Apocalyptic AI and the Stories Technology Tells with Robert Geraci

In this episode of Hunger for Wholeness, Ilia Delio speaks with scholar Robert Geraci about apocalyptic AI, robotics, transhumanist hope, and the religious stories embedded in technological imagination. Geraci traces how his study of robotics led him to notice strikingly religious themes in the writings of engineers and futurists: immortality, resurrection, salvation, and the future transformation of humanity.

Together, Ilia and Robert explore the mid-20th-century roots of computer intelligence, the shadow of world war, and the deep eschatological hopes and fears that shaped early conversations about machines, minds, and human destiny. They consider how figures such as Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, J. B. S. Haldane, Julian Huxley, Norbert Wiener, and Alan Turing reveal the religious imagination at work within technological culture.

Later in the episode, the conversation turns toward technology, ecology, and responsibility. Rather than treating technology as the enemy, Ilia and Robert ask how human beings might reclaim the deeper narratives, values, and forms of belonging needed to guide technological development toward the flourishing of the whole Earth community.

ABOUT ROBERT GERACI

Robert M Geraci is the Knight Distinguished Chair for the Study of Religion & Culture at Knox College. His research explores religion, science and technology in the contemporary world. He is the author of Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality (Oxford 2010), Virtually Sacred: Myths and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life (Oxford 2014), Temples of Modernity: Nationalism, Hinduism, and Transhumanism in South Indian Science (Lexington 2018), Futures of Artificial Intelligence: Perspectives from India and the U.S. (Oxford 2022), and Futureproofing Humanity: Existential Risk and the Technomyths of Human Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Future among the Stars (self 2026). He has been a visiting researcher at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, the Indian Institute of Science and the National Institute for Advanced Studies in Bangalore, India. His research has been supported by the US National Science Foundation, the Republic of Korea National Research Foundation, the American Academy of Religion and two Fulbright-Nehru research awards. He enjoys kayaking, hiking, videogames, and Dungeons & Dragons but doesn’t really have time for any of it.

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Transcript

Robert: Welcome to Hunger for Wholeness. I’m Robert Nicastro. Today, Ilia speaks with Robert Geraci, whose work explores the religious imagination shaping robotics, artificial intelligence, and transhumanist hope. In this first part, they discuss apocalyptic AI, the longing for immortality and meaning, and the stories technology tells about the future of humanity.

Ilia: So, Dr. Geraci, Robert Geraci, it’s wonderful to have you with us this afternoon. I’ve been a big fan of yours, actually, for many years.

Robert G.: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here. And the fandom is mutual.

Ilia: I remember when you published your article on apocalyptic AI in the AAR journal. It’s one of the first really thoughtful articles I had seen on AI and religion. Your research and your thoughtfulness of that research, to me, is very, very valuable.

So let me begin by asking, this is not just plotted. I really am a big fan. I like the way you write, and I like the way you are thinking about AI in terms of religion.

Maybe I can begin by asking you what drew you into this area. It’s not an area that, if you look across the school of AI scholarship, it’s becoming more familiar now, but when you were writing, it wasn’t.

Robert G.: At the time, there was an awful lot of good fortune involved because I was writing a dissertation about, or I planned to write a dissertation about, religion, science, and art. And that meant I needed a religion, and I needed a science, and I needed some artists. So I had to make some choices.

At the time, I thought robots are cool. Everybody likes robots. I started reading things that roboticists wrote, and it turned out that the things that they wrote were the most religious things I had read. Here I was getting a PhD in religious studies, and then I started reading roboticists, and they’re talking about immortality and resurrection of the dead. I was like, wait a minute. The dissertation is writing itself at this point.

There were a couple of people like Anne Foerst and Anne Kull who were talking a little bit from theological directions. They were coming at it from Christian theology. They were talking about robots in a way. And I was just looking at the roboticists and the engineers and thinking, well, they’re doing their own religion, right? What they’re doing is religious.

So there was a good bit of just pure luck and chance in that, and it turned out to be really exciting and fun for me.

Ilia: That’s interesting. Now, when you say the roboticists were doing religion, did they explicitly know themselves to be doing religion, or just the values that they were extracting were religious values?

Robert G.: If I understand correctly, Hans Moravec, the roboticist at Carnegie Mellon, his wife is a pastor, I think.

Ilia: Oh, really?

Robert G.: When you look at his works, especially the 1999 book Robot, he uses all these biblical allusions, and he himself was not Christian.

I tried to meet him when I was in Pittsburgh for a summer at Carnegie Mellon. He had retired from Carnegie Mellon, and when I said by email I would like to talk about these things, he said, “Hey, I’m really too busy making it happen to have a conversation.” His colleague said, “Just show up at his workplace at 11 p.m. because he’ll be there, because he works all the time. And once you get him talking, he’ll talk forever.”

I was born and raised in Texas, and if a person says, “I’m busy,” I’m not going to show up at his office at 11 o’clock at night, even if it’s a good strategy. Maybe today I would approach that differently.

But I think he was deliberately using forms of religious language, though I don’t think he saw himself necessarily as being religious the way I did. Ray Kurzweil, who kind of riffed off a lot of Hans Moravec’s work, I think is more explicit about that. I mean, he has actually gone and talked to Unitarian Universalist communities and that sort of thing. So I think he wasn’t entirely uncomfortable with the idea that there was something kind of religious or parallel to religion about what he was doing.

So I don’t think some of these people were ignorant of what they were doing. I think they were doing it on purpose.

Ilia: Well, interesting.

Robert G.: Even though they were coming at it from an atheist perspective and having more or less rejected all of the traditional religions of American cultural life.

Ilia: Yeah. It’s very interesting because I like to look at religion as the depth dimension. It’s an existential dimension of what we are. So it’s not something like your forefathers discovered in the desert someplace.

Therefore, these existential dimensions or archetypes, to use Jung’s notion, that there’s a collective unconscious where these archetypes of immortality or bliss, or however we want to say it, are already present, or we have access to them through our minds, which is extremely interesting.

Robert G.: Yeah. You look at American political culture and pop culture through the 20th century, when some of these key ideas were emerging, and it was eschatological, right? You had people who were afraid the world was going to end at any moment. And you also had them looking at technology and science going, “Wow, the potential feels kind of unlimited, but in both directions.”

They’re working on that cultural moment, and at the same time they’re living in a country, the United States of America, that is deeply embedded in Christian values and Christian thought. It just kind of permeates American public life, whether you’re a Christian or not. So they were just kind of absorbing, I think, all these influences.

Ilia: Yeah. I think your emphasis on apocalyptic, just as you’re saying here, right? There’s this deep fear that the end is going to come.

Oftentimes, I remind people of when Turing lived. In 1950, he came out with the imitation game, and that’s right after the horror of World War II and the Holocaust and vast destruction of life. I think that the Turing test was not just an intellectual exercise. “What am I doing today? I’m going to ask a machine if it can think.” There was something deeper going on there, and it has to do with this religious impulse.

It’s sort of like, are we oriented to something outside this world or more than this world, or are we destined for sheer nothingness, like sheer destruction? Do you see that as well in that pivotal moment of mid-20th century and the emergence of computer intelligence?

Robert G.: Absolutely. With one little addition, weirdly, if you go back to World War I, people encountered sort of the same dread, right? They could not believe the horror they’d unleashed. Then in the 1920s, that’s when you see the emergence of what we’re now calling Western transhumanism with people like J. B. S. Haldane and Julian Huxley doing their first writing about how, oh, don’t worry, science is going to save us.

Then we delve back down into World War II, and we realize that the horror could be even more profound than we had realized, that the horror was 10 times worse. Then you see Huxley actually rewrote his 1927 book to republish it right afterwards, coins the word transhumanism.

You’ve got the same things happening then in, if you look at our information technologies, Joseph Weizenbaum and Norbert Wiener writing about how dangerous the technology is even as they’re pursuing the technology. But, hey, look, we’re going to have to be super morally responsible to handle the technological power we’re going to engage.

I think also when you go back to Turing, as you pointed out, this was a person who was suffering in 12 different dimensions in 1950, both because of the war and the politics. For them to look, this collective group of people, thinking, well, the science is really interesting, but look what we just did. They’re living with, is it going to be horrible in the future, or is it going to be wonderful? And what are the tools that get us to wonder rather than horror?

Ilia: Right, exactly. Which I think we can conclude science alone cannot achieve the ultimate meaning or value of what we strive for, which does lend kind of a slight, hello, transhumanist, you might want to lower the barrier there a little bit, lower the level of your rhetoric.

This idea that, as you pointed out in Apocalyptic AI, and then we will talk about Futures of Humanity as well, your latest book, there’s something in us that longs for that immortality, happiness, salvation.

Robert G.: Don’t forget meaning.

Ilia: Ultimate meaning. Exactly. Ultimate meaning. And we’re always straddled between ultimate meaning and complete meaninglessness, this kind of ambivalent position we hover over all the time.

Science just has the appearance of, and now technology builds with, “Hey, we can save this planet. We can save you. We can achieve your dreams. Anything you ever thought about or hoped for, here it is. Just put this little chip in your brain and download your mind.”

Robert G.: Trust the people you’re licensing the software from.

Ilia: Exactly.

Robert G.: I really buy into the idea that what people do is tell narratives, tell stories that make sense of the world.

Ilia: Yes.

Robert G.: We look at this world. It’s so complex. It’s so confounding in so many different ways that we end up having to tell stories. Even the story that says science is some sort of neutral arbiter of the universe or whatever, even that’s a story about what we’re doing, right?

So we just kind of relentlessly tell these stories. That apocalyptic story, I think, was a deeply, profoundly hopeful story that people were trying to tell, that the technologies that we were inventing were so powerful, they were going to make the world the kind of world we all want to live in.

Ilia: Right. In a funny way, they have to some degree. I mean, I was watching the movie Hamnet, and I said, “I am so glad that I did not live in the 16th century.” Childhood death was rampant. Anything from the common cold to the bubonic plague was deadly. No running water, no nothing. So do I want to live there? Absolutely not.

Technology has really given us a much better quality of life. There’s no doubt about it. But there’s a thin line between the quality of life that enables physiological and biological flourishing, so to speak—we don’t have to worry too much about things—and then spiritual values.

I think what we’re talking here, it’s not so much about making sure, now we have medications for everything. Now we’re talking about something more. That’s the part where science and religion just remain non-biological partners. They’re not even partners. They’re just not talking to one another to any great extent. And when they do, it’s like, “Oh, that’s nice, that’s good. Yeah, and here’s what we think.”

There’s no effort to join the same team, like the same planet. It’s like, “Well, we have our narrative. You have your narrative. You stay on your side. We’ll stay on our side.” And that’s killing us, actually. These sides of, here we are, here’s what we are physically, biologically; here’s what we are spiritually.

And then spiritually, we have all the monotheistic faiths, and we have all the Eastern traditions, and then we have whatever makes your soul happy and centered. So it’s really all over. We have no binding narrative, it seems to me, not biologically, not spiritually.

Robert G.: Isn’t it frustrating when you think that when people try to tell a narrative that puts the world together, somehow they never get the same traction as someone who wants to tell the narrative of dissolution, anger.

I’m even thinking, one of the things that had surprised me, just maybe two years ago, I reread Robert Ettinger’s books from the 1960s and ’70s, and I hadn’t read them in a long time. He’s the guy, as you know, who invented the idea of cryonics for life preservation. In one of his books, in The Prospect of Immortality, he talks about what he calls the long view, which is that history could be long, and human beings could live long in it. He felt that traditionally religious groups would buy into the long view, that they were all really looking for the same stuff. The people were looking for the same stuff.

Meanwhile, you look at 20th-century transhumanism, which was deeply impacted by Ettinger. But that conversation that said religion and science would kind of cohere around this long view of human history and potential, that goes away. In the 1980s and 1990s, you have this kind of dogmatic triumphalism against dogmatic beliefs. You have these people who are like, “We’re atheists. We love it. And all the religious people are nitwits. And they’re going away.”

That, I think, was really an impoverishment to their own intellectual agenda. Even if they were going to create a kind of competing narrative, that competing narrative could have spoken in a way that brings people together instead of dissolving social connectivity and leaving people kind of adrift in what mattered.

Ilia: No, and now these problems have been compounded because they haven’t been in any way addressed or resolved. Now they’re just getting more and more entrenched. We’re coming to a point, it seems to me, where even technology may not be able to help us. I don’t know how you see things, but that’s one concern.

And then my other kind of interest is with superintelligent AI and where we’re going with self-correcting systems of computerized intelligence and robotics, building humanoids. This is a huge area as well.

There’s something about us that can’t stay human, like Homo sapiens. My students, I know I make them very nervous when I tell them this. It’s like, you’re only here temporarily as a Homo sapien. You’re on your way to becoming something different. I know that really frightens people because they’re like, no, no, no, God made us this way. I’m like, not really. You might want to temper that one a little bit.

We don’t have any sense that we are part of a creativity. This is where Whitehead has creativity as the principle of evolution or just the universe. That’s true. We keep creating ourselves, but we don’t know toward what.

Robert G.: I think often when people are worried about that, if you look at them and say, “Hey, we’re becoming something different,” and then they get really nervous, I think they’re getting nervous because all of a sudden the kind of cataclysmic, existential obligation descends on you.

The moment that you’re saying, “We’re not a finished product. We’re becoming something else, and we’re changing the world,” all of a sudden we have all kinds of obligation to do that in a good way and fear that we’re not doing it in a good way, which is kind of legitimate.

When you say things like, hey, I don’t want to have lived in 1620, I don’t either. I’ve spent most of my life thinking I’d rather live now than kind of any other time in history. Although I have become one of those people who’s looking back to like 1998 and going, well, it looked pretty good. In retrospect, we knew there was an environmental problem, and we were trying to solve it. We knew racism was still with us, and we were trying to solve it. We knew there was prejudice against people for any number of different reasons having to do with sexual orientation or whether they were men or women or whatever.

But at least we thought we were, and now I have a hard time blaming my students who feel like progress is not really where we are at the moment.

Ilia: Yeah.

Robert G.: Who are feeling frustrated that we’re not solving environmental problems, right? This is one of the things I like very much about your most recent book, is you’re trying to wrap that stuff together. How do we make a better world for us to live in? And that’s an environmental question, a technological question, a cultural question, a spiritual question. All of those things to make the world worth living in.

Ilia: We tend to isolate these various dimensions, and then we try to deal with them. But actually, we’re living in a great complexified existence. We don’t have the tools or the way to think about complexified existence.

Technology, to me, has never been a problem because basically, that’s how we got here. Biology was always technological. Way before we arrived, little ants build anthills and beavers build dams, as I always like to say.

Robert G.: Yeah.

Ilia: Even the invention of fire. So techne, nature’s techne, that’s just what it is. Why people find this, all of a sudden, I find people, “Oh no, technology’s going to take us over. We’re coming to an end.” I’m like, no, we’re not. It’s not technology that’s a problem. We’re the problem.

Robert G.: This last fall, so about a year ago, I had a conversation with an artist, Michael Takeo Magruder. He’s a UK-based artist, because I wanted him to come to Knox College, where I teach, to do an event. We were kind of working on an art exhibition, and he wanted to do an original work.

He said, “What’s sacred to you? What does the sacred landscape look like?”

I said, “Well, I love the prairie. I don’t know about anybody else.”

He got real excited, and I went out and took photographs of the prairie burn because we do an annual prairie burn. If you don’t do a burn, the prairie doesn’t stay. The current climatic conditions are such that 4,000 years ago, you could have just had prairie across the Midwest. But you can’t anymore. It would all turn into woods. If you want prairie, you have to burn it periodically.

This is a technology that the Native American communities in the Midwestern plains of the U.S. knew for the last couple thousand years. They were maintaining the prairie for medicine and for food purposes. They were controlled burning. So now today, if we want to have prairie, we have a controlled burn.

He and I collaborated on what became an art exhibition around regeneration of the prairie, and what it means for renewal to follow upon really a deliberate destruction. But that’s a technological question. It’s a scientific question. How do you keep a prairie? You burn it, and you have to do it on purpose.

For someone to feel bad about human beings doing whatever it is we’re doing, they often don’t look at the world and realize that there are lots of ways the world is, that we have the world as it is because we’ve been making choices.

Ilia: Yeah, and you pointed to the Indigenous communities who made those choices, and they knew. What’s so interesting is ancient cultures had a knowledge that wasn’t just about information. There was a deep sense of belonging to being part of that nature, a deep feeling, and realizing choices need to be made here if we are to have a flourishing life. I love that word because you keep throwing it around a lot today, flourishing life.

Robert G.: I love to think about humankind flourishing into the future, and I hope it’s where we’re going. I agree with you. I think we won’t succeed without our science and technology, including without making massive improvements to it.

Even if you just look at what we’ve done so far, you have to think about how are we going to solve some of the problems that, yes, we created scientifically. We created certain problems, things like climate change, that we have to engage. But we’re not going to magically engage them by doing nothing. We’re going to have to invent our way out of some of that.

But then, as you said, it’s about us. So how are we thinking about invention?

I gave a talk in front of a bunch of people. I had two corporate CEOs with me. It was about AI. I said, look, if your AI company is designed just to make money, that’s a stupid and terrible company. They kind of looked at me, and I was like, your company should offer a real and genuine service to the human people, not a service you convince them they need, but one that is actually needed.

If you think about a company that makes a bunch of money building bridges, yes, they make lots of money. Great, wonderful. But now we have bridges over the river. So it’s satisfying a real need human beings have. If we’re going to think about AI, we have to think about what are we building toward the actual needs that people have, or the needs that beavers and ants and whatever else have. How are we going to build AI in ways that benefit the world, including hopefully the human species, before we drive ourselves extinct or something?

Ilia: No, that’s very good. That’s very good, actually. I think you’re absolutely right. We have developed a mindset. We’re in this competitive mindset of more money and more power. We’ve just become so disconnected from the whole, whether it’s the whole of our environment, the whole of the cosmos.

Even the fact that we have an environmental problem, and we couch it as a problem that we have to repair, but we are part of ecology. Teilhard de Chardin has this idea that we are the universe waking up to itself, and that’s so foreign to so many people. “I’m not the universe. I’m a human being.” And I’m like, yeah, but what makes you, you? All that stuff is in the stars and all that kind of stuff. We are nature. That’s the whole point.

So a crisis of nature is a crisis of being human, in my view.

Robert G.: Yeah. I’ve never liked it when people told me that what humans do is artificial and the things that humans don’t do are all natural. I said, but if human beings are natural, right? We’re part of nature. We’re supposed to be here.

And they’re like, “Yeah.”

“Okay, so inherently what we do is natural also.” That doesn’t make it good or bad. It just makes it natural.

Right now, if you think about something, to put a very negative term on it, capitalist extraction, where we extract value out of one thing in order to make money or whatever in another thing, that’s natural too. That doesn’t make it good. It just means it’s natural to what human beings are doing in their present environment. We have to build a kind of, architecturally build an environment where maybe we don’t feel compelled to steal value from over here in order to get it into my own personal welfare advantage.

Ilia: Yeah. No, I think that’s really good.

But how do we get ourselves back on track? I feel like even with technology, you mentioned a company, and many companies, I won’t name any, but it is about profit-making. A lot of it is about profit-making. It’s cool. It’s profitable. We want to be the first. We want to be ahead of everyone else in this game. It’s like a game.

How do we get it back to human-value-centered AI or human-value-centered computer intelligence? How do you see that gap being bridged?

Robert G.: Well, I confess that I like political regulation. An unfettered world without regulation strikes me as problematic.

Way back 20 or more years ago, when I first read Hans Moravec, what really surprised me in his book was not his transcendent vision of human beings uploading our minds into robots and living forever, or cyborgs, or superintelligent computers. That was like, okay, I can see where you’re extrapolating that.

What I couldn’t understand was why he suggested that the future, what would happen, is all human beings would own shares. This was before universal basic income became a phrase. He said, “We’ll all have shares in the robot companies. So the robots will do all the work, largely in space, where it’ll be free of environmental consequences, and we’ll all get paid from the robot companies.”

I read that and I was like, why would you think that? If a human being invents a super helpful robot that can do all the things in the world, why would you think that person is just going to turn over all the shares in their robot company to the rest of us? That just struck me as nonsensical in terms of human behavior.

I think we see it now when Elon Musk tells us, I know I’m not supposed to say names or whatever, but he’s in the news. This is his claim. There’s no reason for any of us to save for our retirement, says the wealthiest person on the planet, that magically we’re all going to have a share. If we’re all magically going to have a share, now would be as good a time as ever in order to make that happen.

So I don’t buy the logic of superabundance. I find that harder to believe than the logic of superintelligence, which I’m on the fence about, the whole superintelligence thing. I’m not convinced that’s coming. But it’ll come before superabundance comes. That’s because we haven’t figured out how to share very well.

Ultimately, if you go back and you read Adam Smith and you read The Wealth of Nations, he literally predicted wealth inequality. He was like, it will happen. But that’s why the government will have to intervene and actually redistribute wealth, which none of the modern-day lovers of Adam Smith, they don’t read those pages. It’s a thousand-page book, and they read the three pages that make them feel good about themselves or whatever.

This person, who is fundamentally a moral philosopher, says what we really need to do is have a way for government to work on behalf of the people. And I really think that’s fundamental. Right now, that’s going to be very, very hard because we’re looking at a world where our governments are not necessarily working on behalf of the people. But we have to get to that place because the people aren’t going to have a say over some magically wonderful robot that can do all the work for us.

Ilia: Yeah, I can kind of see a Hans Moravec dream of a democratic utopia, where technology can alleviate a lot of human work. It’s sort of like, on a smaller level, inventing the plow so the farmer doesn’t have to be out there with his sickle every day.

So this idea that technology can alleviate physical labor, and therefore, now we’re on the level of mind, so now we won’t have to think as much. Maybe we can redirect our energies. Here’s where I would say it does matter who’s playing this game. Who has the ultimate say? And you’re right to bring up Musk because it’s money and power that kind of direct this narrative.

But in an ideal world, if it was equal play, in other words, it was just the matrix of pure possibilities, and we can say, look what power we have with technology. Well, we can rearrange things so that maybe everyone does get a share in the wealth, or we do have much more equitable food distribution. Now we have means to prevent war.

In my dream world, to have a dream world of an equitable planet of life, of shared resources, shared access to knowledge, to education, even to meaningful work, whatever that would be, it requires us, first of all, to have a sense of belonging to something more than my individual self.

I think the West fails in this regard completely. It’s just not a prime candidate because we have a Western mentality that has always gone basically on a kind of Calvinist principle of Jesus loves me, Jesus saves me. So it’s about me, right? Me and my personal salvation.

It’s very different from the Indigenous consciousness of belonging to the web of life, or the Ubuntu consciousness of belonging to a whole, a community from which my identity is derived.

So I think the West, which now strives to lead the pack, and everyone wants to be like an American, according to Tom Friedman, Americanization. I hope not. I guess I hope that we’re way past that now. I don’t think we have the basis to develop technology that could ultimately benefit the planet.

Robert G.: Here’s where, and I’ve been talking to people around the world, you can tell me if you think I’m wrong, here’s my fear. We can all look at a world and go, well, here’s a community whose values are not serving all of us. Here’s a set of values that serve all of us.

Then the problem is, if you take a person from category B, where they maybe have values that serve all of us, and then you give them the opportunity at value A that doesn’t serve all of us, people tend to migrate into that value set. My concern, and I’m really concerned about things like AI ethics and technological ethics, is how do we build a culture, and how do we build a story that matters, that helps people behave in ways that are pro-social for humanity?

But my fear is it’s not really about West versus anything else because when you take someone, for example, there was a famous, famous, I’m sure you read the Lynn White thesis about environmentalism, that Christianity was at fault for the environmental crisis because Christians thought they could just control nature or whatever.

Well, there’s a wonderful refutation by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, who says, “Well, look at what happened in China, where there were Buddhist monks who allegedly were vegetarian, but in fact they clear-cut forests to eat meat, to raise cattle, and where in China people would cut down forests for no obvious reason.” If asked, “Why are you cutting down the forest?” they would say things like, “There are bandits in the forest.” But there wouldn’t be any evidence of actual bandits. They just cut down forests.

You look at China and say the Three Gorges Dam or whatever else, and I’m not trying to demonize China. It’s just that you could read Tuan’s article, which I think was published in the 1980s.

Ilia: White’s article was ’67.

Robert G.: Right. Tuan’s article was quite a bit later, but he was trying to point out that this very influential article glorified a perspective that he thought maybe that sort of valorization didn’t help, that it wasn’t true.

If we go way back in human prehistory, we know that in prehistory, human beings drove species extinct by overhunting them. We know that because we can look at the fossil record, the archaeological record. We can see.

This is my big fear. It’s really not that we can’t come up with good values, because I think we can. And I think we can come up with good values within Western contexts also. I don’t think you have to leave the Abrahamic traditions to come up with good values. There are lots of people who could do it.

But the problem is if I give someone who’s got a good set of values an opportunity to get paid $400,000 a year at some tech company that doesn’t ascribe to those values, entirely too many of us fall into that trap.

So how do we fix that trap? How do you solve that problem? How do you take someone who maybe grew up with Ubuntu philosophical views of the community and how important we are, but then if you give them a $400,000-a-year job to not care about “we” anymore, that person might take the job. That’s where I keep running into this wall.

Robert: Next time, Ilia and Robert continue the conversation, exploring how technology might serve a more humane future, one shaped not by profit or power, but by shared values, humility, and the flourishing of the whole Earth community.