Massimo Faggioli

So the old thing is that

In many cases, the Antichrist has been seen as a particularly insidious force because he or she, they are appealing, they are pleasing, they are comforting, they're reassuring.

And so it's not a visually scary presence, right?

So it appeals to us.

And so that's old, right?

So what's new is that he sees the Antichrist as that kind of complex of forces,

that want to stop technological advance because, and this is where the religious idea of technology, of Peter Thiel and of that kind of entrepreneurs come in, they have a salvific religious idea of technology as salvation.

as the only thing that can save us, us, that for him means a small group of people, of course, not as a planet, not as a one human family, right?

And so there is a view of that anything that wants to slow down technology, that wants to slow down AI, right?

or gathering of data as something that can reassure us, but actually it's slowing down the role of technology of giving us salvation to the extreme that I've heard from some people that they think that the next revelation from God

after the one that came from Jesus, the next revelation will come from AI.

So AI as the voice of God.

That is a directly religious idea.

And of course, for them, anything that...

is between us and the development is Antichrist, because that wants to stop that salvific development.

That is very much part of how America looks at the future, where for a certain American mind, only technology can deliver us from evil.

Well, yes, that's not a disinterested case.

There is a very clear alignment between what he's trying to sell us philosophically and where his investments are.

That's not surprising, but it is surprising the appeal and the fact that it had on some level

on a certain kind of Catholic intellectuals and elites in the United States that are particularly sensitive to this.