A new priesthood has emerged in Silicon Valley. Its members are extraordinarily intelligent, fabulously wealthy and—increasingly—ideologically possessed. They speak of extinction and salvation. Of a coming Singularity that will transform human existence beyond recognition. Of the urgent need to build Artificial General Intelligence before the wrong people do, or to prevent it from being built before the right safeguards are in place. Of the existential risk of machines that will either save humanity or destroy it…

The question is not who can browse the web. It is who controls what the Ai is trained to say, who shapes the models, who decides which truths get amplified and which get marginalized and who captures the economic and political power that flows from those decisions. A handful of companies and their investors hold that power. The transformations they are engineering will touch every human being; the decisions about how to engineer them will be made by very few. That asymmetry is not incidental. It is structural…

We are the only animal whose survival depends not just on instinct but on an elaborate, invisible infrastructure of trust. Every day, each of us outsources vast portions of our knowledge about the world to other people, other institutions, other authorities. The question has never been whether to believe. It has always been: What deserves to be believed?

For centuries, Western civilization built an architecture to answer that question. We called it the library. Whatever the discipline—medicine, law, astronomy, theology—knowledge had to be sought. You went looking for it. You chose your sources, compared one account against another, checked who stood behind each claim. The library was not merely storage. It was a system for making the origins of knowledge visible and therefore contestable. It let you ask: By what right does this claim my belief?.

Today with AI, a screen that tells you things. A voice that sounds like it knows. How do you evaluate a source that cannot show its work?–a process so opaque that even its creators cannot fully explain why it said what it said. We have traded the library for an oracle. And we have done it almost without noticing…

Excerpt from Paolo Benanti, What the Tech Gods Should Learn From the Church, WSJ, May 29, 2026