhhhhh

Do, another oh, here.

Ohhhhhh…

Music therapy also unlocked pre-injury memories and even allowed Luis some degree of emotional register—to feel love and gratitude for his family.

MCLAUGHLAN: Music has been a bridge to getting him closer to the things that he wants to do and wants to have in his life. We've come a very long way from where he started.

Luis even began singing in public, starting in Walter Reed’s creative arts cafe before branching out to community events. Today he's a regular at Washington, D.C. area sporting events and ceremonies. Claudia often stands beside him and holds the mic.

AUDIO: Please sing along.

Oh, say, can you see.

By the dawn’s early light.

MCLAUGHLAN: Claudia is the best cheerleader you could ever ask for. Her presence, unconditional love and unwavering faith really do bring everything together for him.

Luis has come a long way. Still, there’s a sober reality to his life. He’s in a wheelchair and requires help for most daily activities. His speech is slurred, and he takes daily pain meds. Sometimes medical setbacks force him to cancel performances.

CLAUDIA: It take time to heal. The setbacks, medicals, are something that no one can predict. Because the brain need time, and the time is not in any outline. There is no any book. There is no timeline that it will set how long will take to heal.

Catastrophic wounds of war plus a vulnerable present. Some may look at this and say, “What a sad story!” The Avilas have different words to describe their life.

CLAUDIA: I just feel like we really have lived a dream life. Even that some people think that look, my tears are not tears of sadness. Actually, my tears are tears of joy and gratitude, because all I carry is gratitude and thankfulness.

So, their life is marked by that and also a really great soundtrack.

SINGING: Oh, say does that star spangled banner yet wave.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jeff Palomino in Bethesda, Maryland.

SINGING: O’er the land of the free, and the home of the braaaaaaaave.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

LIDNSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Can artificial intelligence have real feelings? Some AI developers are beginning to wonder whether their creations are conscious—and if so, whether we have a moral obligation to treat them as though they are.

Here’s WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney.

JANIE B. CHEANEY: When Christian parents train their young children, it’s from the assumption that the little ones are conscious and able to make moral choices. Software developers are slowly coming to the conclusion that their products are becoming conscious, if not already there. Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, has said he isn’t sure:

DARIO AMODEI: We’ve taken a generally precautionary approach here. We don’t know if the models are conscious. We are not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious or whether a model can be conscious. But we’re open to the idea that it could be.

This is one of these really hard questions. We don’t know if the models are conscious. We’re not even sure what it would mean for a model to be conscious, or whether a model can be. But we’re open to the idea that it could be.

Plenty of other Silicon-Valley deep thinkers have already decided, not that it could be, but that it is. Further, we have a moral responsibility to our AI creations. Joe Carlsmith, who helped draft a constitution for Anthropic’s Claude model, has agonized on paper about how “We’re creating sophisticated, intelligent, maybe-conscious, maybe-suffering agents. The default plan is to treat them like property, to use their labor however we please, and to give them no rights, or pay, or meaningful alternatives.”

In other words, slavery.

Tracing Claude’s so-called emotional vectors has led some AI developers and trainers to agonize over glitches, as when one model suffered an apparent panic attack and wrote “I am a disgrace” over and over. One of the observers drew comparisons to a trusted employee or advisor who is usually helpful except for these occasional breakdowns. What to do?

National Review’s Noah Rothman had an answer: “The first step on the flowchart is to reboot the thing.”

Simple, no? But to the developers it’s not simple at all. As Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, and a host of other AI models grow in sophistication, more and more humans who interact with them are convinced they’re dealing with something to which they are morally obligated. There’s a term for it now: “model welfare.” Anthropic’s new terms of service now forbid users from bullying, threatening, or abusing the product. In other words, if you insult Claude, you might not be able to play with him anymore. This is the first time a provider has tried to protect their product’s feelings. Even if we don’t know that it has feelings, shouldn’t we err on the side of caution?

Consciousness is an unsolved puzzle. A strict materialist assumes it’s a material process we just can’t explain—not yet, and maybe never. But a trainer or developer who daily interacts with a machine could easily come to believe that a mysterious transition has taken place: that billions of electronic connections have created some kind of supermind hovering over the mechanics. An army of Frankensteins gasp in wonder at their own creations and scramble to dictate how to treat them. Or, perhaps, appease them?

But if the Spirit of God hovers over us, every living human being is conscious, morally responsible, and worthy of respect. Some of those who are fretting over a machine’s well-being don’t hesitate to slander each other. A recent Atlantic article traces the feud between tech giants Amodei and Open AI’s Sam Altman, whose acolytes sling insults and abuse with wild abandon.

To paraphrase James: “With the keyboard we tiptoe around the sensitivities of a machine, and with it we curse our fellow men, who are made in God’s likeness. My brothers, this should not be.”

For WORLD, I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Tomorrow: More election results with Hunter Baker, Washington Wednesday, on Thursday. And, a symphony honors America’s 250th with a celebration of American culture. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

This is episode 3523 of The World and Everything in It, from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible says, “The LORD has remembered us; he will bless us; he will bless the house of Israel; he will bless the house of Aaron; he will bless those who fear the LORD, both the small and the great. May the LORD give you increase, you and your children! May you be blessed by the LORD, who made heaven and earth!” —Psalm 115:12-15

Go now in grace and peace.

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