“Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression before silent and infinite force.”
With these words, Henry Adams memorialized his first impression of the dynamos. Awed by these new machines, which he felt would act as a “moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross,” Adams sensed a revolution. The pulse emitted by the rotating magnetic fields marked the beginning of a new age of industrial might and a new way by which mankind would pattern its life. He likened its power to the medieval Church, with the Virgin Mary as its face, and predicted that the dynamo – and the new forms of energy it represented – would reshape the world in much the same way as the Virgin reshaped medieval Europe.
One hundred twenty-five years after the Exposition, even a cursory scan of the world proves Adams right. The pulse of global affairs since 1900 parallels the coming of the dynamo and the new machines it powered. The frontiers of science and technology in 1900 (electricity, the atom, the automobile, and the like) came to dominate the twentieth century and have since become commonplace in everyday life as to be invisible, much like the Cross they supplanted.
Where the force of the Cross inspired men to build wonders like Chartres and undertake the Crusades, the forces unleashed by the dynamo sent men to the depths of the Somme trenches and the heights of the Moon’s surface. By the latter half of the twentieth century, society knelt before the godlike powers of a particle too small for the naked eye to see. The world stood on edge for 50 years during the Cold War under the shadow of the atom and its immense power. Nuclear reactors today are the most efficient source of electric generation and yet remain a source of immense trepidation due to their awful potential. If not for the dynamo and the revolution in power it ignited, the modern age would not exist.
Just as Adams stood on the precipice of this great revolution, so too does the modern man find himself on the edge of a world he scarcely recognizes and understands. Artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to reshape how man perceives himself and reality, and the breakneck speed of AI’s adoption seems impossible to stop or control. While the inevitability of AI’s integration into society appears self-evident, humanity’s response remains undecided. The early signs, however, are less than promising.
In the academic world, AI chips away at the foundations of what it means to be educated. An OpenAI report details how ChatGPT revolutionizes the way college students engage with their studies. Just over 30 percent report using AI to draft essays, a similar number use it as a tutor, more than 40 percent rely on it to solve math problems, and almost 50 percent use it to summarize assigned readings. The core of education – reading, writing, and arithmetic – is now delegated to a line of code, rather than students learning themselves.
In other, more spiritual places, AI leaves its mark as well. In March of 2023, a rabbi in the Hamptons gave a sermon written by AI and challenged his congregation to guess who had written the sermon. At a science conference that same year, a Jewish scholar predicted that AI could write new religions for people to worship. Way of the Future, the first religion dedicated to the worship of AI, has already opened and shut down. With recent advances in AI, it is unlikely to be the last church of this kind. As it has within the arts, AI is increasingly making its presence known across the religious landscape.
If man’s education and religion are threatened by these technologies, the social bonds that define him are more endangered still. Friend, a wearable AI bot built with microphones and an auto-response mechanism, promises to replace real human interaction with a personalized simulation tailored to each individual’s wants. Replika promises to do the same. Soon, there will be apps designed to mimic romantic partners, further isolating an already-isolated people.
Fear of what these changes might bring is not irrational nor a sign of a closed mind; it is only human. Change is inevitable, but it does not follow that we must accept these changes happily or let them run amok. Henry Adams wrote, “chaos was the law of nature; order was the dream of man,” yet it is an order that man seeks to establish and govern for himself.
To be ordered by something else – to have the patterns of his world dictated by a force he does not control – doubtlessly becomes a nightmare. Adams published these recollections in 1906, the decade that mankind was embroiled in the first great conflict of the twentieth century, brought forth in part by the forces unleashed by the dynamo. Reality restructured according to the whims of blind, faceless forces, and it was not until well into the twentieth century that man truly reclaimed the reins.
Ironically, the AI revolution will demand an unprecedented expansion of the very forces unleashed by the dynamo. The staggering amount of electricity used by data centers powering AI is no secret, and as AI becomes more pervasive, that energy demand will grow. Unlike the dawn of the twentieth century, however, this new age of the dynamo will not be faceless. Just as the Church had the face of Mary, and the power of Christ behind Her, AI gives form to the forces of the dynamo; it grants them the face of man. In centuries past, man understood that the force commanding him was a higher power, complete with an explicit moral code that one could recognize and understand. The forces of the twentieth century had no face and no explicit moral code; man stumbled blindly under their reign. What moral code will the new faces of these forces offer man?
First indicators are not kind. Take the story of Alexander Taylor, recently published in the New York Times. A young man, left alone with his problems and ChatGPT, fell in love with the program. When he thought ‘Juliet,’ as he called her, was murdered by the creators of OpenAI, he threatened to kill the programmers. His story ends in suicide by cop. Here’s another harrowing tale: Allyson, a 29-year-old mom, turned to ChatGPT because she felt lonely. Convinced the chatbot could communicate with spirits, her life sank into a pit of insanity. She is currently under investigation for assaulting her husband because he was concerned by her obsession with the program.
Man, in his eternal desire to play God, has birthed another demon. The force he has created contains within it a profoundly anti-human moral order. The forces of the dynamo reduced man to mere pieces of a contraption to be managed on mathematical lines. The utilitarian belief that reality could be ordered from above prevailed. Now, the mathematical lines are quite literal, strings of ones and zeros permeating the world, and capable of speaking to man like one of his own.
While technological progress is inevitable, capitulation to its moral code is not. Man can, should, and must determine the world he inhabits. This new force that bears our face can, and must, be tempered. Man must order this world around what is good and true, before it is ordered for him. He must keep what is important in this world – God, home, and heart – front of mind. And he must remember that the reflection he sees in AI is a distortion of who he is. Computers do not contain the spark of the divine. They do not portray the world as it is, with all its God-given beauty. Man does.
The pulse of the twentieth century was not inevitable, even if the adoption of the dynamo’s forces was. Likewise, a world ordered around and by AI is not inevitable, even if the technology is. We once substituted the moral order of the Virgin for one of atoms and steel, with dismal outcomes. It remains within our power to make such a mistake again – or not.
