On some level, everyone knows there is a problem. In recent posts, I have detailed the many concerning things about our current state of technology. I have outlined the creepy spiritual risks. I have spoken of the dehumanizing elements. I have written about the ways that government and the powers of this world can abuse it. And I have spoken of how it is pushing us to darker and darker places. And many recognize these risks - especially those that know it well.
Technology - particularly that seen in AI, devices such as cell phones and lap tops, and in their interactions with every facet of the modern American life - is a threat.
And yet, despite our reservations, we couldn’t be moving faster towards more adoption, more usage, and further development. Whether we ever reach “singularity” or not is beside the point. Far from slowing down, technology appears to be speeding up.
Why is this? Why do we simultaneously adopt what we also fear?
French philosopher and sociologist, Jacques Ellul, in, “The Technological Society” argues that we do so because we have no choice. Human beings adopt “technique” because we have to. Something about tech is like a virus that works within humans and is adopted in the same way a virus is. We realize it makes something work better, faster, and easier and so we adopt almost without thought. And on some level, reservations and stated concerns aside, we all like technology. We like the convenience and the dopamine hits. It is one thing to be intellectually concerned, but we gravitate to something based on our love for it not based on our intellectual assessment of it.
Can it be stopped then?
It is important to note that much of the talk in tech about “inevitability” was language crafted by giant corporations such as Google and Facebook in order to combat public concerns about their growing database of privacy destroying information. [1] And it is also worth noting that futurists who talk about the inevitability of this or that technology have a terrible track record.
And the truth is that tech is unsustainable. Either it ends humanity, or we end it first. Between AI weapons, brain chips, nuclear weapons, bioweapons, and the way that tech tends to reduce human fertility there are too many existential risks to humanity to continue down the path that we are going down. At some point in time, we already cannot control the golem that we are building. He is getting stronger and more threatening with every day we let him grow. Humanity and technology are in many ways opposed in the same way that a virus and the human body are opposed. So, if Ellul is right, tech will be the end of humanity, eventually. And this is precisely what Ellul thinks we are heading for. But by ending humanity tech itself will end.
But I think Ellul is wrong. We are not robots forced to adopt “technique.” We have freedom to choose. We have freedom to decide. We are able to not adopt something even if it makes us feel good.
And we have to. We have to find a way to roll it back.
But what do we do? It would be easy to say that everyone should throw out their laptop and their cell phones and go live in the woods. But exactly zero would do it. So, what is the path forward? How can we prove Ellul wrong? What possible steps can we take to slow if not turn around the creeping dangers of technology on our lives?
If we look at the history of technology and we look at how certain things that seemed inevitable were slowed, stopped or turned around, we see there are some simple things that humanity can do and when done well, tech will slow and maybe reverse.
Here they are:
1- Educate ourselves and our families to the dangers. This seems basic but people are not doing it. Everyone have to recognize that when we are using tech - every time you pick up your cell phone or laptop - we are interacting with a tools designed by people into weird and possibly demonic stuff. Recognize that tech was designed to remove your humanity (removing you from nature, disconnecting you from other humans, exposing you to fake environments, etc.). This isn’t a safe space.
So, obviously, you can’t expose your children to this stuff. At a minimum, you have to have age limits. There should be zero tech for the very young and if you allow it at all later, it should be very limited and much later than their friends. And whatever limited technology, you do give has got to be monitored. If you allow your children to scroll social media and look at random websites, you are giving them access to a portal to hell (porn, deception, psyops, and enslavement). You can’t do this.
So take this education piece seriously. Start with your kids then teach other adults. Tell them what you have learned. Teach them of the dangers and the dehumanizing aspects of technology. Make sure that no one views technology as neutral let alone good.
2- Avoid using it. Don’t use ChatGPT. Don’t use AI art. Avoid it if you can. Of course, we can be reasonable on this - there may be situations where its use is unavoidable -but we have to have the objective not to use it. Don’t allow it to generate your art for you. Don’t allow it to write for you. Don’t allow it to create music for you. Teach your children how to create real art, to write well, and to create music on their own.
And do not let AI advise you. Recently, the Catholic apologetics group, Catholic Answers, created an AI apologetics bot (initially a priest) who was built to advise Christians about the faith and give them answers to their questions. We can’t do stuff like this. This is incredibly dangerous. If there are dark forces at work either within the people writing the tech or within the technology itself, minor errors of faith and direction could lead people down dark paths. We cannot let AI be guiding us in any way.
3- Honor those who reject tech and shame those who embrace it. There is an old tool called honor and shame that pretty much every culture in history has used to change bad behaviors. A lot of people have tried to get rid of shame but that was a mistake, and we have to bring it back. Shame prevents immoral men from having affairs and intemperate men from drinking too much. No one wants to be shamed or socially stigmatized. Everyone wants praise and honor.
This is a rule of human nature and we already are using it. If a mother that fed her children nothing but donuts, you would shame her and she would feel it. Even if she didn’t care about her own kids, the shame itself would get her to do the right thing. Honor and shame drive way more of our actions than we would admit.
So, what should we think of a mother that allows her child to play with AI bots all day? What do we think of a father that gives his 10-year-old unrestricted access to the Internet? We should look at them as terrible. It’s shameful. And the opposite is praise worthy. I love it when I hear about a parent protecting his children from tech and I congratulate him.
Honor and praise.
These social conventions may seem old-fashioned, but they are not. They heavily influence how everyone behaves every single day. And technology and the pressure to reduce its effects on society, needs to be enforced by the same code.
4- The Church must speak up. The common perception that the church has lost all influence is false. The influence is giant and teachings of Christianity absolutely impact the lives of so many people and many care very much what their pastor says when they show up to church on Sunday. And unlike other voices in the world, the teachings of the church are not the sorts of things that Christians can just set aside. So the church needs to have a voice.
So much of what I have talked about in this book goes beyond the physical. It speaks to the magical, the spiritual, and the occult. For this reason, the church absolutely must weigh in on this subject. The church must speak on the sinfulness of exposing your children to the dangers of artificial intelligence, online porn, online brainwashing, and the general dehumanizing nature of modern technology. It has to. [2] And if it can do so effectively and consistently, it will absolutely make an impact on the broader society. For a picture of this, look at the Amish. The reason the Amish have been so able to withstand the onslaught of technology is because it is a religious issue for them.
And it should be a religious issue for everyone. So, share your concerns with your pastors, priests and bishops. Share your concerns with your fellow Christians. Encourage your church to make statements on this. And if you are a religious leader, speak up.
5- There is a role for the government. A lot of my more libertarian minded readers will get uncomfortable with this point. They will express fear that the government will restrict the good things, such as free speech, and the ability to proclaim Christian values online. They will state that the government should stay out of all these things altogether. But that is not actually the role of government. The role of government is to protect the people from evil. A government that restricts the good while allowing the bad is not a good government, and we should seek to change it to become a good government. Laws, allowing porn, but banning Christian ideas aren’t evil because they restrict actions on the Internet. They’re evil because they restrict the good and allow the evil. Our objective should always be to encourage the government to do good and to fight evil.
A good government would heavily restrict all uses of artificial intelligence - but especially those developed by people and organizations that lack Christian ethics and morals. A good government would prevent children from being exposed to too much technology. A good government would prevent schools from using technology, rather than paper and pencils. A good government would tax technology in the same way that it taxes cigarettes, whiskey, or other “vices”. A good government would not be neutral towards this impending threat on humanity.
These goals need to be worked over and over and when one battle is won, we need to move onto the next. It can be done. The idea that tech is inevitable ignores the many times tech was held off, slowed, reversed, and rejected via means exactly like the above. As I have written, nuclear war was once thought to be a technology that would be regularly used in warfare. It hasn’t been used since its original deployment. Peopled learned about the threat (education), countries and municipalities limited its use (even for peaceful means), shame via protests and culture made those promiting it grow quiet, religious leaders spoke out, and governments made international laws restricting it. These methods were similarly used to slow chemical weapons (once a new technology thought to be an inevitable part of every fight), eugenics (once a technology that was expected to transform the human race) and trans fats (a technology once used throughout the food industry).
Humanity is perfectly capable of using education, personal choice, shame, religion and government to stop, slow, and roll back technologies. Jacques Ellul wrote, “Arrest and retreat only occur when an entire society collapses.” But we don’t have to wait until tech destroys humanity and burns through society like a virus (leaving only groups like the Amish to rebuild). We don’t have to join the ranks of Ted Kaczynski and attempt to use violence to accomplish the goal. A combination of the right pressures has worked in the past and can work in the future. It can work to achieve the long-term goal (an epic rollback of much of modern technology) and it can work in the short term. These are achievable objectives that we can and should immediately start working towards.
We can do this. We can all make an impact. None of what is outlined above is beyond any of our capabilities. But we have to be in agreement: we need to go back.
Endnotes
[1] Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. United States, PublicAffairs, 2019.
[2] I was glad that Pope Francis briefly mentioned the dangers of AI and tech in his recent memoir, “Life”
The name is Ellul!
Thanks for this!
In my small corner of the world, I've seen an interesting trend. Among the educated and religious, at least, the older folks (60+) are much more casual and tend to be positive about new tech - they seem to still be more bought into the story of progress. The younger adults with kids are much more cautious and restrictive in their lives and their families' lives- and much less bought into the progress myth. I do think the tide is turning a bit, as people see more clearly the very negative effects of unrestricted tech access.