Weekly Update 05.01.26

AI, Transhumanism, Creation over Creator

Transhumanists—those who have a religious zeal for perfecting mankind by means of technology—sing the praises of artificial intelligence. AI will lead to a plethora of scientific advances and will free up some of mankind’s time by taking on more and more rudimentary tasks, but I am beginning to believe that AI will follow the trajectory of atomic energy. It didn’t take but a few years for atomic energy to be weaponized by the government. The boon of energy production was soon co-opted by fallen and worldly ambitious men for dominating and destroying man. The insidious nature of AI—we have been in its tightening grasp since the dawn of the internet in the mid-1990s—will lead to a similar result. AI will be put to use to enforce conformity and, as Bolocan Cristian Daniel (a transhumanist) in The Father We Never Had: Artificial Intelligence—Before and After, quixotically writes (as quoted here by Rob Dreher), “[AI will be used by elites] to maintain the conditions that allow life to continue and evolve.” Technology, he giddily argues, will become “so advanced that it [will] dissolve into biology and matter, becoming invisible, omnipresent, and fluid, exactly like the air you breathe or the gravity that keeps you on the ground.” Daniel goes so far as to say that when this singularity occurs, it will be “the moment the Father appears.”

Daniel’s utopian delusion and divination of technology was predicted by the prescient Neil Postman in his 1993 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (read it!):

Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfaction in technology, and takes its orders from technology.”

And,

Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin “social deviance,” which is a statistical concept, and they call evil “psychopathology,” which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts.

Who will put this technology to use in its most pernicious form, Postman asks: bureaucrats. The danger of AI will play out in the realm of bureaucratic oversight:

Naturally, bureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct attention away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions and toward itself, as if the computer were the true source of authority. A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear.

So, what are we to do in the face of such a dehumanizing power? Are we to be technophobes or technophiles—or some combination of both? These questions are not new—every generation, especially since the scientific revolution, has had to grapple with them. Even still, the insidious nature of AI and the credulous nature of man, coupled with his age-old crippling fears, forces us to seek wisdom from our Creator once again. Will God intercede as He did with Babel? Will God allow man to reap what he sows? Are all of the awestruck AI priests just filled with the kind of hubris that led Adam and Eve to eat fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil after the devil convinced them that they would be like God? What about AI is good?

We must figure out the right questions to ask and then go to a source outside of man and his fallen reason (i.e., God’s Word) to answer them. We mustn’t forget that God sees and God knows and that He is working all things together for the good of those who love God and are called according to His purpose. History has a goal, and that goal is nothing less than the praise of His glory (Eph. 1:14). This truth is the singular inevitability of all that comes to pass, as mysterious and perplexing as that may appear to us.

The truth of God’s sovereign reign will give Christians the confidence to seek the answers.

And in the meantime, be wise about your use of technology. You may tire of hearing me warn you about reels, and gaming, and the priests and priestesses of our time who read a headline and then become proselytes of its message—but my goals are to shape our trust in the Lord, our distrust in oursleves, and our resemblance to the sons of Issachar: “men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do” (1 Chronicles 12:32). We are being manipulated by the delusional pantings of transhumanists and technopolists to put our trust in the creation rather than the Creator.

Much good has come to us, by God’s common grace, through technology. I believe that will continue. Even so, we must be discerning and wise about how those who become the purveyors of this new technological gnosis make a false god of it. The heart of man is desperately evil—and, therefore, what God intends for good is frequently, almost inevitably, twisted by man for evil. We must “abhor what is evil, cling to what is good” (Romans 12:9b).

Wake up, sleepers.

Love,
Pastor Andrew

My “Weekly Update” posts are portions of emails sent each Friday to the members of Trinity Presbyterian Church.