Quevaal, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The rise of artificial intelligence is one of the most consequential developments in human history, yet the people building it cannot even agree on whether it will save us or destroy us.
Some tech visionaries like Yuval Noah Harari are all-in, embracing AI's promises of prosperity and human flourishing. Elon Musk looks forward to the day people can download their minds into machines, but also warns that AI could go rogue. Peter Thiel occupies the most interesting position of all. He has reintroduced the word antichrist into mainstream conversations as a framework for understanding where unchecked technological power leads. Yet his conclusion is that the only way to fight that monster is to build it faster.
The real danger, Thiel says, isn't AI itself, but the kind of chaos that would drive desperate people to surrender their freedom to a strongman who promises safety. His solution? Accelerate AI development so that no single authoritarian power can monopolize it. That is a classically tragic kind of logic. The ancient Greeks had a word for the self-assurance that blinds a man to the consequences of his own choices — hubris. The flawed hero runs headlong into his fate while trying to avoid it.
Oxford mathematician and Christian apologist John Lennox warns that concentrated technological power could quickly lead to a single world-state controlled by one person with extraordinary authority. C.S. Lewis saw this danger coming decades ago. In his book That Hideous Strength, he showed how the greatest threats to human freedom arrive dressed as progress. Lewis prescribed a remedy for the hubris of every age: read old books. Not because the past was perfect, but because people then made different mistakes than we make now. We need that perspective.
But we need more than old books. We need the truth about our human condition — our capacity for self-deception, our hunger for safety, our susceptibility to the promise of control. There is no older or wiser book than the Bible, which has warned of hubris since the beginning and reminds us that history is not ultimately in our hands. Only in Christ is there hope, not in technological advancement. The real hope found in Holy Scripture stands against both hubris in our own power and despair in the power of others.
Join with us at PhyllisSchlafly.com as we examine our past and plan for our future. And join us again for the Phyllis Schlafly Report.
