The Fallen Man is the Fall of Men
I listened to a recent podcast by Tom Bilyeu, and it is brilliant in its scope. But I don't think it goes far enough, and in Tom's secular world, it wouldn't. Tom is not coming at this from Scripture, so you might write off the title of his video as nothing but clickbait: "AI Antichrist." Don't. You can watch the whole thing here: A.I. AntiChrist. It's worth watching, and worth understanding. Tom is a marketer who built and sold a company, and he knows what a product launch looks like. What he sees right now is a product launch, and the product is fear.
His argument, in short: the sudden wave of "AI is going to kill us all" is being amplified on purpose, because fear proves the technology is powerful, that proof supports the valuations, and a frightened public will vote for regulation that the biggest companies will then help write. The target, he says, is open-source AI, the free competitor that can't be priced and can't be controlled. He's careful to say he doesn't mean the biblical Antichrist. He means what he thinks Peter Thiel means: the worst of human behavior, the appetite for total control, which arrives not by conquest but because people are frightened enough to hand it over.
That video inspired this podcast and the article that goes with it.
Here's where I part ways with Tom. I think he's right about the mechanism and wrong about the target. Nobody spends fortunes to control a product. You spend them to control what the product can reach, and this product can reach everything. The goal was never to control the machine. The goal is to control the world, and the machine is simply the first tool in history that makes the oldest human ambition possible at the scale Revelation 13 describes.
And I want to be clear about something up front, because it matters: I'm not demonizing AI. I use it. I used it to write this. The machine is iron, and Scripture never blames the iron. It blames the hands. So this episode isn't really about artificial intelligence at all. It's about men. It's about a fall that started in Genesis 3, that God put a stopgap on in Genesis 11, and that every generation since has inherited from the one before it, each of us holding on to the man above us as we go over the edge together.
We had an expression when I was a kid: a skunk smells his own stink first. If you want to know who's afraid of AI and why, don't look at the machine. Look at who's pointing at it.
Open your bible and let's get into it!
Article: "The Fallen Man is the Fall of Men"
