Earlier this year, something startling happened: Leading technologists at the AI frontier turned fretfully for guidance to a devout Orthodox Christian. A Silicon Valley book club tackled Fyodor Dostoevsky’s notoriously daunting novel “Demons” (also translated as “The Possessed”). Then an anonymous writer published an extraordinarily long essay on the book’s premonitions of what happens when human beings fall into falsely illuminated fanaticism. The author saw in Dostoevsky a warning for the people building artificial intelligence.
Verily, I thought, an enormous can of worms had been opened.
Technique and intelligence, severed from the disciplined heart, become hollow and ultimately self-destructive.
Orthodox Christianity is, in essential ways, the opposite of the power-hungry posthumanism animating so much of tech’s increasingly overt spirituality. The posthumanist dreams of a disembodied intellect mastering existence. Orthodoxy calls us to put our embodied intellect to work cleansing the heart, that the Holy Spirit of the loving Master of existence might dwell there.
The anonymous writer stumbled over the Gospel account of the Gadarene swine. Christ casts out Legion, permitting the demons to enter a herd of pigs that rushes to its destruction. Rather than welcome the man’s deliverance, the townspeople beg Christ to leave as if nothing had ever happened. Yet the essay concludes that “demons are not external enemies but our own capacities turned against us” and that they “must possess us fully” before we can be healed.
Not a great start. The temptation to mislearn even the plainest lesson is strong among people unacquainted with the embodied practices through which Christians slowly and humbly welcome Christ. But self-mastery had become a keyword among tech leaders watching crackpot woo one-shot more employees and founders. Anyone earnestly seeking self-mastery will eventually collide with Christian asceticism. I took stock of the development in “The Dostoevskian Moment.”
Lo and behold, last weekend Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, published a sprawling 24-paragraph meditation on another Dostoevsky novel, “The Brothers Karamazov.” He confessed that he had not loved the book, but ended by asking how analyses of a nation’s soul ought to relate to its major novels and works of art. His post inadvertently exposed the limits of intellectual examination conducted at a distance from the quiet experience of the heart.
Then another tech founder, Delphi’s José Maria Macedo, answered Collison with something beautiful. Father Zosima, he observed, teaches that love dreamed of can indulge fantasies of grandeur, while active love is “harsh and dreadful,” requiring labor and patience. Macedo finds that love in Alyosha, whose goodness persists through ordinary humiliations, cruelty, and grief.
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Collison’s reading, Macedo suggested, resembled Ivan Karamazov’s impulse to put life on trial before the intellect. Alyosha offers another way: a life that cannot be reached through rationality alone. Macedo cannot explain how God allows evil, including the suffering of children. Yet Dostoevsky makes him want to become more like the man who answers suffering with love. That, Macedo wrote, is why “The Brothers Karamazov” is his favorite novel.
Macedo has grasped something his fellow technologists desperately need. Technique and intelligence, severed from the disciplined heart, become hollow and ultimately self-destructive. Like the snake eating its own tail, they cannibalize life rather than return humbly to its inexhaustible wellspring.
At a moment when tech is increasingly transfixed by the desperate quest to “align” AIs with an all-too-human utopian agenda, Dostoevsky’s call to first align our own personal will with God’s grows steadily louder.
Artificial intelligence, Demons, Evil, Heart, Intelligence, Orthodox christian, Posthumanism, Silicon valley, Children, Ai, Dostoevsky, Christ, Temptation, Big tech, Patrick collison, Gospel, Jose maria macedo, Opinion & analysis
