Each new day brings a hundred headlines on some aspect of artificial intelligence. How to make sense of this flood? Who can provide context—especially for conservatives, rightly concerned about Big Woke Tech?
Fortunately, Breitbart News’ Wynton Hall has written a book on AI, addressing these and more questions, and offering the outlines of solutions. “We must future-proof ourselves,” Hall writes, “by confronting the politics and power of the AI revolution before it reshapes our world, unchallenged.”
Truly, we have no choice but to grapple with AI, as it already affects 99 percent of the population. If you have a smart phone, an internet connection, or a credit card, you are already within AI’s reach. To put the matter starkly: AI knows all about you.
So Hall’s book, Code Red: the Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI is coming at the right time. It’s a breezy read, written more from a political, rather than technical, point of view. So it’s a guide for the perplexed—and the alarmed, and the merely curious. Chapters cover corporate wokeness, of course, and also the threat from China, including all the military threats. Also, chapters on AI’s impact on education, loneliness, and sex. Oh, and government: Will it be big or small?
Yet, Hall asserts, “Perhaps nowhere is the clash between AI and human values more visible than at the fault line of faith.” For his part, Hall is firmly on the side of traditional faith. Indeed, putting his cards on the table face up, he quotes the New Testament’s Letter to the Romans, warning against being deceived by contrived illusions: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or of birds or of four-legged animals or of snakes” The Apostle Paul’s point echoes to this day: We shouldn’t mistake even the fanciest AI for the actual Almighty.
Of course, not everyone agrees on the separation of church and AI. As Hall notes in CODE RED, plenty of preachers and counselors are using AI chatbots to write their sermons and other missives.
Others are going further, much further, conjuring up their own AI idols. One such is Anthony Levandowski, a key figure in the evolution of AI-guided driverless cars. He has launched his own religion, Way of the Future.
Hall frames the issue rightly: “Are human beings innately good and capable of creating a utopian civilization when properly managed and socially engineered? Or are they inherently sinful, incapable of self-guided perfectibility, and thus unable to create a Heaven on Earth through governmental power or social engineering?”
Hall’s God-fearing answer is “no,” and yet others say “yes.” Here’s San Francisco techie Garry Tan: “People are so ready to make AGI [artificial general intelligence] their god.” We should stipulate: some people are “so ready.”
In Hall’s words, “Beneath the surface of these public clashes between traditional theology and techno-secularism’s worship of AI lies a heuristic fault line that has existed for centuries, one that will continue to be in conflict as the AI revolution unfolds.” That is, some people have always wanted to play god; they have used whatever ideology, technology, or biology is handy to elevate themselves over others.
To be sure, sometimes this elevating is popular, at least in the short run. It takes a while to see what happens when men build temples to themselves and their desires.
CODE RED recalls a revealing 2024 conversation between billionaire Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman and centibillionaire Bill Gates. Gates suggested that as AI progresses, “issues of disease and enough food and climate—if things go well—those will largely become solved problems.” We might immediately pause over those contingent words: “if things go well.” Big if!
We might further note that both Hoffman and Gates have been implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein case. So whatever words they say on anything must be seen through the lens of their own deeds. (The Bible, of course, has little patience for hypocrites.)
Yet let’s hear Gates out. Presuming a deep faith in technology, the Microsoft tycoon suggests humanity will have to “rethink.” Specifically, he continued, “you can almost call it a new religion.” Sure, Bill. Whatever you say. Perhaps, for your sake, you can conjure up a creed that offers forgiveness without the bother of genuine contrition. Hoffman, too, might like such an E-Z morality.
So what be coming next in the tech-realm of “new religion”?
One biggie, Hall tells us, is transhumanism. That’s a catchall term for everything from attempts to remake humans to be more conforming to technology to attempts to achieve human immortality. To be sure, it’s legitimately appealing to think that medical science can improve and extend life. But as pundit George Will says, the four most important words in the English language are, up to a point.
So as we listen to Nick Bostrom, co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association (now Humanity+), we must keep our guard up. Bostrom speaks of transhumanism as medical advances, which is nice, but then he veers into the Singularity, that being the hypothetical moment when AI becomes the aforementioned AGI and is thus smarter than humanity.
If and when this Singularity happens is highly contested. And yet if it does happen, we will have to struggle all the harder to keep ourselves human. We might pray over, for example, Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, in which the faithful are told: “Ye are the temple of God, the Spirit of God dwelleth in you.” Dwelleth in human beings, not in anything man-made, including AIs.
Of course, the most-talked about “trans” is transgender. You know, the whole business of males pretending to be female, and vice versa. And not just pretending on a Saturday night, but acting on that pretense, with hormones and surgery. And then, further, expecting society to go along with such inversion. It’s truly awful and terrible, and it has wrecked the lives of thousands, including minor children, even as it has unhinged norms of student athletics and social propriety.
So is transgenderism a part of transhumanism? We can ask that question of the transhumanists, mindful that their answer might shift depending on who’s listening. All the while we need to keep in mind that transgenderism is strongest in the tech-y places where transhumanism is strongest, such as San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
The basic problem is that the transhumanists, boosted and enriched by AI, are making it up as they go along. That’s the issue with anything new: It takes a while to test it out, to see if it makes sense, comporting with valued moral precepts. Conversely, the strength of the old—including ancient faiths—is that it has eliminated the, uh, kinks.
Yet the whole point of AI is that it’s new, radically new. The world transformed in chips and algorithms. Amidst this sudden transformation, it should come as no surprise that untethered change spills out in unexpected directions. And so, upon reflection, we see that transhumanism and transgenderism are two peas from the same tech pod.
Anyone reading the Book of Genesis knows that God created man and woman, period. And even if one takes the Bible more figuratively, it’s perfectly obvious that surgical, pseudo-medical transgenderism is not a part of any divine plan. It’s the stuff of a Frankenstein story, not a Bible lesson.
Wynton Hall’s CODE RED is deeply informed on the AI tech. And it’s also fully informed on the transcendent. We need that combination—our path being lit by the lamps of both reason and faith—as we step forward, carefully, into this brave new world.
Read the full article here