Elon Musk wants a robot in every home; here’s how to ensure they don’t kill us all
It’s been clear for a while that mass robotics are coming — and nothing short of a catastrophe will make them go away. But it took Elon Musk, the man Peter Thiel once called the greatest salesman in the world, to penetrate the collective consciousness with last week’s “We Robot” event, which unveiled the Robovan, the Cybertaxi, and the Optimus bot, instantly familiar to anyone who has spent even a few seconds watching “Star Wars” content with droids in it.
The advent of the mass-market humanoid robot — explicitly designed not just to do what you want but to be what you want, taking on any number of roles filled for all of human history by, you know, humans — has predictably touched off a fresh bout of feverish conflict between acceleration-happy tech optimists and tech pessimists desperate to at least pump the brakes.
And it’s true — Big Tech is dominated by the cult of wokeness, intersectionality, DEI, ESG, perv pride, and so forth, and what makes Big Tech big is its deep and intimate relationship with the federal government, especially the intelligence community, which has also cast its lot with the cult and its rituals.
What is new this time around is the political aspect of the confrontation. As more tech founders and funders have gravitated toward Trump this year — with Musk at the forefront of that trend, too — their newfound confidence in openly criticizing tech people and entities aligned with Biden and Harris has given the debate over tech an explicitly partisan flavor.
And it’s true — Big Tech is dominated by the cult of wokeness, intersectionality, DEI, ESG, perv pride, and so forth, and what makes Big Tech big is its deep and intimate relationship with the federal government, especially the intelligence community, which has also cast its lot with the cult and its rituals. There’s no denying that the woke left dominates the anti-growth, pro-deceleration, pro-regulation wing of technologists and bureaucrats who want to ensure the spiritual authority of their cult is what dictates and controls the vector of tech research, development, and deployment.
Ostensibly, what they want is to prevent the eradication of human life by out-of-control machines. In reality, they are increasingly apt to openly support the reduction of human beings to compliant freaks coercively on-boarded into the social credit regime of the ultimate in micro-management, a planetary woke supercomputer.
At the same time, the unfortunate reality is that the woke left managed to get its act together way before anyone else in organizing an attempt at aligning tech with spiritual authority. One might have thought even one generation ago that America’s many millions of healthy Christians, with their thick community ties and robust commercial activities, would have united around ensuring that technology did not develop and dominate American life in ways that directly, consistently undercut the authority of church life — by manufacturing experiences and dreams that promised paradise on Earth in exchange for complete spiritual submission to the technologization of all things, from the planet down to the molecules in your body.
Alas, America’s Christians did not do this, and so the cult of the woke left — increasingly a formal religion with well-developed liturgical language, ritual performance, and rites of sacrifice — rushed into the spiritual vacuum.
The result of this lamentable series of events is that the political right wing in America found itself increasingly out of control and desperate for a path back, perhaps at whatever cost. Because of their loss of political power, the people most spiritually inclined to resist swapping out their ancient faith for a heretical cult of merging with machines began to accept it instead, increasingly believing that their only hope of destroying the established woke theocracy was a revolutionary cyborg theocracy.
The plausible reasons for making that devil’s bargain are clear enough. But so, of course, are the objections. As one columnist put it: “I cannot understand why conservatives venerate a man who is destroying the way of life they want to preserve. This AI/robots stuff will take your jobs, your freedom, your humanity.”
To repeat, however, the key to understanding is quite simple: As technology developed in ways that made central to human experience the urgency of the ultimate questions about our identity and purpose — questions that demand theological answers and close, personal spiritual guidance — the political conservatism of the 21st century, unmoored from any institutionalized spiritual authority, became very easy for the revolutionary left to defeat, because the left so swiftly abandoned its formerly materialist and secular foundations in favor of militant post-Christian woke spiritualism.
And so we find ourselves caught in a political realignment where Christian spiritual authority over the otherwise free development of technology in America is almost entirely absent from the debate — a debate taking place at an unprecedented inflection point for the United States, one where the nature of our form of government and indeed the nature of our very being is at stake. Not good!
Seeing Elon Musk and his allies navigate this landscape has been interesting. Despite the criticism they have attracted, on the whole, the maneuvers have been in the right direction, even though the breakneck pace of the tech and how its fans market it effectively encourages the country to dump Christ the God-man in favor of the god-simulating Borg collective. However, the main problem is not with machines or their power but rather with people and their own. It would be just so embarrassingly easy for any technologist empowered in this way to simply betray the desperate conservatives huddled at his feet begging him for manna, offering a simulation of the conservative lifestyle — “based Disneyland” — in exchange for the rest of the world … and, of course, their souls.
Some might see in various prominent tech figures the first stirrings of an Antichrist personality with the ambitions to match. I am much more inclined to focus our attention on the harder case of the technologist with the very best intentions being reshaped by the virtual and digital world he has created into a person who believes he has no alternative but to smash the church of Christ and the sacred human form so that the new and “improved” god of the Borg, and the neo-church to match, can take “us” to the next level of super-galactic consciousness.
What can prevent that dismaying scenario? One Christian technologist, riffing off of the marketing of Optimus for those seeking an emotional support relationship, recently posted the makings of an answer. “Teacher, babysitter and friend?! Can we use them as soldiers? This is one of the key patterns of the [cyborg] theocracy,” he observed. “They take weapons and use them to hijack human spiritual relationships. The solution is obvious.”
If you’ve made it this far, it should be obvious. Those who hope to lose the woke theocracy without losing their humanity, too, in body and soul, can trust neither political conservatism nor post-political technocracy. For structural salvation in the digital age, there is only one institution in real life capable of re-establishing spiritual authority without imposing a theocracy — inspiring us, not coercing us, to ensure our tech is developed and used in ways that preserve our way of life, form of government, and sacred human being. The time has come for Americans of all stripes to rediscover what church is all about: providing an inimitable foundation of rock, not of sand.
