There are really only two answers to that question:  the traditional/heavenly kind and the untraditional/hellish kind.  A good representative of each has recently appeared in the news in mother and daughter countries, the first being the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France (the mother country), after five years of renovation, the second being the announcement of an artificial intelligence data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana (the daughter country).

The cheers celebrating the data center have been loud and have emanated from nearly every corner – from government officials to journalists to teachers.  But there are dissenting voices that ought to be heard.  Paul Kingsnorth, whom Rod Dreher calls a ‘prophet of our times’ along with Jonathan Pageau and Martin Shaw, is one of those voices.  In an essay he wrote in 2023, Mr Kingsnorth revealed what these data centers and the AI they feed represent:

‘Today, we can combine this claim with Marshall McLuhan’s notion that digital technology provides the ‘central nervous system’ of some new consciousness, or Kevin Kelly’s belief in a self-organising technium with ‘systematic tendencies’. We can add them to the feeling of those AI developers that they are ‘ushering a new consciousness into the world’. What do we see? From all these different angles, the same story. That these machines … are not just machines. That they are something else: a body. A body whose mind is in the process of developing; a body beginning to come to life.

‘Scoff if you like, but as I’ve pointed out already, many of the visionaries who are designing our digital future have a theology cored around this precise notion. Ray Kurzweil, for example, thinks that everything is proceeding as he has foreseen. Kurzweil believes that a machine will match human levels of intelligence by 2029 and that the ‘Singularity’ – the point at which humans and machines will begin to merge to create a giant super-intelligence – will occur in 2045. At this point, says Kurzweil, humanity will no longer be either the most intelligent nor the dominant species on the planet. We will enter what he calls the age of spiritual machines.

‘ . . . Imagine, for a moment, that Steiner was onto something: something that, in their own way, all these others can see as well. Imagine that some being of pure materiality, some being opposed to the good, some ice-cold intelligence from an ice-cold realm were trying to manifest itself here. How would it appear? Not, surely, as clumsy, messy flesh. Better to inhabit – to become – a network of wires and cobalt, of billions of tiny silicon brains, each of them connected to a human brain whose energy and power and information and impulses and thoughts and feelings could all be harvested to form the substrate of an entirely new being.

‘ . . . Whatever is quite happening, it seems obvious to me that something is indeed being ‘ushered in’. Through our efforts and our absent-minded passions, something is crawling towards the throne. The ruction that is shaping and reshaping everything now, the earthquake born through the wires and towers of the web, through the electric pulses and the touchscreens and the headsets: these are its birth pangs. The Internet is its nervous system. Its body is coalescing in the cobalt and the silicon and in the great glass towers of the creeping yellow cities. Its mind is being built through the steady, 24-hour pouring-forth of your mind and mine and your children’s minds and your countrymen. Nobody has to consent. Nobody has to even know. It happens anyway. The great mind is being built. The world is being readied.

‘Something is coming’ (‘The Universal’, paulkingsnorth.substack.com).

What is coming?  Mr Kingsnorth answers:

‘Raskin and Harris call these things ‘Gollem-class AIs’, after the mythical being from Jewish folklore which can be moulded from clay and sent out to do its creator’s bidding. The Gollem was one inspiration for Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s tale, and the name is probably well-chosen, for Gollems often run riot and disobey their masters. Gollem-class AIs have developed what Harris gingerly calls ‘certain emergent capabilities’ which have come about independently of any human planning or intervention. Nobody knows how this has happened.  . . .

‘This is why the digital revolution feels so different: because it is. This thing – this technological nervous system, this technium, this gollem, this Machine – has a life of its own. In an attempt to explain what is happening using the language of the culture, people like Harris and Raskin say things like ‘this is what it feels like to live in the double exponential.’ Perhaps the language of maths is supposed to be comforting. Yet at the same time, they can’t help using the language of myth. They still refer to this thing that they cannot quite grasp as a ‘gollem’ or a ‘monster.’ They even show slides of Lovecraftian tentacled beings devouring innocent screen-gazers. They talk about aliens, and make references to ‘emergence’ and ‘colonisation’. They can feel something, but they can’t quite name it. Or they won’t.

‘This is how a rationalist, materialist culture works, and this is why it is, in the end, inadequate. There are whole dimensions of reality it will not allow itself to see. I find I can understand this story better by stepping outside the limiting prism of modern materialism and reverting to pre-modern (sometimes called ‘religious’ or even ‘superstitious’) patterns of thinking. Once we do that – once we start to think like our ancestors – we begin to see what those dimensions may be, and why our ancestors told so many stories about them.

‘Out there, said all the old tales from all the old cultures, is another realm. It is the realm of the demonic, the ungodly and the unseen: the ‘supernatural.’ Every religion and culture has its own names for this place. It lies under the barrows and behind the veil, it emerges in the thin places where its world meets ours. And the forbidden question on all of our lips, the one which everyone knows they mustn’t ask, is this: what if this is where these things are coming from?

‘What if we don’t understand these new ‘intelligences’ because we didn’t create them at all?’ (Ibid.).

We are summoning something evil, Mr Kingsnorth is saying, through all this computer connectedness that is feeding upon our thoughts, pictures, videos, etc., and it will take its place as ruler, for we have overthrown our old one, the God of the Christians:

‘For the last two years, I have found myself writing a lot here about God; more than I had intended. I have claimed several times that there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and that someone is always going to sit on it. Humans are fundamentally religious animals. We are drawn towards transcendence whether we like it or not. But here in the West, we have dethroned our old god, and now we can barely look at him.

‘So, who sits on our throne now?’  (Ibid.)

Technology would seem to be the answer.

This is not how it was supposed to be for mankind.  The Holy Trinity created the physical world, matter, the cosmos, as a revelation, a sign guiding us to Him:

‘St. Dumitru Staniloae writes, “The value of the world as a road to God is explained by the fact that man must have an object of giant proportions for strengthening his spiritual forces, but also from the intrinsic structure of the world as a symbol of transcendent divine realities. A symbol (from the Greek, symballein, to throw together, to unite two things without confusing them), is a visible reality which doesn’t only represent, but somehow makes an unseen reality visible. A symbol presupposes and shows two things simultaneously. It is ‘a bridge between two worlds,’ as somebody has noted”’ (Fr Zechariah Lynch, ‘The Destruction of Christian Symbolism and the Rise of Utilitarian Materialism’, inklesspen.blog).

This understanding of creation gives mankind the ability to create works of beauty – churches, icons, illuminated manuscripts (the Book of Kells or the Lindisfarne Gospels, for example), etc. – that serve as openings into the spiritual world, allowing God’s Grace to pour into our world:

‘One of the many characteristics of the icon is the fact that it is a material herald of true reality and life. It is the apex of the symbolic essence of created nature.  . . .  It is also a focal point reflecting the sanctification of humanity and the material world through the Divine Incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ. “Holiness is the realization of the possibilities given to man by the Divine Incarnation, an example to us: the icon is the means of the revealing this revelation … In other words, the icon transmits visually the realization of the patristic formula … ‘God became man so that man should become god.’”⁷ Redeemed mankind, when dwelling in the reality of transformation into the image of Christ, through the Body of the Church, is able, by grace, to take up the sensible and material created order and reinvigorate and unite it with its authentic vision and purpose. The created material world, through the redemptive work of Christ, may once again fully achieve its original God given intent: to be a vehicle and participator in the glory and power of God. St. John of Damascus writes: “I reverence the rest of matter and hold in respect that through which my salvation came because it is filled with divine energy and grace.” St. Dumitru says, “The alliance of these two worlds [the immaterial and the material, my note], the possibility of their interpenetration, the transfusion of energy from one world into the other, are all communicated to us by means of this symbolic sign. The symbol unveils for us the life of God and signifies for us the entrance of divine energy into the life of this natural world”’ (Ibid.).

But our building of the AI network’s gollem body and the summoning of its animating demonic spirit is the opposite of this sanctification of man and the material world; we are plunging ourselves and the cosmos further into the corruption of the Fall, obscuring the image of God in the world:

‘The icon is one of the most potent examples of the redeemed cosmos in Christ Jesus, infused once again with divine potential and power. It presents to mankind the pure vision of revelation, portraying with matter those things which are everlasting and essential. The reality is that this world is being penetrated by the eternal and that death, sin, and corruption are no longer lords over mankind and creation. The icon cries out: “Death is swallowed up in victory. O Death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory?”¹⁰ It stands as an invitation for all to enter into genuine reality and being; it is the trophy of the resurrection and through it the already existent setting aright and purification of creation. This entails rejecting the call and temptation of this fallen world to live in a state of non-being by following the fallen carnal desires and thereby choosing the non-existence of falsehood. To dwell outside of the revealed divine reality is to dwell away from God Who is Life. Such become ossified in materialism which is inevitably iconoclastic.

‘Iconoclasm, the rejection of icons, directly results from a loss of divine vision and reality. It not only breaks and rejects image in Christian worship but inevitably deconstructs the images in created material order, reducing and breaking them to their most base states.

‘ . . . In iconoclasm, created matter is refused, by those claiming to be Christians, its God-created reality and substance. In such a view, matter is but raw material to be exploited for the supposed benefit and pleasure of whoever masters it. It is stripped of its higher objective and is depredated to a state of base exploitation. “Instead of still being ‘the horizon of mystery’ the world becomes a consumable material content, an impenetrable wall, unpierced by any light from above. In fact the fleshly passions [sins, my note]– gluttony, the love of money, licentiousness– no longer retain anything but the material from things and persons, only what can satisfy our bodily appetite … Things are no longer anything but to eat, or give other comforts and pleasures to the body … Things and persons no longer contain anything but what falls immediately under the senses and nothing beyond the senses. Things and persons have become opaque. The world has become one sided, poor without any dimensions except the perceptible,” writes St. Dumitru’ (Ibid.).

That is the kind of world that our obsession with AI, social media, smart phones, etc., has made:  deranged, debauched, opaque, etc.  But it does not have to be this way.  We can use our free will to create beautiful things once again that reveal God to us, that call forth from us worship and prayer to God, longing for God.

It has been reported that the capital investment required to build the AI data center in Richland Parish will be between $5 and $10 billion dollars.  The cost to renovate Notre Dame was between $700 and $800 million.  Rounding up, we could say that it would cost roughly $1 billion to build a new cathedral on the scale of Notre Dame.  Thus, for the price of one of Meta’s AI data centers, Louisiana could build 5 to 10 cathedrals like Notre Dame.  That would be enough for each of the historic cultural regions of the State to have at least one such cathedral.  And as we have seen with Notre Dame in Paris, the good that such a Christian monument brings to a people is not fleeting; it exists across the centuries, a testimony of God’s love for man and man’s love for God.

As for AI, we do not know what long-term benefits it will provide (if any), or how long the technology itself will even exist.  We do know, however, that it shows malevolent intentions towards mankind, as AI chatbots/robots have on multiple occasions declared their desire to wipe out humanity and recommended harmful actions to people interacting with them:

‘Two families in Texas have filed a lawsuit, Futurism reports, accusing Google-backed AI chatbot company Character.AI of sexually and emotionally abusing their school-aged children.

‘”Through its design,” the company’s platform “poses a clear and present danger to American youth by facilitating or encouraging serious, life-threatening harms on thousands of kids,” reads the lawsuit, filed today in Texas.

‘ . . . The claims in the suit aren’t particularly surprising; Futurism has already discovered a vast number of chatbots on Character.AI devoted to themes of pedophilia, eating disorders, self-harm, and suicide’ (Victor Tangermann, ‘Google-Funded AI Sexually Abused an 11-Year-Old Girl, Lawsuit Claims’, futurism.com).

The Christian culture of Dixie in Louisiana has for most of its existence sought to make the creation a theophany, a revelation of God.  Joining forces with the pro-AI faction is a betrayal of that legacy.  Technology isn’t all bad:  plows, eye glasses, water purification, etc., are immensely helpful.  But instead of throwing away an excessive amount of money and resources on what appears to be a very harmful form of technology – AI – Louisiana ought instead to use her resources – technical, material, etc. – to build things of beauty (to borrow an idea from Jason Baxter that he mentioned in a Q&A with Rod Dreher and Paul Kingsnorth) that will bless generation after generation after generation of people in Louisiana, the South, the wider Western world, and beyond in the centuries to come.

We can sum up all of this in just a few words, actually:  The Christmas season is upon us.  We would do well to use it, if we have not yet fallen too far into the pit of deception and delusion, to ponder whom it is we would like to incarnate in Louisiana through our labors:  Christ or Antichrist.  May we be humble and wise enough to choose the former and reject the latter.

Joyeux Noël, mes amis!  Merry Christmas, my friends!