Silicon Valley has a Dostoevsky problem

Earlier this year, something startling happened: Leading technologists at the AI frontier turned fretfully for guidance to a devout Orthodox Christian. A Silicon Valley book club tackled Fyodor Dostoevsky’s notoriously daunting novel “Demons” (also translated as “The Possessed”). Then an anonymous writer published an extraordinarily long essay on the book’s premonitions of what happens when human beings fall into falsely illuminated fanaticism. The author saw in Dostoevsky a warning for the people building artificial intelligence.

Verily, I thought, an enormous can of worms had been opened.

Technique and intelligence, severed from the disciplined heart, become hollow and ultimately self-destructive.

Orthodox Christianity is, in essential ways, the opposite of the power-hungry posthumanism animating so much of tech’s increasingly overt spirituality. The posthumanist dreams of a disembodied intellect mastering existence.