Is there anything more off-putting than a tech founder who concern-trolls himself — warning with deep seriousness that the things he’s doing are actually quite troubling and we all need to get serious about passing laws that will mitigate their consequences before disaster strikes?
I don’t know — I don’t want to know! — but one related instance currently going viral highlights why it’s worse than a mere turnoff. In a heartfelt cry for help, Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, one of the leading AI companies, posted a long warning about how dangerous his frontier technology really is and how it’s our responsibility to take action to remedy that.
“Make no mistake: what we are dealing with is a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine,” he writes.
“In fact, some people are even spending tremendous amounts of money to convince you of this — that’s not an artificial intelligence about to go into a hard takeoff, it’s just a tool. … It’s just a machine, and machines are things we master.” To the contrary, he insists that “what we are dealing with is a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine,” one that, despite his optimism about AI’s benefits, leaves him “deeply afraid.”
There’s only one thing that can justify human existence over and above that of the most powerful tools we can build.
Now, it is notable that Anthropic has a certain reputation. David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto chief, posted in response that the company “is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering. It is principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem.”
In fact, as the New York Post recently reported, Anthropic is on a “collision” course with the Trump administration due to its deep, elite connections with the left-wing political machine, ranging from previous administrations to the Ford Foundation, one of the so-called “nongovernmental organizations” the White House has blamed in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination for fomenting and funding political violence.
But worse, in a sense, are Anthropic’s links to effective altruism, a cultlike Silicon Valley movement whose brushes with large-scale fraud (in the FTX scandal starring Sam Bankman-Fried) and polyamory have led even eccentric and controversial figures like Sam Altman to raise red flags. As former FTC chief technologist and Abundance Institute AI policy head Neil Chilson has explained, today EA figures are best known for pushing extraordinary crackdowns on AI development, ranging from “authoritarian” policy responses to literally calling in the airstrikes on AI data centers, an approach driven by their insistence that runaway AI is an apocalyptic development sure to wipe out humanity unless we collectively act first.
To be clear, Anthropic’s founders have distanced themselves from EA in public remarks, and Clark’s recommendations do not include anything like nuking AI from orbit just to be sure. In fact, he should be commended for his call to listen more to “labor groups, social groups, and religious leaders” on the subject of our future relationship with our most powerful technologies.
But there is no escaping the fact that the ultimate goal behind the alarm raised by Anthropic’s leadership and the EA network sharing its orbit is to take coordinated global legal action to pervasively restrict and dictate the course of technological development from the very highest level on down. This is something many Americans instinctively reject, whatever their fears or concerns about AI might be. It is easy to see how such an approach would disregard the Constitution right out of the box. But the appeal being made is to higher-scale principles and powers than the Constitution’s or the American people’s. And ultimately, in this context, weaving in the “voices” of “stakeholders” across various “communities” is merely a means to that end, a diversitarian stamp of moral legitimacy that, as a core part of DEI’s use as an algorithm to create a new global governance regime, has already worn out its welcome.
So what do we do?
I would hardly characterize myself as a “religious leader,” but the fact is that very few Christians have spent recent years working seriously across the interrelated fields of tech theory and practice, and in that capacity I do want to offer a perspective that can prove useful to cutting through the increasingly intractable and fruitless debates between “nones” who love (or even worship) AI and “nones” who hate (or even want to destroy) it.
The overarching problem posed by the Anthropic controversy is that people who do not believe that our given human being is sacred really can’t be trusted with legal control over the technology they think is going to obliterate our humanity — because they fail to understand that no law can ever save us from destroying ourselves regardless of how much technology has advanced in any particular direction, and they fail to grasp that we will continuously destroy ourselves in ever more feverish ways the more we reject God’s own message that He created us in an act of love so great that our relationship to Him is familial, calling us to reciprocate that love and act toward one another accordingly.
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There’s only one thing that can justify human existence over and above that of the most powerful tools we can build. Only one thing that can justify our authority and control over those tools. Nature, reason, philosophy, myth, story, legend, ethics, ideology, rights, might … none of these suffice any more.
The only thing that will do is faithful belief in the truth of the Christian anthropology: that our given human form, including its visible and invisible parts, is sacred in the highest — for we were given that form, as the consummation and microcosm of all creation, because of how unfathomably the immeasurably supreme God loved and loves us, individually and together, even unto the degree that we can and must call Him not just Lord or Master, but Father, so that we can freely return His complete and total love with our own.
Nothing else will hold the line against occultism, obscurantism, destitution, servitude, profanation, disenchantment, and despair in the realm of AI or any other technology capable, if pushed, of simulating the human person and the human soul to the point of complete deception and delusion.
It just so happens that “we” have pushed technology to a degree that this uncomfortable truth about what justifies our existence (as it always has) is coming ever more starkly and inarguably out into the open.
Of course, a lot of people really don’t want this to be true, for all the endless reasons and rationales we are all extremely familiar with. You would think that the revelation of “this one weird trick” would cause waves of relief to spread joyously across the world, but no. The most prominent reactions are from those who would rather flee into the underground catacombs or dive into the black hole of the Borg.
These foolish attempts at a hasty solution will not just fail you as a person; they will fail the many, many millions desperately thirsting to be trustably, authoritatively led into the more strenuous and tension-filled but more peaceful and beautiful middle way between the two great negational temptations.
Abandoning the people and the devil take the hindmost 300 million-plus is a poor way of loving one’s fellow creatures so beloved by God that in them He commands us to see His very self. Obey the commandments (Matthew 22:37-40) with discernment, patience, discipline, humility, loving-kindness, and long-suffering, and we can have “nice things” like technological advancement and flourishing communities and so forth. Seek ye first the kingdom, and the rest will follow.
Seek ye other stuff — such as a simulation so powerful that there, all experience and memory of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are obliterated, and the rest will follow from that.
Start in your heart
This is emphatically NOT about attacking or debunking or destroying other faiths, doctrines, ideologies, wishes, passions, agendas, or anything else. The time has come to deny pride of place to blaming the other instead of the self, to fixating on what the other says or does instead of what lurks within and issues forth from one’s own heart (Matthew 15:18-20).
This is about the urgency of taking up the calm and quiet invitation to pursue an active, affirmative path that unlocks the kind of future so many thirst for and even say they want. It’s so simple. It doesn’t require anything of us that can’t be done by just about any person, regardless of place or time. I like to “joke” that “Interstellar” is a movie about how men will literally shoot themselves into a black hole instead of going to church. It’s not a joke, of course. That temptation, right to the very limit of sanity and imagination, is always there somewhere, lurking in our hearts, ever since the Fall.
Drawing near to your fellow man, drawing near to God, is often painful, scary, “destabilizing,” unpredictable, laborious, costly, and hard to explain or even understand in hindsight. Yet it is essential — it is of the very essence of who we are.
No attempt to escape or replace this experience, no matter how grandiose, all-consuming, or incomprehensible, can lead us to any solution to our deeply human problems, especially in a golden age, where some such problems not only persist but grow acute: monstrous, menacing, overwhelming, to the point where we must realize, as we must realize now, that where we are going there are no solutions, only salvation — not by any merely human creation, but by our all-good, holy, and life-giving Creator.
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