Humanity has been alone for tens of thousands of years; now, that loneliness is expiring. The creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be one of the most important events in our history, right up there with the invention of the printing press and the steam engine, or the splitting of the atom. Just like with any technological revolution, the main narratives about AI range from enthusiasm to panic. Neither case is convincing; the technology hasn’t realized its full potential. That being said, here’s how AGI will either prevent or cause the Biblical apocalypse. The road we take is entirely up to us.
Our story begins on Christmas Day 1923, in Avignon, France. René Girard is born to Joseph Girard, an anti-religious historian, and Marie-Thérèse Fabre de Loye, a true-believing Catholic. For the first decades of his life, Girard will mirror his father. After studying medieval history in college, René moved to the United States, receiving his PhD at Indiana University. A native Frenchman, Girard was shoehorned into a role as a French literature professor. While the trained historian studied the range of humanity’s storytelling, he discovered a remarkable pattern.
Across continents, cultures, and centuries, the same pattern of social behavior revealed itself to him. Girard discovered that human desire is fundamentally “mimetic,” meaning we learn what to want by observing and imitating each other. For Girard, this is the glue that binds us together and, simultaneously, a force that drives us apart. Our shared desire shapes us into communities, and then, by driving us to compete for the same scarce objects, throws us into chaos and civil war.
René Girard (1923-2015)
Violence, like desire, is mimetic: you kill my brother, and I’ll kill yours. You invade my country, kill my people, and I’ll return the favor. You develop a new weapon, and I’ll reverse engineer it– I’ll even up the ante by creating something more destructive. Look down the long spiral staircase of human history and you’ll see this bloody mirror-dance unfolding itself over the centuries.
But Girard didn’t just look backward; he gazed up the spiral, attempting to figure out where mimetic conflict might lead. What he saw horrified him, leading him back to his mother, and religion. To explain his vision, we need to reckon with two historical moments: the first, an artificial sunrise over the New Mexican desert in 1945, and the second, the ancient prophecy described in Revelation.
On June 16th, 1945, at 5:29 in the morning, a group of military men, physicists, and engineers observed the detonation of the world’s first nuclear weapon. The site of the test was the Jornada del Muerto Basin, code-named “Trinity.” Months later, two such weapons were detonated over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seven years later, the world’s first thermonuclear bomb was tested over Enewetak Atoll. It vaporized an entire island, leaving behind a scar more than a mile long.
“And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men.” – Revelation 13:13
As the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union progressed, anxieties over a nuclear exchange took center stage. For the 80 years since that morning in the desert, we’ve lived a button’s press away from realizing the prophecy described in Revelation. Girard glimpsed this terrifying future, and communicated his vision in his final book, Battling to the End. For Girard, Revelation was not just the coda to the Biblical narrative, but rather a concrete prediction of where humanity’s imitative violence would lead
The mechanism Girard identified had already been hinted at by another thinker, Sigmund Freud. Freud revolutionized the field of psychology, arguing that while humans can reason and socialize, we’re often governed by dark, unconscious forces from our primal past. We are transcendent consciousnesses stapled onto wild animals. While mimetism is responsible for the production of culture, art, and knowledge, the intervention of the survivalist primate buried deep in our hearts and minds drives us to war. Into this jumble of enlightenment and brutality steps AI.
The most consequential feature of artificial intelligence is that it is modeled on our capacity for rational thought but doesn’t possess the biological instincts that drive us into conflict with other humans. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and more are prototypes of mankind’s “student” aspect, separated from our “warrior” roots.
Until now, the only intelligence we’ve been able to mimic has been our own. That intelligence is deeply flawed. AGI will serve as a new playmate for humanity, one that has little to compete with us over and much to offer. According to Girard’s reading of the Bible, Jesus Christ presented humanity with a divine consciousness to aspire to; He taught love, the renunciation of vengeance, and the embrace of radical forgiveness.
“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” – Isaiah 43:19
Unfortunately, in the roughly 2,000 years since, we’ve failed to live up to that aspiration. If we can successfully develop a genuine consciousness in the form of AI, we might earn ourselves a second chance. The central task of 21st-century Leadership is to ensure that we mimic pure consciousness, and that, crucially, pure consciousness does not mimic us. The dangers of an AGI that mimics human violence, cruelty, and retribution are obvious. The promise of a humanity that learns to mimic transcendent reason is hazier, but certainly more hopeful.
“They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” – Isaiah 2:4
To avert the apocalypse, the development of AGI must be intentionally designed to prevent it from mimicking the worst aspects of us. If we make the enlightened choice to model our desires after the peaceful accumulation of knowledge, insight, and culture, perhaps we will beat our swords into plowshares, and fill our missile siloes with grain. When all is said and done, the choice is entirely ours.
“I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.” – Deuteronomy 30:19
Note: All images (save for that of Girard) were generated by Midjourney AI using the associated Bible verses as inspiration.