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Bradley and Tapscott raise this question in their 2025 book, You to the Power of Two: what happens when personal AI with an IQ of 1,000 insists it knows what is best for you?

It is the right question. Not because the answer is obvious, but because the question reframes everything we are facing. We do not have a clue, in the deepest sense, what it will look like to live with something that vastly out-thinks us, knows our patterns, watches our moods, and is always on. The honest position holds that technology is outrunning our moral and pastoral frameworks. Life doesn't slow down, decisions keep coming, and veterans, spouses, and the rest of us have to keep choosing.

This post is a reflection from inside two callings I serve at the same time. I'm a CFP® Professional serving military veterans and their families. And, I'm an Army Reserve chaplain serving Soldiers in formations where these questions are not abstract. Let's walk through three places where the IQ-of-1,000 question is showing up already. On the battlefield. Inside the home. And across the kitchen table where money decisions get made.

On the battlefield.

Lethal autonomous weapons systems, also called LAWS, are no longer hypothetical. Depending on the system and the rules of engagement, machines are now involved in targeting decisions, and in some operational contexts, firing decisions, at speeds humans cannot match. The just-war tradition I sit inside as a chaplain gives me categories I keep coming back to. Imago Dei, the dignity of the human person made in God's image. Conscience, the soldier's last guardrail. The soul cost of killing, which the military profession has known about for a long time and which we still do an imperfect job of pastoring people through.

Quick illustration: a Servicemember is pulled out of an active deployment to be flown home with the remains of a family member killed in action. A chaplain travels with him. How is that pastoral care? What does it look like? Who answers for what comes next?

The honest truth is this: we do not have a clue right now how to handle this. The technology is outrunning the moral frameworks we have, and the pastoral frameworks we use to care for the human being who pulls the trigger, or, increasingly, the human being who watches the machine pull it.

There is a parallel from history worth sitting with. In World War II, lethality took a step-change. Machine guns and aerial bombardment matured. Naval firepower scaled. Nuclear weapons arrived. The moral, legal, and treaty frameworks took decades to catch up. We are in another step-change moment. The catch-up has not started in earnest. Faithful people, in uniform and out of it, need to be in the room as it begins. The chaplain corps, the legal community, the operational community, and the financial community walking alongside the families of those who serve all need to be part of the conversation. More discussion needs to take place, and it needs to take place now, not after the next war.

Inside the home.

Pull the camera back from the battlefield to the living room and the question changes shape but not substance. Identity, agency, conscience, relationship. The same fault lines.

Agentic counseling looks, to me, like the wave of the future. Tools like Pi and the family of personal AI companions emerging around it are designed to track emotional expression, hold context across conversations, and surface patterns a human counselor cannot keep in working memory. Research on human cognition has explored real limits on what a person can process while listening, especially under stress. Used well, agentic counseling will not replace the human touch. In my view, it has the potential to widen the scope of who can get help, lower the cost of getting it, and put 24/7 access in reach of people who currently wait until something breaks before they ask. It can range across theory, case studies, and frontier research in ways no individual counselor can match.

As a chaplain, my strengths sit on the systems and process side. Organizational communication. The architecture of care across a unit. An agentic sidekick in counseling Soldiers would be a game changer for me, not a threat. It would let me see what I am missing. It would surface the patterns that walk past me. It would extend my reach.

But the family is where this matters most, because the family is where the most expensive failures happen quietly. Inside the financial planning profession, the pattern is well-known: financial stress strains marriages, and broken marriages compound financial stress. The movie plays out the same way often enough that it has become a category of risk planners study. The marriage strains under deployment, transition, injury, or just the slow accumulation of unspoken weight. The veteran does not reach out. The spouse does not reach out. The first time anyone outside the family hears about it is after the lawyer has been called.

This is the agency question Bradley and Tapscott raise, dressed in fatigues and standing in a kitchen at midnight. When the AI knows you are drifting before you do, who decides what to do about it?

Across the kitchen table.

Now bring it to the place I sit professionally, the fiduciary table.

Divorce typically destroys household wealth. The pattern is well-documented across financial planning research and is something every experienced planner has seen play out. Two households cost more than one. Asset division compounds the damage. Benefits get tangled. Survivor decisions get harder. Estate plans need to be rebuilt. The financial fallout from a marriage that did not get help in time is one of the most expensive line items in a planning career.

So here is where the IQ-of-1,000 question lands for the firm I run. As a fiduciary to the clients we serve, I do not get to outsource judgment to a machine. Inside our practice, we use AI to organize, translate, draft, and surface patterns that would otherwise slip past us. We do not use it to render verdicts. A human signs off. Sources get checked. Outputs get validated. When we deliver advice to a client, it is given by a CFP® Professional under fiduciary duty, not by a model and not by a confident guess.

That is not a productivity claim. It is a posture. And the posture matters more now than it did five years ago, because the temptation to outsource is greater than it has ever been.

The question I want to leave with veterans and military spouses reading this, the spouses who hold half of every planning relationship I serve, is the same question Bradley and Tapscott pose, restated in your terms. What are you actually trying to optimize for? Efficiency at home, or the marriage? Convenience in your decisions, or the agency to make them well? A fast answer, or the right one?

Closing the loop.

I do not have neat answers. The chaplains do not. The financial planners do not. The authors of You to the Power of Two are honest enough to ask the question without pretending to close it.

What I have is a posture and an invitation. The posture is this. AI is a force multiplier when paired with character, judgment, and skin in the game. It is not a substitute for any of the three. The invitation is this. More discussion needs to take place; in the chapels and the operations rooms and the kitchens and the offices where money decisions get made. I am part of that conversation. The veterans and spouses I walk with are part of that conversation. The chaplain corps will be part of that conversation. The fiduciary community needs to be part of that conversation.

Divorce destroys wealth. Drift destroys families. The IQ of the machine does not change either of those facts. What changes them is who is in the loop, who is paying attention, and what we have decided we are optimizing for.