The tech elite possess extraordinary technical education, yet they are extraordinarily uneducated in history, philosophy, literature, and theology. As I saw building tech businesses in both Silicon Valley and Seattle, tech leaders weren’t trained in the liberal arts. They weren’t taught to think critically about tough ethical questions. And they weren’t even instructed in how properly to accept the concept of truth (with a capital T), instead preferring a vague spirituality. They fancy themselves freethinkers and yet, cut off from the philosophical foundations of freedom, their thought is profoundly constrained and uniform. Their consciences are generally not properly formed.
The result is what C. S. Lewis described in the Abolition of Man: “We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” Freed from any concept of Judeo-Christian morality, today’s tech leaders envision separating mind from body in AI-driven computers. They are also developing a quasi-religious hope in the so-called “metaverse,” where AI determines what we see, hear, learn, and love. Where will Silicon Valley stop? Nowhere, because nothing eternal or ethical is holding the tech elite back from doing, designing, and destroying whatever they please, using the unsurpassed power of artificial intelligence. The zeitgeist is their conscience, and if it tells them to do something, they will comply.
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