Future-Proofing Humanity and Building a Global Mind with Robert Geraci

In this episode of Hunger for Wholeness, Ilia Delio continues her conversation with Robert Geraci on the ethical future of technology, the possibility of a global mind, and the stories we need to tell if civilization is to flourish. Together, they ask how AI might help us build shared spaces of learning, dialogue, and human connection rather than deepen division, surveillance, and algorithmic isolation.

Ilia imagines noospheric classrooms and a global heart, where technology becomes a medium for shared values across cultures, religions, and planetary communities. Geraci reflects on the need for humility, public goods, meaningful work, and stories that draw us toward a better future rather than trap us in conflict, wealth, and power.

Later in the episode, Geraci discusses his book Future-Proofing Humanity, exploring existential risk, technological culture, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the importance of civilization as an unfinished project. Rather than fearing technology itself, Ilia and Robert invite us to ask what kind of humanity our technologies are calling us to become.

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 back to Hunger for Wholeness. I’m Robert Nicastro. In the second half of Ilia’s conversation with Robert Geraci, they turn to the ethical future of technology, exploring Ubuntu-inspired coding, noospheric classrooms, shared values, and the possibility of a global mind and heart.

Later, Robert reflects on his book, Future-Proofing Humanity, and the stories we must tell if civilization is to flourish.

Ilia: We need more Ubuntu-like people, coders, people who are writing the code, who are really creating the software. Unfortunately, I think a lot of our lives when it comes to technology are in the hands of a very select group of people. It’s not democratic by any means. It is definitely a kingdom of its own sort, this computer kingdom. Our life is in your coded hands, basically, if you were to rewrite the Psalms.

Robert G.: I have been happy, though. I’ve had students, and you’ve probably witnessed the same thing. Twenty years ago, if I asked a student, if it were technologically safe and feasible and affordable to take your cell phone and implant it in your body so that you didn’t have to carry a phone around, everything your phone does was wired up to your brain, 20 years ago, all my students wanted that.

Now my students do not want that. I imagine you’ve seen something similar, right? Where now they’re like, oh, that’s a terrible idea. A, I don’t want to have that kind of permanent, I don’t want to be on like that. But I also don’t trust the people at the top. They don’t trust them with that kind of power.

Ilia: Yes, that’s very true, Robert. I find the exact same thing in my own students. They are wary of who’s writing this code. They’re wary of surveillance, of their digital footprint being all over. They realize being tethered to their phones is affecting them mentally, their capacity to think, to be creative. So they’re trying to find ways that they can, how do I detox a little bit from this instrument?

Yet at the same time, while they’re telling this to me, they’re looking at their phone. That is sort of the ambivalence of the whole thing. It’s like, no, we don’t want this. I can only look at my phone to find out the reasons why.

We’re in a very, very strange dilemma with regard to technology. We’re so entwined in it. It’s become DNA. It’s not only not going away, it is now becoming epigenetic. It’s really just woven right into everything about us in our culture.

So even if young generations say, I need to find ways I’m not using my phone, in the meantime they’re sending me pictures through Instagram and TikTok. We don’t even know anymore that we don’t know how to get out of this loop. We’re in a loop, a very endless, strange loop.

Robert G.: It is too much like a heroin addict telling you that they don’t want to be on heroin.

Ilia: Exactly. That’s exactly right.

Robert G.: I say this as someone who just dragged one of his undergraduates into helping me build my new social media empire. I was like, I want to create a social media account that’s really just about stuff I love. I love mythology. I love monsters. When I go out and travel the world, if I see a weird sculpture of a monster, you can bet on it, I’m taking pictures of that monster.

So I love mythical monsters, and I love technology. We’re building this myth, monsters, and tech social media universe, but I literally want my student to do it for me. I don’t mind sitting in front of a camera and filming something. I don’t mind taking pictures of something. I don’t want anything to do, and I don’t feel like I have time to learn to do it well.

I would rather the student just made the account for me and tried to figure out how to get people to really fundamentally join me in a conversation. The same concept of having your podcast, which is about how do you have a conversation with the public? How do people talk with you about the things you care about?

Ilia: Exactly.

Robert G.: I’m trying to figure that path out, but also without getting lured into the evils of the algorithm. How do you get visibility for some concept, which is deeply problematic, because then we’re all fighting against these things we can’t understand. They’re opaque and they’re deliberately opaque, and sometimes even counterproductive.

If you’re on Instagram trying to share some idea, the algorithms may be deliberately preventing your idea from being shared, especially if it doesn’t make people angry. Let’s go back to that thing we talked about like 20 minutes ago, where if I say something that’s really about conflict and getting people angry, we now know that gets amplified on social media sites.

Ilia: Yeah.

Robert G.: Whereas if I say something about, hey, you think X and I think Y, but I figure we could probably come together. There’s a Venn diagram where we’re in the same place. I’m going to get no leverage on a social media account with that.

Ilia: No, absolutely. Absolutely.

So I really do think we’re in a kind of Jungian moment because there’s something deep within our psyche that has become split. That’s one of the things I think. I think the problem is not so much in the public milieu. The public milieu is a reflection or a mirror of this internal milieu that has become seriously, I mean, it’s really in intensive care. The collective conscious and the collective unconscious, the psyche, is in an intensive care unit. It’s really been damaged. There’s something about it that’s come apart.

This is where I think, you know the old adage, you can’t solve a problem with the same conditions that created it.

Robert G.: Said no alcoholic ever.

Ilia: I hear you that you don’t want to be part of building your own website. You’re going to involve the students. Of course they could do it in much less time than it would take an older person to do it. I mean my man, not you, but I would take it.

Robert G.: That’s a win all by itself, right? I’m busy. I could be playing with my dog.

Ilia: Yeah, no, I completely agree.

But we have to find it. So you and I are both interested in ethics. How can we use AI ethically to actually build a world into a more flourishing life? And I’m going to use that term. I think it’s overplayed a little bit because there are parts of the world that are not flourishing by any means.

But we have the potential to do so. That’s what AI says to me. We have an amazing capacity to create and imagine what doesn’t exist. That in itself is really fantastic as humans. That’s one of our trademarks. And then it’s a question of, well, what do we imagine? And what do we want to bring into existence?

Robert G.: And how do we make sure we’re imagining it for all of us, right? Not, I’m going to imagine it for the people who look just like me, whose skin is like mine, or my religion is like mine, or whatever. But if it’s good for me, it’s probably good for all of us. And how do we imagine that?

Ilia: Well, that’s where I actually think our educational systems have to change. We keep educating to people who look like us and basically think like us, even if they disagree on a few things.

So I imagine we can use technology to build what I would call noospheric classrooms, classrooms that will allow people from all around the globe to enter into the same space of shared conversation. Because we have to have these conversations that we’re having here on a different level, that we can begin to talk together. What do we hold in common? What do we value?

Robert G.: AI could, in fact, be a technology that allows you to have that conversation, as opposed to you learning 45 different languages and the cultural rules.

I’m looking at your little Zoom backdrop behind you, which is kind of library shelves. I think one of the two greatest contributions of American culture is the public library. The other is the national park, but the public library is a commons for all. We have to think about education as that. How do we create a commons for all, that we can all be part of a conversation together, where we are in fact learning together and seeing the world that way?

So I totally agree with you, and I think that technology could help us do that.

Ilia: That’s exactly right. I would say every place of higher education, everyone’s trying to keep up with technology and have computers. Well, you need to mach schnell there. You need to speed that up and move that to a whole different level. You can’t stay at that level, like we give our students a computer. That’s very nice. Now, how are we going to use that technology to begin conversations on a different level?

Because I can touch my button and I know what’s going on in Iran, in Afghanistan. We already have the noosphere. It’s already filtering through our minds, but we don’t know how to know something together.

Here’s my Teilhardian thing. If we can build a global brain, I mean, we already have something like the global brain, but really a global mind that we’re really beginning to think, maybe of shared values across continents. I would even extend that to if we go to Mars, life on other planets, that we could take these same principles and begin to think intergalactically. So I never want to be just overly terrestrial here.

But then with that, can we build a global heart? This is where I think religions, quite honestly, need to say, it’s been really wonderful being our little separate tribes, and now we have to let go and maybe join in this new interconnected whole that we’re all part of. Maybe religions can just contribute their wisdom to this new emerging wholeness.

I’m thinking we’re still too small in our thinking, even with technology. It’s still like aiming for eternal life, brain downloading, and you’re going to overcome every biological disease. I think it can do a lot of good in that way, but it’s got to be more than that.

I think technology has the capacity to really help us build, because it’s we who really want to build, and we can’t do it just in our human skin. Now we’re in mind extension, and we have to use that to our advantage, I think.

Robert G.: Yeah. And really zoom in on the things where we tend to agree. I think we tend to agree on things that are really the practical ones. One of our big problems is we sit around and we hover around what you believe versus what I believe.

Ilia: Exactly.

Robert G.: Then we get in this world where we’re just fighting with one another. But if we really get down to what do you want in your daily life? What do you want your life to look like?

Ilia: Exactly.

Robert G.: What you want your life to look like, I bet, is a really super overlapping Venn diagram with what I want my life to look like and with what everybody else wants their life to look like.

So if instead of you and I getting into some kind of argument about, well, you believe this one thing and I think that’s just wildly wrong, we could really focus in on things we all agree on, things like you said: shared work, shared food, shelter.

I really think you were dead on talking about how people want meaningful work. There are people who would sit around and do nothing all of their time if they could. Fine. As far as I’m concerned, pay them to do that rather than paying them to do something. But most of us want a meaningful engagement with the world around us. We want to feel like we’re doing something that contributes.

Ilia: Absolutely.

Robert G.: To our community. I think we could enable that. If we’re thinking about our technology as ways to put roofs over people’s heads, put food in their mouths, and give them meaningful opportunities to do stuff in the world.

Ilia: Actually, that’s it.

The impetus for this idea goes back to, I worked with a Jesuit a number of years ago who wrote a book called In Search of the Whole. He worked in a university where there are people of all different faiths or no faiths. The one question he asked them: “What is the good you are trying to do? What is the good you seek?”

That’s a great starting point. What is the good? Because everyone does seek good. In the same way, I believe every person seeks to love and to be loved. I think love is the highest, no matter where you are in the world, whatever religion, language, color, doesn’t matter. Every single person in the human heart seeks to love and to be loved.

We start there, on what binds us together. These ideological differences and religious doctrines, like, “Oh, well, we have the real God and you don’t have the real God. We’re going to be saved.” Well, that’s just ridiculous, in my view. Helpful maybe to people, but now they can become divisive. They’re paths to ultimate meaning. If they give meaning to you, I think you should stick with it.

Robert G.: Yeah. And if we’re just humble about it, right? The arrogance that says, “I’m right and you’re wrong,” is actually not even consonant with what most religions teach.

Humility that says, I could be wrong. I don’t even need to worry about you. I’m going to just go, I could be wrong. If I’m willing to acknowledge that, it would change all kinds of social dynamics for me in ways that I think most people would feel better about.

We see this in academia all the time. Put aside religion. Put aside people fighting over my God, your God, whatever. In academia, the number of people who might feel like they have to be right, they have to be the smartest person in the room. You just go, that’s really not helpful right now. It only leads to people shouting at each other over a seminar table instead of over an altar. But it’s the same dynamic.

If people just sit back and go, wait a minute, maybe I’m wrong about this thing. I’m probably not. You can say I’m probably not, right? That’s okay. But I might be wrong. Then it changes how you’re going to interact with someone else.

Unfortunately, I do think we have a problem. Maybe this is an explicitly Western problem. Remember a moment ago, I was like, let’s not West versus East or something. But there may be a Western problem that says the person who is wealthiest is the least wrong. Somehow we’ve built this idea up in our culture that if somebody’s spectacularly rich, they must have it all right.

That was why I loved in that movie, the Knives Out, Glass Onion movie, the moment when Benoit Blanc realizes that the Ed Norton character is just a complete yahoo, and that the whole murder narrative is built around the fact that this guy’s a yahoo. It’s all so dumb. He has this moment where he’s like, it’s so dumb, this situation we’re in. We shouldn’t be in this situation.

I think most of us, if we look and we go, do I really think someone’s right because he has more money than I do? Is that really what I think? Almost none of us are going to go, he has more money, she has more money, therefore whatever. But we act as though that’s true. We’re perpetuating a problematic environment that prevents us from having those shared moments where we can figure out what’s good for the world and for us.

Ilia: Humility, I think you mentioned humility before, may be one of the most sought-after virtues today. It’s something that we really need to get back to.

First of all, there’s no total or absolute knowledge. Like, this is the way you should know it. Really? It’s very interesting, but it’s just an approximation of something, in the same way that my knowledge is an approximation of something. So we’ve got to get over the knowledge, whatever it is we have there, thing going on.

Robert G.: Your correspondence to truth with a capital T.

Ilia: The truth. And then you’re right, the wealth and power, that equation, like power equals wealth or wealth equals power. Well, that’s simply not true.

Robert G.: And then equals moral right.

Ilia: And moral right. This really lopsided and distorted understanding of things is actually so superficial. It is completely without any depth.

So we’re losing sight, and that’s part of why this podcast is to call us back to how do we reclaim the depth dimension of our life, the values that we hold together, that we really can build a new world. That’s what I think technology is saying to us. You really can build a new world. We have that capacity to do that, and we don’t have to stay locked into these very deadly systems sometimes that are just pulling us apart inwardly and outwardly.

I think this is where I come back to that idea that the person who is really at home in themselves, who has reconciled the self to the deeper self, this is who I am in my deepest self, and it’s good. It’s lovable. That’s where, to me, divinity shines out. Start there, from that tree root, and then you can begin to engage the many, many, many faces and opinions, whether it’s in the classroom or the faculty meeting, like, what did you mean by that?

Robert G.: I love that you say that. I know right over my shoulder is, and I’m sure you’ve read Ursula Le Guin, who’s such a wonderful author and wrote many, many, many wonderful books. Her book, A Wizard of Earthsea, which I keep on this shelf right behind me, that Earthsea trilogy was for me growing up that moment.

It’s the protagonist in that story who figures out who he is in the very first of the stories, and that he’s good and he’s bad, and he’s doing the best that he can. That moment of responsibility for himself.

Ilia: Yeah.

Robert G.: I was like, this is who I am, and it is okay. I have made mistakes. I’m going to do what I can moving forward. When you were saying that, I just immediately was like, oh. I just think Ursula Le Guin is worth everybody reading.

Part of that, how do we grow into, now I’m really sledding uphill, if we really want to grow into a tech culture that makes sense, can I give you a reading list? Can I give you a reading list between ages eight and 20 that you’ll have read and had an opportunity to have those things change your life?

I don’t know. That might be a hard sell.

Ilia: You know what, Robert? Even through this conversation, we began with that transhumanist ideal of apocalyptic AI. But that’s what we’re saying. We need these other dimensions to begin to kick in. We can actually look toward something that is better, more than what we have now. It may not be the ideal. Ideals are, well, they’re ideals. They’re not really reals. But that’s okay. We need those to keep pulling us on.

Robert G.: We might be a little too committed right now culturally to things that don’t drag us upwards.

Ilia: Yeah.

Robert G.: That are dragging us down. In a world with partisan conflict, with warfare, with economic injustice, with oppression of people for this, that, or the other characteristic of who they are, we’re not really looking at what’s going to drag me into a little bit better. What’s the story that helps me be a better person of me? Wherever I am, whatever I am, can’t I be a little better?

Isn’t that what I should be pursuing each year, to just be a tiny bit better, make the world a tiny bit better? I do think, as you were saying earlier, in terms of how our technologies and how our spiritualities might connect to one another, that’s what we ought to, there’s that unifying theme, right? Technology is supposed to make your life better. Religion is supposed to make your life better. What are the choices you’re going to make about the life you’re living that does that for you?

Ilia: Yeah. Perfect, really. In a certain way, religion is a type of technology. Spirituality is a type of technology that’s harnessing the spirit. I think they’re not exactly as opposed to one another as they may seem to the naive viewer.

But I want to get back to your book, though, on Future-Proofing Humanity, since we were going to talk about that a little bit. Can you tell us just a little bit about, the title itself I’ve always found provocative. Where did you get that, what led you to the title, and what were you hoping to do there?

Robert G.: In some sense, by the way, I should say that’s all we’ve been talking about this entire time, right? How do we think about the future positively?

I actually don’t remember where the title came from. I created a class called Future-Proofing Humanity. The concept of future-proofing just came out of tech culture. How do you create, say, a software product that’s going to continue to work in the future? Or a machine. It’s really a technological idea beyond software. But how do you create a machine that, A, is still useful in the future, doesn’t just break, and B, matches the context that it will find itself in?

The telegram was not future-proofed because it doesn’t match the current context. It can’t be used today in any meaningful way. Human beings have noted that extinction is a possibility, which probably wasn’t a thing that we had to have as a collective part of our consciousness until fairly recently. But by the 1950s, it was pretty obvious when we’re in the middle of the Cold War and people were thinking about the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists putting out the Doomsday Clock. The whole idea was we could all go extinct.

So what are we going to do to not go extinct? That became in the 21st century a really compelling issue because we were thinking about climate change. We were thinking about war. We were thinking, in fact, about AI. We were thinking about Terminator scenarios with Skynet, bioengineered viruses. We had all these different risks.

It had occurred to us that things like super volcanoes could happen. When you look at the geological record, we know that there were super volcanoes. We know that there were big asteroids that can hit things. We had all this stuff, deliberate, accidental, whatever, that could drive us all extinct. We’ve seen this kind of technological culture emerge out of that.

Ilia: Yeah.

Robert G.: Where there’s existential risk, the risk that could drive us all extinct. And a tech culture really started talking about it.

So I just wanted to teach it to my students. We had a unit on genetic engineering, and we had a unit on robotics and AI, and we had a unit on space flight that kind of brought it together. Eventually, I thought I would write it up into a book.

Then it occurred to me how connected the idea of urban design was to all those things, which hadn’t occurred to me when I was teaching the class. So it all kind of came together in this Future-Proofing Humanity book, which is really about stories.

I am deeply worried about the stories we tell about technology and about ourselves. I think we could tell better stories. And I’m not saying this about literary stories, of which I might object to some and many of which I might think are beautiful, but the collective story that we’re telling with our machines, with our governance, with our economy. We’re not telling a good story because the story we’re telling is violent. We need to figure out how to tell better stories.

The class was just about existential risk and the technologies. By the time I was writing it into a book, I turned into this moral philosopher that I’d never really been in my own scholarship previously.

Ilia: I think it’s great, really. I think you’re absolutely right on target. It is really about storytelling. Not just that we are a narratable people. In fact, the whole universe is kind of narratable. The whole thing is a dramatic unfolding story. It’s the story of, I would say, the story of the universe.

Storytelling has always been deeply, deeply influential on our psyches, more influential than information or any fact finding. We never remember facts really. We always have to Google them.

Robert G.: But stories. And the best stories we don’t know the end to.

Ilia: Yes, exactly. No, I think it’s helpful. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in this book, in Future-Proofing Humanity. But I think we need to somehow get the word out more. Even our conversations on these matters are still too local. We somehow need to amplify that we need a collective narrative. I think technology really can be a big help to us, a huge help.

Robert G.: I am hoping my new myth, monsters, and tech social media empire, that is no doubt destined to. The point really is, how do I get to tell the stories that I think are fun and interesting, but that I think a lot of other people will think are fun and interesting, even in short little snippets?

Maybe that leads them to a conversation of, okay, heck, maybe it sells books. Maybe they’re like, I’d like to know what else this guy thinks, and that’d be great. But really, it’s how are we collectively going to tell that story together? How are we going to have the conversation that says we are all in this together?

In Future-Proofing Humanity, I come back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, which has been really powerful for me and my thought. Not for the reason that most people get really worked up about, the whole quest for immortality in the Epic of Gilgamesh, but really this fundamental issue about civilization in the epic. What really matters, what the epic really advocates and glorifies, is human civilization.

There’s something valuable there. I think that’s true. There’s something valuable about human civilization, even in a world where we often do terrible things to each other and to the world. That’s because we’re still learning. Our civilization’s not perfect, but it’s worthwhile, and it’s kind of beautiful and powerful that human beings can build civilization. How do we do it right? How do we keep pursuing a better one?

Ilia: Yeah, ever ancient, ever new. An ancient story.

Robert G.: Nothing new under the sun.

Ilia: No, I think everything’s new under the sun, contrary to that. But I think that’s true, nothing new under the sun.

In any event, I think we have to keep the conversation going. I think we have to keep building, or finding the values of what binds us together, not only together as a human community, but as an earth community, that we’re part of an ecological whole.

I think we also have to lean on the future, that technology is not our enemy. We’re an enemy. There’s a divided self, I think, and we’re an enemy to our own selves, using technology and somehow interpreting it through a lens of a repressed self.

So we need some kind of healing process to go on. But we can look toward a better future, certainly better than the one we’re in right now, a better world.

Robert G.: I’m an inherent optimist.

Ilia: I am too, actually.

Robert G.: Even in a world where I feel frustrated and challenged. I really feel like there are bad things about humanity and there are great things about humanity. Psychologically, we tend to focus on the bad. But if we can consciously train ourselves to think about what’s beautiful and what’s good, we can pursue what’s good.

Ilia: Yeah, absolutely.

Robert G.: As a group and as individuals.

Ilia: I completely agree. It’s just really remarkable, if not miraculous, that after such a long period of cosmic history and biological evolution, we’re here. Vast destruction, vast destructions way before we arrived. There was really no good reason that life should come together to continue on in complex ways, to produce complex biological life, and then creatures who could actually reflect or know this process that has given rise to it. That in itself, just reflecting on that, is sheer amazement.

Robert G.: We get to learn Stan Lee’s lesson for Spider-Man, that with great power comes great responsibility. How fortunate are we, how lucky are we to be here? How are we going to use that time to do the best we can? I firmly believe people can find a path.

Ilia: I think that is beautiful, and that’s a great way to conclude our conversation together. I’m totally with you. Let’s keep working at it.

Robert: Our thanks to Robert Geraci for helping us reflect on the kind of future our technologies are calling us to create together.

As always, I’m Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.