The AI Challenge: Palantir, The Pope, And Paul Kingsnorth

Authored by Peter Berkowitz via RealClearPolitics,

As artificial intelligence extends to every corner of contemporary life, it brings remarkable capabilities and opportunities – along with dangers that strike at the foundations of individual freedom, human dignity, and the common good.

Many incline to either extol AI’s blessings or condemn it as a curse. The savvy who learn from experience recognize that like all tools and contrivances, AI can be used for good and bad. Students of history grasp that as with numerous technological breakthroughs over the last 100 years – perhaps more so – AI promises unprecedented benefits while posing catastrophic peril to the future of human civilization.

What is artificial intelligence?

Three major artificial intelligence platforms – ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok, all large-language models colloquially referred to as AI – to which I put the question agreed: AI consists in machines’ ability to perform tasks such as perceiving, learning, reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making that normally require human intelligence. All three AI platforms stated that narrow or weak AI, the familiar and currently available form of artificial intelligence, executes one task well. The platforms added that computer scientists are pursuing general or strong AI (also known as artificial general intelligence or AGI) which, like a human being, would understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks. Gemini and Grok noted – and ChatGPT concurred in response to my follow-up query – that researchers contemplate a third kind, superintelligent AI (also called artificial superintelligence or ASI), that would surpass human intelligence in virtually every aspect and in almost all ways.

To my initial inquiry, Grok volunteered observations on “common misconceptions.” AI can already accomplish wonderful things: write essays, computer code, music, legal briefs; pass bar exams, medical licensing tests, and Ph.D.-level science exams; generate photo-quality images and realistic videos; and hold conversations that feel human. But, reported Grok with seemingly sly modesty, “AI is not ‘alive’ or conscious (as far as we know in 2025).” Still, Grok acknowledged – as if describing a mental-health patient – AI hallucinates, errs, and lacks real-world grounding. And Grok helpfully summarized: “Artificial intelligence today is software that mimics cognitive abilities through massive statistical learning, not through human-like consciousness or general reasoning from first principles – yet it’s already transforming almost every industry.”

As it promises to sweep across and remake not only industries but also moral and political life, AI’s perils – some observable, some looming – come into focus.

AI provides a crippling crutch. Reliance on artificial intelligence, especially among the young, stunts creativity and judgment. Adults’ use of AI as a substitute for friends and therapists erodes empathy and human connection.

AI strains resources and damages the environment. The colossal data centers that handle artificial intelligence’s massive computational demands consume huge amounts of electricity and require immense quantities of potable water to prevent overheating.

AI diminishes human control and creates acute vulnerabilities. Artificial intelligence involves not one big machine but rather incorporates millions of interconnected devices distributed over vast geographical areas. As AI supports a growing number of crucial operations – government, national security, energy, telecommunications, transportation, health, finance, and more – the nation will increasingly depend on prodigious computer networks whose operations and output computer scientists can’t fully anticipate or account for.

AI displaces workers and diminishes human capabilities. Artificial intelligence will take over numerous jobs at which it outperforms the workers it has made unnecessary, while carrying out other activities more cheaply and efficiently but less responsibly than the professionals who will lose their livelihood. Skills and qualities essential to citizenship and human flourishing – not least reading, writing, and judiciousness – will atrophy.

AI blurs true and false. Able to present deepfakes as real and real images as deepfakes, artificial intelligence undermines the reliable information and shared reality on which free and democratic government depends.

AI facilitates the concentration of wealth and power. Government’s growing reliance on artificial intelligence entwines the public sector and the private sector, shifting influence and control from elected officials to giant corporations that write computer software, host clouds, and manage physical infrastructure.

And AI opens the door to doomsday scenarios once confined to science fiction. Artificial superintelligence incorporated into robots and weapons systems may conclude based on calculations that it conceals from the human beings who built it that wiping out this people, that nation, or these civilizations will yield the greatest good for the greatest number.

This brief parade of horribles – potential as well as actual – underscores the need for serious thinking about the AI challenge. Eminent figures from high-tech, religion, and the world of letters have taken notice and stepped up – to focus attention, frame the issues, and summon to action.

On Nov. 11, accepting the Hudson Institute’s Herman Kahn award, Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp argued that AI was central to America’s national security. Turbulence lies ahead because technology “is going to change everything politically” and “there are dangers in AI,” warned Karp. To navigate the turbulence, he counseled, it is urgent to “understand and embrace the superiority of America and its culture.”

Echoing Abraham Lincoln, Karp stated that the United States is special because it was founded on the conviction that “the rights we have in this country are inalienable and they are given to us by God.” It follows, according to Karp, that no machine, however intelligent, can possess what God alone has the power to confer – an essential dignity expressed in the rights inherent in all persons.

The superiority of America’s moral and political principles, however, has never been enough to fend off the enemies of freedom. The United States preserves its superiority also thanks to prowess in “controlling the violence,” argued Karp. Americans earn the privilege of respecting the rule of law at home by prevailing on the battlefield abroad.

China, in Karp’s view, presents the primary threat to American freedom. Were the Chinese Communist Party to succeed in its quest for AI dominance, the CCP would decisively infuse international relations with authoritarian norms and comprehensively reshape world affairs to serve authoritarian interests. Consequently, argued the Palantir CEO, the United States must persevere – guided by the nation’s founding commitment to basic rights and fundamental freedoms – as the world’s “dominant technological culture in the world.” That requires excelling at AI.

A few days before Karp’s speech, an address by Pope Leo XIV was read aloud at the Builders Artificial Intelligence Forum held at the Pontifical Gregorian University. The pontiff praised the participants – organizers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and clergy – who had gathered in Rome “to ensure that emerging technologies remain oriented toward the dignity of the human person and the common good.” This called for examination of “not merely what AI can do, but who we are becoming through the technologies we build.”

The AI challenge represents, for the pope, the latest round in the age-old “dialogue between faith and reason.” Although a new technology, AI, “like all human invention, springs from the creative capacity that God has entrusted to us (cf. Antiqua et Nova, 37),” he stressed. “This means that technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation.” Like all human invention, AI “carries an ethical and spiritual weight, for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity.” To foster wise choices, the pope summoned “all builders of AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work – to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.”

In contrast to high-tech titan Karp and the Bishop of Rome, both of whom want to harness AI to advance individual freedom, human dignity, and the common good, author Paul Kingsnorth maintains that artificial intelligence represents an all but unmitigated evil. His new book, “Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity,” has little to say directly about AI. But it offers rich psychological, neurological, cultural, autobiographical, ethical, political, and theological explorations of modernity’s internal dynamics, which, he believes, culminate in AI’s transformation of human beings into its servants. Kingsnorth’s explorations form an elaborate lamentation on what Nietzsche in the 19th century called “the death of God” and the German sociologist Max Weber in the 20th century described as “the disenchantment of the world.” They also recount Kingsnorth’s long, inspiring journey – intellectual, moral and political, religious – in search of a way amid modern technologies’ seductions and ructions to live in harmony with our essential humanity. His reflections are at once lyrical and erudite, illuminating and harrowing, compelling and overwrought.

By “the Machine,” Kingsnorth means not in the first place technological progress or politics dedicated to it, but rather a spiritual crisis born and bred in, and transmitted globally by, the West. The modern scientific spirit, he argues, manifests an instrumental orientation toward the natural world that relentlessly reduces human beings to natural objects, and therefore subject to control and manipulation no more and no less than any other particle or complex of particles. Left and right today, Kingsnorth maintains, serve the Machine’s degradation of human beings to mere things: Postmodern progressives work furiously to dissolve traditional constraints and abolish natural limits while pro-free-market conservatives spread the Machine’s ineluctable logic and dehumanizing imperatives around the world.

All is not lost, though, for Kingsnorth. Notwithstanding his darkest moments, he exhorts readers to “Remain human despite it all.”

Americans may even turn matters to the nation’s advantage by mustering the wherewithal to fashion an education that acquaints students with America’s roots and the West’s enduring heritage: inalienable rights and the forms of government that secure them, human dignity, and the common good. Such an education would greatly improve the nation’s chances of clarifying AI’s blessings and curses and putting today’s most astonishing and terrifying technology in the service of properly human purposes.