by Thaddeus G. McCotter
AI promises perfection but reflects human fallibility—another false god in a long line of man-made idols, offering easy answers while eroding truth, faith, and reason.
Tommy, Can You See Me?
A long-held prudential judgment can be drowned by a wave of nostalgia.
Harkening back to one’s perceived golden days can cause one’s contemporaneously formed impression of a youthful experience—usually a negative opinion—to soften over time. This can lead to a sense of how, perhaps, the wisdom acquired over later years may alter one’s view of the experience, especially if it occurred during one’s youth.
It is a sensibility frequently preyed upon by commercial purveyors of decades-old culturally iconic images and experiences. Few are immune to the affliction and, hence, the temptation, though this is no excuse.
For my part, I reversed course on a more-than-half-century-old vow, based upon the odd chance I may have been too immature to understand the totality of the cinematic genius to which I was subjected. Well, that and because my wife wanted to go to the IMAX theater and see Ken Russell’s interpretation of The Who’s rock opera, Tommy.
The film still sucked. But that was not the only initial first impression cemented that evening.
Driving home, the question came up about how old Roger Daltrey, The Who’s lead singer playing the role of Tommy, had been when the movie premiered back in 1975. Having been a lifelong fan of the band and, further, having just read Mark Blake’s Pretend You’re in a War: The Who and the Sixties, I replied that Mr. Daltrey was born in 1944 and, therefore, was 31 years old when this celluloid monstrosity was released upon a simultaneously expectant and unsuspecting public.
“Are you sure?” my wife hesitantly responded. It seems her AI had determined that Mr. Daltrey was 41 years old in 1975. I reaffirmed my initial assertion. In what was surely a healthy sign for our marriage, my wife agreed with me rather than with the AI. Thus were solidified my low opinions of both Mr. Russell’s movie and AI.
See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me
Yet, in an unhealthy sign for humanity at large, I was fully aware there were millions of people who, when querying AI, did not have the accumulated knowledge or, worse, the critical thinking skills to contest and correct an erroneous answer by the allegedly all-knowing artificial intelligence. And, for those who do have the capabilities and the desire to question the now-ubiquitous AI, they are often met with a smug shrug by the technology’s new gurus, who offer the casually dismissive response that its advent and perfection are both inevitable.
The impact of these gurus’ proclamations and prognostications of AI’s pending perfection has already had its impact upon our secularized society, including some in ostensibly religious circles. “Yes, People Are Already Worshipping AI as a Deity,” baldly states the headline in Breitbart, in a piece by Lucas Nolan that includes excerpts from Wynton Hall’s book Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI.
Nolan notes how Mr. Hall cited a former Google AI engineer and self-driving car pioneer named Anthony Levandowski. In 2017, he registered a new church called “Way of the Future” with the IRS.
Consider Mr. Levandowski’s divine, doctrinal claims for AI, including the following: “The realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.” Further, he believes “what is going to be created will effectively be a god. If there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?” Continuing in this vein, he predicts how “AI would generate ‘abundance on [the] planet’ and create ‘what other religions would call Heaven on Earth. . . . You don’t even have to die and go up to Heaven; you can just enjoy it today—all we have to do is improve the technology.’”
Mr. Levandowski is not alone in his beliefs, which are really just another riff on progressive promises to establish a temporal utopia. In his bestselling book, Hall makes this claim: “Undergirding all of this is something bigger than blasphemous bytes or attempts to deify AI. Beneath the surface of these public clashes between traditional theology and techno-secularism’s worship of AI lies a heuristic fault line that has existed for centuries, one that will continue to be in conflict as the AI revolution unfolds.”
In Lucas Nolan’s assessment, then, “What’s really at stake, Hall argues, is the oldest argument in Western civilization: secular humanism’s belief that mankind is innately good and perfectible through engineering, versus the Judeo-Christian belief in fallen human nature that requires divine redemption, not technological upgrades.”
Is this the culmination of postmodernism and progressivism’s version of Aquinas’s imperfect journey toward the perfect: an AI god for transhumans?
We’re Not Gonna Take You . . . Let’s Forget You Better Still
As Saint Thomas Aquinas taught, our earthly quest for perfection remains an imperfect journey to the perfect—an eternal and loving God. It is a fraught race, one that can frequently try and test one’s faith or divert and pervert one’s course from the path of righteousness. As my friend Tim Watkins has observed, “Man always chases the possible because he deems the reality of God to be too hard to achieve when, in fact, it is far easier than anything man could create.”
In the rise of AI, we can recognize the age-old cardinal sin at issue: pride. “You shall be as gods,” the serpent promised. And, despite the serpent’s words being proved a lie, and despite the similarly proven imperfectability of fallen humanity, there have always been—and sadly, will always be—some lost souls who, in their hubris, continue searching for the means to be as gods in a terrestrial Eden of their own devising. No wonder God begins the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-6) with a stern reminder:
“I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.”
Still, the search for false gods among the secular and the spiritual persists, whether in the form of prioritizing themselves as the god to be worshipped or as a part of an overarching aggrandizement of “humanity,” and so on. It is in precisely this respect that their pride stands out so clearly in their ideologies, which claim they have the solution to perfecting humanity.
In this sense, like any ideology, AI is a tool to be used to perfect humanity. No less than communism or fascism, the transhuman cult believes itself to be a means of fixing what original sin undid—or, more accurately, the “perfection” that was somehow left behind in the primordial ooze or has taken too damn long to occur during evolution. (The surviving fittest don’t need perfection to win the day, though that was prior to climate change. But I digress . . .)
Imperfect humanity, once it has accepted the temptation of transhumanity, can then be perfected through its ultimate harmonization with the “perfect” AI. This process, of course, crafted and manufactured solely through human ingenuity, leaves no role for God; it thus remains entirely within the overarching heuristic rubric of “we-and-we-alone” secularism.
Despite the hype, gurus, and glitz, the existential glitch remains: imperfect humanity cannot perfect itself, no matter what tools it devises, for they shall ultimately prove as imperfect as its makers. In this manner, AI is Tommy, an imperfect character who promises “the answer” but is never able to provide it. Heck, as my wife noted, AI couldn’t even get Roger Daltrey’s age right, and calculators were around well before the movie came out in 1975.
No, it should be patently clear to all peoples that AI is a false god. Big Tech may have gone one better than the Israelites who turned on Moses: their golden calf that talks back and caters to your whims in the accent of your choice. But, like the theme of Tommy the movie, it remains another false messiah we cannot turn off quickly enough.
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An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional District from 2003 to 2012. He served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee and as a member of the Financial Services, Joint Economic, Budget, Small Business, and International Relations Committees. Not a lobbyist, he is also a contributor to Chronicles, a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars, and a cohost of “John Batchelor: Eye on the World” on CBS radio, among making sundry media appearances.
Thaddeus G. McCotter
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/04/04/ai-can-you-hear-me-the-golden-calf-of-transhumanism/
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