After 18 years and many failed attempts, the US and Britain laid down the transatlantic telegraph cable successfully in 1858. The first message on August 16 from Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan expressed her congratulations for his presidential win.
Buchanan replied in a message that took more than 16 hours to transmit through thousands of miles of copper cables: “May the Atlantic telegraph, under the blessing of heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument destined by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world.”
We have long supposed technology can usher in utopia. Although it promises “perpetual peace,” the telos of modern technology more often detaches us from our bodies, our places, and our communities. Especially in artificially intelligent forms, technology makes us more machine than man, more functionality than being.
Take for instance, a recent argument by Mary Harrington in her book Feminism Against Progress, which shows the underbelly of such promised tech utopias. She argues the modern feminism that has won out is a feminism of freedom (where women grasp unfettered autonomy) rather than a feminism of care (which flourishes within local, embodied, and social relationships).
This feminism of freedom sees women and men as “fungible, interchangeable work units,” defined not by their God-given personhood, nor by their embedded place among families and society, but by their economic output. It’s an argument educators like Alan Jacobs and Alan Noble have also made.
AI Is Making Humans Dumber
It’s only a short leap to see that if men and women are interchangeable, if we are defined more by our late-modern capitalistic output than by our sexed bodies, our common human limitations, and our social relationships, then technology can serve the role of savior.
Technology promises liberation from the pesky challenges of being human (such as motherhood, argues Harrington) in favor of “Meat Lego Gnosticism,” where we can disassemble and reassemble ourselves like fleshed Lego bricks to find an authentic, self-made individuality. Such liberation promises utopia in terms of equality, freedom, and a lack of consequences, but it ends up more akin to Frankenstein’s monster.
We increasingly look to new technologies to eradicate what we’ve construed as the problem of being human. We need simply look at the headlines to see how we look to technology to save us.
But false gods demand sacrifice. We are sacrificing our young people in what appears to be a rise in suicides after they use AI chatbots for therapy or companionship. We can also consider the uptick of gender dysphoria and affirmative models of care even while the 2024 Cass report showed that transgender medical technologies should be used much less frequently. We are sacrificing the poor: Harrington observes the forced hysterectomies of sugarcane workers in India for the sake of productivity.
We know from Old and New Testament stories that false gods end up distorting humanity; they promise liberation but enslave us. Psalm 135 reminds us that idols “have mouths, but do not speak; they have eyes, but do not see; they have ears, but do not hear, nor is there any breath in their mouths. Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (v. 16–18, ESV). While the tendency to idolatry is old, our new technologies make their promises seem attainable.
But why, then, is this so appealing?
In Acts 8, we read of a famous magician, Simon. People know him as “the Great Power of God” and treat and worship him as a god (v. 10). Yet when the men and women of Samaria believe Philip’s preaching of Christ and his kingdom, they convert, leaving magic behind. (Interestingly, Simon, too, is baptized). When Peter and John arrive in Samaria, they lay hands on and pray for these new believers to receive the Holy Spirit.
AI Will Shape Your Soul
False gods also require our resources. We are marshaling vast sums of economic resources for technological “progress” (Nvidia recently became the first $4 trillion public company, to cite just one example) without much, if any, ethical regulation.
Simon sees power. He offers money to the apostles so he, too, could bring the power of the Holy Spirit. We know the rest of the story: The apostles soundly rebuke him and tell him to beg God’s forgiveness. But Simon has a longer story in some early church writings.
Church father Justin Martyr links Simon with early Gnostic heresies, describing him as a god with a prostitute companion. Dante places him in the eighth circle of hell—where different types of fraud are punished. Although scholars debate whether the Simon of Acts 8 is the same Simon to whom the early church leaders responded with such vitriol, what is clear is that both Simons are guided by similar motivations: the elevation of the self above the true God, the idea that they can transactionally obtain the power of God, and a desire to harness that power for personal gain. Simon believed money could make him into a god. With this power, he likely believed he’d cement control, security, success, and perhaps an eternal legacy.
Although we may have stopped trying to buy the Holy Spirit as Simon did, we still attempt that transaction’s end goal: to make ourselves gods, limitless, unattached, powerful, and self-determining. Technology is our modern-day magic. Except now we offer ourselves as the payment to our technologies, in whose image we are increasingly being made.
Most technologies are not morally neutral. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan noted in his book chapter “The Medium is the Message” the example of an electric light bulb. In contrast to many other objects, it is “pure information” and “a medium without a message.”
But generally, he argues, the idea of a neutral tool doesn’t hold up, because “it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. … Indeed, it is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.”
In other words, it is not just what sort of content an AI chatbot puts out that is something to evaluate but the very existence of the AI chatbot (the medium) that influences how we process information, how we experience relationships, or what we think love is.
Chatbot Cheating in Ethics Class
To presume that our current digital technologies are simply neutral tools is to naively underestimate both the power of sin and the power of God. Writer Paul Kingsnorth calls this pervasive power “the Machine,” which is “a tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control and ambition.”
We are often blind to our complicity. McLuhan also notes our self-deception when we believe only content matters without understanding how the medium is the message; then we operate “in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form.”
Mammon, or Simon, or “the Machine,” or “Meat Lego Gnosticism”—all whisper the same lie in a different dress for every age. You will not surely die. You will be like God.
The question for those who claim the name of Christ is this: Will we continually sacrifice ourselves for the vision of a disembodied technologically achieved utopia? Or will we instead find our greatest security in the God who gave up the power and riches of heaven to take on our human flesh and who bore our god-hungry sin upon his cross?
Ashley Hales is editorial director for print at Christianity Today.
