It only took a few decades

When Anthropic announced its AI tool could modernize COBOL code on Monday, IBM's stock suffered its worst single-day drop in 25 years. The market's message was swift: obsolescence is coming, and investors want out first. Yet buried in the technical details is a more human story.

Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL still process 95% of ATM transactions in America. These systems handle airline bookings, government benefits, financial transfers—the invisible infrastructure of daily life. They were built decades ago by programmers whose names we never knew, working in a language most of today's developers have never learned. Now AI promises to do in moments what "would take human analysts months to surface."

The efficiency gain is real. So is what we're not saying: an entire generation's expertise is being rendered worthless overnight, and we're celebrating the cost savings. Markets don't grieve. They optimize. But Christian wisdom asks different questions. What do we owe those whose work we depended on yesterday but won't need tomorrow? The COBOL programmers nearing retirement built systems so reliable they're still running fifty years later. Their reward is watching their life's work become a problem to be solved by artificial intelligence. We cannot stop technological change. But we can choose whether to rush past the human cost or pause long enough to say thank you—and to ask who bears responsibility when progress leaves people behind. That question matters long after stock prices recover.