Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now mainstream. Over half of Americans use at least one AI tool, although daily users still represent less than 10 percent of the adult population. Nonetheless, twice as many Americans have a negative, rather than positive, view of AI’s likely effect on the U.S. over the next 20 years.

Concerns about the role of AI in daily life have grown steadily over the past five years, according to a recent report by Pew Research. Most Americans believe that AI is likely to significantly disrupt the job market, and nearly a third of adults expect AI to have a “major impact” on their own job. Even so, most Americans remain deeply ambivalent towards AI, unsure of its implications and divided over how or whether it should be used or regulated.

Is the emergence of AI really any different from the advent of any other technology, whether it be steam power, electricity, air travel, or the Internet?

Discovery of technology is just that: discovery. It is not something new, but the revealing of something for which potential already existed, previously hidden in creation. Latent technology is, therefore, neither good nor evil. The axe can split firewood, or the human skull. Nuclear energy, present since creation, can now be harnessed to power a city, or to turn it to dust. Humans are ultimately responsible for how technology is used. Pilots of modern aircraft and other complex military or commercial vessels already effectively function as cyborgs, deeply integrated into the complicated machines they operate. And they, not the computers, are accountable for their commands. They must always apply human judgment—something that the most advanced of AI agents cannot yet attain.

In principle, then, AI is not different from other tech in its latent potential. Nevertheless, even those who create AI have said they are concerned  that they do not themselves fully understand how AI reaches the conclusions that it does. As one mathematician involved in applications for the defense industry recently asked, “If you can’t explain how or why AI is doing what it’s doing, should you trust it?”

One danger, then, is that we become the tool of the tool we created. Just as Dr. Frankenstein’s monster says to his maker, “You are my creator, but I am your master;—obey!”, so too are we becoming enslaved to the tools of our technologic developments. Consider, for example, a crowd of people in a subway or waiting area. All heads are down, transfixed by their screens and hypnotically detached from their surroundings. Or the family of four at table, each on his or her own device, narcissistically absorbed in their own world, disconnected from one another and from their essential selves. Our very humanity seems to be at risk.

Yet we cannot put the genie back in the bottle. AI cannot be banned. Even if one country, such as the U.S., were to restrict its growth or heavily regulate its usage, China or other national competitors would plow ahead, leaving the U.S. at a disadvantage. The polymath and tech founder Peter Thiel argues that the U.S. made an enormous strategic error in this generation by, among other things, focusing its billions of dollars of technology-related capital investment on bread and circuses, i.e., consumer uses (iPhones, PCs, social media, gaming, etc.) rather than towards defense and other industrial ends directed at the national interest.

Who should determine how AI is used or regulated? One thing is sure. Scientists and engineers are not the right people for us to trust if we want that the technology to be put to benign use. Their passionate motivation is “what is possible?” rather than what is wise or beneficial to humanity. Materialists, who find no God in the universe, have concluded that for humans to survive, we must transcend our humanity through technology and human integration with AI. Many would agree AI risks dehumanizing its users. For theists, the risk is snuffing out the divine spark that makes humans unique among creation. For atheists, this hopefully suggests an alternative of a technologic Utopia and upgrade to the species.

Promotors of the transhumanist movement, and the technocratic elite in general, are like the ancient builders of the Tower of Babel, whose hubris was their downfall. Their tools are insufficient for the task, but they are undeterred. They take a dim view of humanity in its current condition, which must be rescued and improved. Rejecting the biblical narrative of human redemption through God’s grace, they believe that they alone are gifted with Promethean fire from the gods. In their prescriptive, hundreds of elites will lead and control the billions of people of earth who will obey and serve them. AI becomes the god of this age, and they its ministers and priests.

Thiel has mused on the apocalyptic implications of AI. Is AI the biblical Antichrist, or at least the system that enables its rise? Or, perhaps, is AI the “katechein,” the restraining force the Bible prophesies will hold the Antichrist back for a time? Or perhaps AI is both? The same technology can serve benign or malevolent ends, as the wars of the 20^th century proved all too well. Every generation from at least the Black Death of the early Middle Ages through the Cold War era’s fear of nuclear annihilation finds something in the air that leads them to believe that the end is nigh. All were wrong. Only one generation will be right, and odds are it isn’t ours.

O Technology, we will always have you with us. There is no going back. There is therefore no room for Luddites or techno-pessimism. The voice of Wisdom calls, “How will you use what you have created?” Will you master it, or will it master you? To not be mastered by technology requires the daily discipline of disconnecting from it. There is an element of resistance here. The cure is as ancient as the disease. We find our humanness in spiritual contemplation, reflection, solitude, prayer, gratitude, fellowship, and service to others. Only here, disconnected from the machine and from the hive mind of social media, can we find ourselves again.

Another element of resistance is found in education. As important as STEM is for our national strategic interest and tech-enabled economy, the liberal arts must not be cast aside as irrelevant or superfluous. It is in the humanities that a new generation can best explore and discover not just the how and what, but the why and the what for, of technology and life itself.

Will AI become a force for good or for evil? The answer is surely both, but which force will prevail? Advances in science and technology, including AI, are not antithetical to the Judeo-Christian traditions’ optimistic expectation that the kingdom of heaven will prevail, fully in the future but partially in the now. It is incumbent upon us to work out what the “now and not yet” of this revealing means in the context of an AI-embedded future.