AI, GOD AND US.

AI, GOD AND US.

This past Tuesday, the day after Labor Day 2025, I read Thomas L. Friedman’s 4,000 words essay in the New York Times. It affected me deeply. Friedman, the most senior columnist in this world-class paper, predicted that, unless the USA and China, unite in taming the Artificial Intelligence (AI) monster for the preservation of humanity, our future will be ruled by this machine.

The article reminded me of Jacques Ellul, the author of THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY, a book published in France in 1955, and whose 1964 English translation I bought in 1965.

Here is the synopsis the Internet provided.

Dive deep into the chilling predictions of French philosopher Jacques Ellul, particularly his seminal work, The Technological Society. Ellul argues that the true danger isn’t machines taking over, but the rise of “Technique” – the relentless pursuit of optimal efficiency in every human endeavor. Reading it, we discover how this principle, applied universally from industry to psychology, subtly shapes our behavior, values, and even our thoughts. Jacques Ellul explains how this drive for efficiency becomes autonomous, unified, and self-augmenting, creating a system that demands human adaptation, leading to a new, insidious form of enslavement. It explores how Ellul’s concepts of Technique and the technological society reveal the hidden pressures of modern life, from algorithmic feeds to performance metrics, demonstrating how we become optimized components within the very systems we build. Understanding Jacques Ellul provides crucial insights into navigating the modern world and resisting the passive conformity demanded by efficiency. We learn why Jacques Ellul’s warnings in The Technological Society are more relevant than ever in our digital age, and see how Ellul challenges us to critically examine the dominance of technology.

Jacques Ellul was also an extraordinary Christian, who saw the danger of enslavement.

Here is one of his quotes:
“Christians were never meant to be normal. We’ve always been holy troublemakers, we’ve always been creators of uncertainty, agents of dimension that’s incompatible with the status quo; we do not accept the world as it is, but we insist on the world becoming the way that God wants it to be. And the Kingdom of God is different from the patterns of this world.”

Professor Ellul’s prophetic words stir deep resonance within me: they hit me in my guts! They echo Friedman’s prediction, another contemporary prophet. Here is what Friedman writes:

A.I. will spread like a steam vapor and seep into everything. It will be in your watch, your toaster, your car, your computer, your glasses and your pacemaker — always connected, always communicating, always collecting data to improve performance. As it does, it will change everything about everything — including geopolitics and trade between the world’s two A.I. superpowers, and the need for cooperation will become ever more apparent each month.

The above quote reminds me of ‘the Antichrist’, the opponent of the Holy Spirit. Friedman emphasizes that there are two things in the world happening faster than you think: one is climate change and the other artificial intelligence — heading toward some level of “autonomous omni-presence, artificial intelligence, sometimes called superintelligence”.

When will we get there?

When will we get there? “This year, next year, five years — I’m not sure”, he writes. “But I would say the consensus within the A.I community is that we’re going to get there. And that is going to change everything about everything”.  Friedman also writes: “Before there was God and us. Now there is God, us and AI.”

I know this to be incorrect: ‘evil’ was always there: always, in the entire history, there always were God, Satan and us. Now, with Satan kicked out of heaven, he has landed feet first on earth.

It could well be that, just as God is a spirit, AI embodies, as Friedman writes, a vapor a ‘spirit’, unobtrusively invading everything, making AI the ‘new’ God!

We must not forget that history basically is the ‘fight between Good and Evil’.

History started in Paradise, and finds its finale in the End, today’s climax. The struggle basically is ‘who rules the earth’. That “The world today is swept by once-in-a-century transformations,” is obvious: by and large it has succumbed to nihilism: no longer is there a reigning, overarching, ‘faith’ system. The Age of Rationalism is over: Reason is no longer sufficient to enact a lasting future: spiritual understanding has replaced it: AI is the new God.

This means that we must look around us, not with our eyes only, but through the Spirit, giving free expression to ‘intuition’, our ‘inner’ facilities, our ‘gut’ feelings, and so rekindle indigenous wisdom, genuine love for all created matter.

That’s why I reemphasize Ellul’s assessment of ‘the Christian”:

“Christians were never meant to be normal. We’ve always been holy troublemakers, we’ve always been creators of uncertainty, agents of dimension that’s incompatible with the status quo; we do not accept the world as it is, but we insist on the world becoming the way that God wants it to be. And the Kingdom of God is different from the patterns of this world.

And we all say: Amen!