Finding Faith in a Technotopia

On spiritual deliverance in an AI-driven world

My thoughts here reflect a confluence of material I’ve read or watched over the past week, including Trump’s launch of Stargate, a colossal new AI infrastructure project led by three sketchy tech titans from Silicon Valley. I was inspired by reading JD Vance’s speech at the March For Life in Washington this week, in which he spoke of protecting the right to life of the unborn in the context of celebrating children, of uplifting families, re-centering them in society as fundamentally valuable for the stability and health of our communities. That hopeful message, juxtaposed against the kind of naval-gazing materialism and techno-utopianism that dominates our cultural conversation, has me feeling wistful.

Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash

And it got me thinking. The reason so much of our culture feels shadowed by a death cult—nihilistic, robotic, hedonistic, myopic—is that we have rejected the value of sacrifice. Or more to the point, of self-sacrifice. Or more to the point, selfless sacrifice. What was once common cause among humans—our presumption of a higher purpose and a Higher Person whose raison d’etre was to become our raison d’etre, by learning to love sacrificially—is now just an optional take, a view held mostly by those willing to resist the fashionable tide, buck the popular trend. Today our culture is focused on self-fulfillment, living our best lives by pursuing whatever makes us happy. Self-actualization is the highest good and relies on the sacred right (rite?) of radical individualism—the celebration of the self, uninhibited by social norms or expectations, unrestrained passage to change and “grow” in whatever direction is desired, with no need to worry about the consequences to society.

It’s as plain as day to me that our cultural revolution which put Self at the center of society, booted God out of that place of honor and inspiration, is what pushed us over the edge, has us circling the proverbial drain.

Yes, I know. That sounds incredibly doom-y and pessimistic. I don’t actually feel like a pessimist—at least not a sullen, hopeless one. But that’s only because I believe in God. I have faith that His Providence is operating throughout all of creation, in every life, in every moment, down to the split second; He is everywhere present, filling all things. So it’s not that I see us, each and all, headed down the drain, as in We’re all going to Hell and what’s the use?

That would be nihilism.

No, what I am getting at is that our culture is destined for decline and ruin unless we (re)discover the wonder of God, the sustaining, creative force that lifts us up because it is higher than ourselves, to which we can look up and orient our humanity. We must find the reality that does not place our individual intellects and wills—our personal thoughts and desires—in the driver’s seat, steering our lives. Which is why I think our expanding technology, and its encroaching takeover of our world, is likely to be the path to our cultural destruction, and to our spiritual deliverance.

I see the current trajectory of technology use as bringing a beguiling ease to our lives. I say beguiling because for all the benefits it bestows, creating convenience and instant gratifications, it is also propelling us into a kind of cultural fugue state—deepening disconnection from the natural world and disassociation from our human past, replaced by a tenuous, virtual connection with each other. And the key word there is virtual. We may be able to communicate more and more easily with one another, but the cost of that ability will be a growing reliance on mediating instruments—text, screens, curated feeds—and artificial intelligence, all of which will create for us a highly personalized yet artificial reality. We will be living in the ultimate contradiction, the perfect oxymoron.

In part, my thoughts are spinning in this direction (some might say “circling the drain”), because last night I finished reading Rod Dreher’s Living In Wonder (profusely recommend!!) and one huge takeaway for me is how far we modern humans have strayed from understanding what a life of meaning looks and feels like. Technology, for all the amazing improvements it’s brought—I do love my appliances, my car, my computer, my phone (sort of)—has had the dual impact of making our daily lives much easier to navigate while also separating us from participation in the baseline demands of survival.

On the one hand, that’s an excellent thing. I’m certainly not someone who wants to go back to the days of struggling against the vagaries of nature to stay well-fed, warm, and healthy, which is to say comfortably alive. (You’ll find I’m not one to go camping, or even glamping.) But on the other hand, release from that struggle has seemingly detached us also from any appetite to accept our human weakness, our frailty in the face of nature, as a humbling truth of our existence. It has allowed us a deceptive perception of ourselves as capable, on our own, of taming and controlling our environment, bending the world to our desires. It has fueled our pretensions, supercharged our hubris. Indeed, the entire project of artificial intelligence, in the eyes of its most ardent advocates and funders, is to give man-made machines god-like powers to command and control, to achieve the Singularity in which artificial intelligence surpasses man’s own—and keeps going. As one the those “trailblazers,” Google’s Ray Kurzweil mused: “Does God exist? Well, I would say, ‘not yet’.”

So yes, technology feels like a life-enhancing gift in so many ways—freeing up our time and enhancing our days with ease and opportunities and the means to share ideas and beauty to wider audiences, even to grow communities. Yet it bears a cost most of us prefer not to contemplate. It has a dark underbelly we prefer to look past. And that underbelly is the risk—and in many ways already the reality—of alienation from ourselves, from nature, from each other, and from God. As we catapult into an AI “arms race,” the risk is accelerating for humans to lose touch with the idea of truth.

Already our media technology, especially social media, with algorithms that filter our reality to meet our preferences, has bifurcated society into two barely overlapping worlds. Trump’s America, for example, is dark, threatening, volatile, and bigoted, or conversely, bright, promising, balanced, and tolerant depending on which “truth” your information sources assembled. Algorithm create a self-perpetuating feed that cannot be escaped except by those who opt out entirely from the media engagement—which doesn’t change the trajectory of society, only one’s awareness of it—or who decide to expose themselves to the discomfort of the other side’s “lies,” trying to see the world from the opposite view. But that also does little to slow the rending of our social fabric or preserve our grasp on truth, because unless it happens at scale—unless collective action occurs so that we all choose curiosity together, seek to hear and discuss the other side’s narrative—the bifurcation and resulting polarization will continue apace. And truth will become whatever the algorithm shows us.

So what’s to be done? We have no individual control over the swings of culture, the sway of technology and its advances in our society. The hard reality is we are not in charge. We cannot command collective action to resist technology or subdue it. But that hard reality is, paradoxically, the obvious, humbling, comforting reality: we are not in charge . . . but Someone is. And I do believe that is where we are actually headed as a civilization—back to our Source, the One who designed us and everything.

As more and more people catch sight of the soulless expanse of that dark underbelly, feel the deadening effects of its addictive seduction with the alienation and purposelessness it produces, the only way out will be through a spiritual reawakening. I expect a revival of our selves into acknowledgment of the only One who can light our path back to order, meaning, and each other. What lies ahead of us is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Because when despairing people are faced with choosing between a dead god and a living one, between artifice and reality, I think it’s self-evident they’ll opt for the One who loves. It’s the obvious, final answer.