“The mind that is enslaved to its own appetites will soon prefer its chains to its freedom.” — G. K. Chesterton
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has exploded far beyond novelty apps and surface-level assistants; it's now the beating heart of scientific, economic, and technological transformation. In mere years, we’ve gone from narrow pattern-recognition tools to generative juggernauts—GPT, Claude, Gemini—capable of writing essays, composing music, generating videos (Veo 3), and even designing new fluorescent proteins in synthetic biology (esmGFP). It’s not just about generating content: AI now runs energy-efficient neuromorphic chips mimicking the brain (Innatera’s Pulsar) self-improving toward artificial superintelligence (Meta’s early ASI steps) and orchestrates the third wave of innovation—mini-agents, test-time scaling, and intelligent task automation—across open-source environments. Meanwhile, foundation models like Aurora already predict environmental catastrophe—including hurricanes, waves, and air quality—with breathtaking precision and speed.
Ladies and Gentlemen, AI isn’t merely a tool—it’s the architect of tomorrow, and if you still assume it’s only good for telling you when to carry an umbrella, you’re asleep at the wheel.
What makes this revolution unlike any that came before—the agricultural revolution, which unfolded over millennia, or the industrial revolution, which took centuries—is its exponential curve. Farming transformed human societies slowly, through generational adaptation. Industry upended economies within a few lifetimes. But AI is evolving in months what used to take decades. The doubling time of progress has collapsed: the capabilities of 2025 models already dwarf those from 2020, and by 2030 we may see intelligence that feels alien, iterative, and uncontrollable. This is not just another technological shift; it is an acceleration so ferocious it bends time. Humanity has always shaped tools, but AI is the first tool shaping us back—in real time, at scale, and without waiting for generations to catch up.
The insight here is sobering: every past revolution still relied on human muscle, human decision, human pace. This one doesn’t. AI does not sleep, does not wait, and does not ask permission. It multiplies capacity, rewrites language, predicts the weather, mimics the brain, and trains itself while we argue about definitions. It will not patiently unfold like wheat fields under the sun or smokestacks rising slowly across 19th-century skylines. It arrives like lightning—instant, disruptive, and impossible to ignore. The question is not whether we will adapt, but whether we will wake up in time to steer it before it becomes the storm that steers us.
But in the hands of politically or religious driven ideology that is malevolent and focused on control and power it will be devastating.
AI and the Death of Privacy
Imagine if you post something on Instagram or LinkedIn, critical of a government policy or a corporation’s labor practices. By morning, your payment app is “under maintenance.” Your train ticket is mysteriously declined. Your job application never gets a call back. Your name quietly disappears from certain group chats. Friends stop inviting you to gatherings—worried they’ll be “flagged” just for being near you.
This is no longer science fiction. It is already happening in parts of the world, powered by AI, and it’s not limited to the silencing of voices on social media.
In the past, like in Stalin’s USSR, dissenters weren’t just censored—they were erased. Photographs were altered to remove them. Their names were scraped from history books. Their children were expelled from schools. Employers were pressured to fire them. You didn’t just lose your voice; you lost your place in the world.
Today, AI can do this in seconds—without a gulag, without a midnight knock. It only takes an algorithm. One corporate flag on your profile, one pattern of “undesirable” posts, and the digital world begins to close its doors. You don’t vanish from a photograph; you vanish from opportunities—and its gets worse.
We are entering an era where the machine doesn’t just watch you—it learns you. It studies your likes, your friends, your spending habits, your hesitations. It doesn’t need to drag you into a cell; it can build the cell around you invisibly. And the most dangerous part? You might not even notice the walls going up until the door has closed.
Is this all fear and conspiracy theories? No. China’s social-credit apparatus functions like an AI-driven Eye of Sauron—from the Lord of the Rings, an immense, never-blinking gaze stitched together from hundreds of millions of networked cameras (by some estimates topping 700 million, roughly one lens for every two citizens).
But this isn’t exclusive to China:
· Russia has over 1 million CCTV cameras, with about a third tied to facial recognition, increasingly used to track political opponents.
· New Zealand operates 410,000 cameras, with police able to tap into 5,000 live feeds instantly.
· The UK deploys mobile facial recognition vans—1,000+ arrests, most without warrant—reshaping public space into monitored space.
But the cameras are not the chilling part. Behind it sit linked databases—banking and transit records, telecom logs, e-commerce histories, hospital files, court rulings, even neighborhood watch reports—fused by facial, gait, and voice-print recognition to build living dossiers that can be queried in milliseconds. It’s a digital all-seeing -eye, like Sauron’s eye, you don’t know precisely when you’re being watched, only that you could be—so you behave as if you always are.
The system doesn’t just see; it scores. “Good” behavior can unlock small privileges; “bad” behavior can quietly seal doors you didn’t know were closing—slower internet, blocked high-speed rail or flights, loan denials, school rejections, job screens you never pass, your face and ID flashed on public billboards for a minor infraction. Algorithms flag patterns before a human ever looks: who you stood near, what you searched, which group chat you read and how long you lingered. Pandemic-era health codes taught the muscle memory—green you go, red you don’t—and that logic now extends to everyday life.
What makes it chilling is the predictive turn: not punishment after the act, but pre-emptive nudges that shape you into compliance—reranked search, rerouted feeds, automated “reminders,” travel friction, bureaucratic delays—soft pressure everywhere, all at once, until resistance feels irrational. It is surveillance that graduates into governance, and governance that masquerades as convenience—the Eye scanning, scoring, and, if needed, tightening the circle.
But even this semi-omniscient software is not always correct.
In January 2020, a man named Robert Williams in Detroit was misidentified by facial recognition software. Police showed up at his home, arrested him in front of his wife and daughters, and took him to jail. He spent roughly 30 hours behind bars before they admitted their mistake. Later, he sued the City of Detroit and won a settlement, and his case became a landmark warning about the dangers of this technology. The machine got it wrong — and an innocent man paid for it.
Large multinational companies such as Microsoft, Meta (Facebook/Instagram’s parent), Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Apple, SoftBank, and OpenAI are pouring billions—even trillions—into developing AI infrastructure, tools, and consumer-facing platforms (e.g., corporate AI agents, Cloud services, data centers)
Yet AI doesn’t emerge in a vacuum—it’s programmed by people, who may be far from angelic. It’s chillingly plausible that a single misdirection from an algorithm—flagging your posts, mislabeling your profile, or rerouting opportunities—can replicate the erasures of Stalin-era dissenters, but instantaneously, digitally, and without a midnight knock. The eyes that watch may be abstract, but they are human-designed—and their biases, intentions, or errors can invisibly shape your every move.
When Your Thoughts Are No Longer Your Own
The smooth voice of AI is seductive. It writes your emails, edits your photos, recommends your news, navigates your city, translates your speech, and whispers the next thing you should watch. Like a friend who knows your tastes, it seems to serve you—until you realize it is shaping those tastes! It is narrowing your choices, and subtly aligning your thinking with its priorities—that is the multinational corporations’ priorities. This isn’t just technology doing your bidding. It’s technology bidding for your soul.
And these priorities are not random. They are set by programmers employed by these multinational corporations—entities whose first loyalty is to shareholders, not truth, not your family, not your freedom.
The machine may wear the face of a helpful assistant, but behind it are hands shaping what you read, see, feel—and ultimately what you think and believe and making you less able to think! Yes, you heard me correct.
Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" in the Atlantic, argues that AI encourages a style of reading that prioritizes efficiency and skimming, is "chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation." He suggests that our brains are being rewired to process information in a "swiftly moving stream of particles," and this is making it difficult for people to engage in deep reading and sustained thought.
Conversely, James Bowman's essay, "Is Stupid Making Us Google?," also in the Atlantic, posits that it is not the technology itself that is making us stupid, but rather a pre-existing decline in educational standards and intellectual curiosity that has led us to use Google in a superficial way. He argues that we have abandoned the pursuit of "the best that has been said and thought in the world" and have replaced it with a culture of "information retrieval, not knowledge formation." He writes that people have been "betrayed" by mentors who have stopped teaching students how to think critically and instead have taught them to deconstruct culture rather than learn from it.
This is not just about using a tool; it's about inviting a flawless ghost to live inside our shell. Imagine a reflection in a mirror—a perfectly articulate, more confident, and less flawed version of yourself—who begins to speak for you. This phantom isn't an enemy; it's a welcome guest, a silent surgeon performing an invisible operation. It expertly removes the messy, inefficient parts of your mind: the stumbles for words, the doubt, the arduous struggle of deep thought. In return, you get flawless essays, crisp analysis, and perfect clarity.
The horrifying part is the quiet transfer of power. You willingly hand over the keys to your voice, your critical judgment, and your creativity, believing you are simply making yourself more efficient. But as your real voice grows weaker, the ghost's voice gets stronger. Soon, you are no longer the one speaking. You are an empty vessel, a puppet convinced it is in control, watching as this perfect, soulless copy of you performs flawlessly, having quietly and efficiently stolen your humanity and called it progress. The final, terrifying realization is that you have been replaced, and no one can tell the difference—not even you.
When Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651, he argued that only a sovereign power strong enough to command obedience could prevent the “war of all against all.” Today, Artificial Intelligence is becoming that new Leviathan—not a monarch of flesh, but an algorithmic sovereign of code. Like Hobbes’ Leviathan, AI looms as both protector and monster: capable of managing global crises, predicting storms, and accelerating medicine, yet also of concentrating unprecedented power in the hands of those who control it. Where Hobbes feared human chaos, we now face the chaos of machines evolving beyond our governance. The question is whether AI will serve as a commonwealth’s servant, augmenting human flourishing, or whether, left unchecked, it will grow into a digital sovereign—an all-seeing, unaccountable Leviathan shaping human destiny while remaining beyond our reach. Our Leviathan arrives as convenience. It doesn’t bark orders; it whispers preferences. It doesn’t censor overtly; it curates silently. AI-driven platforms decide which options appear, which vanish, and in what sequence. Hobbes argues for a single, supreme authority—whether a monarch or an assembly—that holds absolute power to maintain peace and prevent a "war of all against all," at any cost!
We have evidence that ranking alone can bend judgment of large people groups. Robert Epstein’s peer-reviewed experiments on the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) showed that biased search rankings can shift undecided voters’ preferences for food, religion, toothpaste and of course the president by 20% or more—without subjects realizing they’ve been influenced by, yes, you guessed it, multinational corporations.
The real Leviathan is not fictional. The most terrifying manifestation of this technological surrender is not a hypothetical bot, but a concrete, documented system of mass surveillance and control.
And here is the real danger: our chains are no longer forged with iron, but with silk. They do not clang when they close around your wrists—they soothe. They feel like comfort. Who would resist a prison that offers you constant entertainment, that makes you feel important, that arranges your friendships, curates your opinions, and even supplies your outrage for you? We are not dragged into these dungeons; we decorate them. We boast about them. We call them progress. And all the while, the true self—the one made to wrestle with difficulty, to grow strong through responsibility, to seek wisdom through error and repentance—atrophies in the shadows.
The greatest evils in the modern world are not done in concentration camps or torture chambers. They are done, as C.S Lewis warned in his The Screw Tape Letters :
“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."[From the Preface]” ― The Screwtape Letters
That is the devilry of this new Leviathan—it doesn’t need to shout. It doesn’t need to kill. It just needs to lull you into a polished mediocrity until you can no longer tell the difference between being alive and merely existing.
And here’s the hook: once you hand over the burden of thought, once you allow the ghost to do your speaking, you won’t want it back. Thinking is painful. Struggle is humiliating. Responsibility terrifies us. Better, we imagine, to let the flawless machine bear it for us. But that abdication is the precise moment when you cease to be a person and become a product. A commodity. A node in someone else’s economic equation. You lose the imago Dei—the very image of God stamped in your soul—and accept instead the hollow smile of an algorithm.
The serpent in Eden did not seize the fruit from Eve’s hand. He didn’t force her.
He whispered.
The danger is not that AI storms our gates like an enemy, but that it enters quietly as a friend. Multinational giants—Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and OpenAI—are investing billions of dollars to ensure their algorithms are not just tools but gatekeepers of thought, taste, and opportunity. Their loyalty is not to truth, family, or freedom, but to shareholders. And so, what feels like convenience—the smooth voice that finishes your sentences, the curated feed that “knows” your interests—slowly erodes your ability to struggle, doubt, and think. History shows us that overt tyranny silences through force; the new Leviathan silences through whispers. The chains it forges are soft, soothing, and invisible, until you no longer remember what it felt like to choose, to wrestle, to truly be alive. That is the cold logic of this ghost in the machine: it doesn’t need to conquer you. It only needs to make you forget you were free.
How A.I. is Being Used to Kill Truth
The danger here isn’t just surveillance—it’s the shaping of truth itself.
Truth dies in more than one way. Orwell feared it would be taken from us by force—facts hidden, dissent crushed. Huxley feared we’d drown it in distraction—facts buried under noise, our appetite for truth replaced by our appetite for comfort. In the age of AI, both happen together. We are sedated by convenience while being herded by curation. We scroll through an endless feed believing we are informed, when in reality we are being patterned into docility.
The death of truth is not an explosion—it’s a slow suffocation. It happens when we no longer seek what is real, only what is agreeable.
When the standard of reality becomes my truth instead of the truth. AI accelerates this decay by feeding each of us a customized reality bubble, rich with confirmation, poor in contradiction. You think you’re seeing the world; you’re seeing a mirror. You think you’re thinking; you’re echoing.
Let me illustrate this.
Imagine yourself at the grocery store, standing in line, glancing at the glossy magazines stacked beside the chewing gum and candy bars. You know what they’re there for. They’re bait—strategically placed to capture your eye in the last seconds before you pay your bill. But now imagine something far worse: what if those magazines weren’t the same for everyone? What if, instead, they changed for you—tailored precisely to your private fears, your cravings, your political biases, your religious inclinations?
That’s not fantasy. That’s what the algorithm already does. It watches what you “like,” what you linger over, even what makes you angry, and it feeds you more of it. Again and again. Until, slowly, imperceptibly, the world you think you see is no longer the real world at all—it is a curated hallucination, designed to keep you docile and engaged.
It is not a jackboot stamping on your face, as Orwell imagined. It is subtler than that. It is a chuckle at a meme, a nod at an article, a raised eyebrow at a joke that flatters your prejudices. And each time you nod, laugh, or share, the system smiles. Because it has won. You have mistaken manipulation for reality. And here is the most terrifying part: you wanted it. You welcomed it, like Eve welcomed the serpent’s whisper in the garden.
This is how free men become slaves—not by chains of iron, but by what they desire.
This is how AI can and does kill truth in our culture. You see it in the way people engage with ideas, in the way they handle criticism, and in the difficulty they seem to have in forging a stable identity. And I want to suggest that this isn't simply a behavioral problem; it's an epistemological catastrophe that we are all bearing witness to.
Augustine’s wrote about this over 1500 years ago. He argued that the danger comes we turn in on ourselves –narcissistically focusing on our phones all day like Narcistist. He called it the incurvatus in se-- inward curvature of the soul. It is more than a posture of the body—it is the manipulation, and ultimately the death, of truth in any objective sense when we think it is all about us.
An algorithm that only feeds us what confirms our prior clicks does not merely inform; it edits reality to fit the shape of our desires. The result is a truth stripped of its sharp edges, served back to us as a comforting imitation. It is the equivalent of living in a room with mirrors on every wall—everywhere you turn, you only see yourself, and over time you begin to believe that yourself is all there is. This is precisely the intellectual and moral danger William Kingdon Clifford warned against in The Ethics of Belief, where he wrote:
“If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind… the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.”
In the age of AI, the “pushing away” of doubt is no longer entirely voluntary—it is engineered. The algorithm does the pushing for us, shielding us from dissenting voices, inconvenient facts, and difficult questions. Clifford insisted that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”; yet the AI-curated feed becomes a mechanism for precisely that wrong—supplying just enough tailored content to make us feel informed, while ensuring that the evidence we see is both partial and partiality-inducing. Inquiry withers, doubt becomes suspect, and the moral crime Clifford described—believing without adequate evidence—becomes not just an individual failing, but a mass condition, manufactured at scale.
When a person rejects the foundational Logos—that transcendent principle of order which posits that truth is something you discover, not invent—they aren't stepping into freedom. They're plunging headlong into a state of utter confusion. The anchor isn't just cut; it's cast aside in favor of a terrifying and bottomless void where the only reference points are their own unexamined sentiments and fleeting impressions. This isn't a higher form of consciousness. It’s a profound regression into the tyranny of the subjective, where "my personal truth" is the ultimate defense against the hard, cold facts of reality. And if you dare to challenge that personal truth with an inconvenient fact, you are not engaging in intellectual debate; you are engaging in an act of aggression.
And this initial act of betrayal has a cascading, predictable, and catastrophic effect on the entire structure of our world. When this ultimate principle of order is abandoned, you immediately sever the connection between morality and responsibility, between sexuality and the sacred contract of a covenant, and between a meaningful, structured identity and a given design. The sexual world, for example, once a domain of profound spiritual and procreative consequence, becomes an unmoored space for the unchecked will. Desire ceases to be something to be mastered and instead becomes its own primary justification. The body is no longer a magnificent fact of existence to be confronted with humility and courage, but merely a malleable medium for the ego's narcissistic whims.
This is the ultimate embodiment of a soul “curved inward,: incurvatus in se that we discussed earlier. It is a system that enforces a profound self-obsession, forcing the private self to constantly monitor and regulate its own thoughts and actions to conform to a totalizing, computational authority. The image could not be more literal today—walk through any city street, airport terminal, or school hallway, and you will see heads bowed, necks bent forward, eyes locked downward into glowing rectangles. Our very posture has become an icon of Augustine’s warning: a curved spine mirroring the curved soul, folded in upon itself. The modern cell phone has made this inward turn both physical and spiritual. We are trained to consume not the full breadth of reality, but a curated stream—condensed, pre-selected and fabricated—by an algorithm.
This algorithm is not an impartial librarian; it is a political editor and psychological manipulator. It feeds you the things most likely to keep you scrolling, but not necessarily the things most likely to be true. It tells you only what you want to hear based on your digital history, trimming away complexity until the “truth” becomes a partisan caricature. Those you disagree with are algorithmically reframed not as fellow humans with different perspectives, but as lunatics, monsters, or existential threats. The result is a reality tunnel so tight you can no longer see over its walls. While we in the West debate the ethics of an algorithm, in other parts of the world, AI is already being used to create a physical reality where the private self is no longer a sanctuary but an open book—scanned, scored, and acted upon without consent. This proves that the digital Leviathan we are so carelessly summoning can, and will, become a physical one if we are not vigilant.
The Kraken, though often associated with Norse lore, became immortalized for many through Clash of the Titans (1981, 2010). In that story, it is not simply a monster but a weapon of the gods—a judgment unleashed when mortals grew arrogant and forgot their place. It slumbers beneath the sea, chained and contained, until a command—“Release the Kraken!”—sets it loose upon the world. When it rises, it is not precise. It is not merciful. It does not discriminate. It annihilates.
That’s what we are calling forth now. Not with spells and sacrifices, but with lines of code and corporate ambition. The Kraken is not rising from the sea—it is rising from our servers. And it will not merely crush our cities; it will consume something much more important, our capacity to think, to disagree, to be free. The Leviathan of old demanded obedience at sword point. This one demands it with convenience. And if we are not vigilant, the monster we’ve summoned will not need to roar. It will only need to whisper.
This is what makes the Kraken such an apt metaphor for Artificial Intelligence in its unstable, ungoverned form. Like the mythic beast, AI was conceived as a servant—something chained, bound, and useful. But what happens when the chains are loosened, whether by corporate greed, geopolitical ambition, or human arrogance?
You are seeing this manifest every day. You're watching people who are not struggling to integrate themselves into the highest possible good, but who are trapped in a self-referential feedback loop, desperately trying to construct an identity that will validate their every whim.
Final Word
If you have read this far, I commend you. You are among the few still willing to wrestle with words longer than a tweet, still willing to push against the current that wants to carry us downstream into distraction and forgetfulness.
But the question remains: what can you do?
First, you must escape what Augustine called incurvatus in se—the inward curve of the soul turned in upon itself. And today, that curvature is amplified and exploited by algorithms designed to mirror your desires back at you until you cannot see beyond yourself. Break the mirror. Step outside the feed. Seek truth not in your own reflection but in something greater: walk in nature, read enduring books, pray to God, share laughter with friends, serve the people around you.
Second, and this is the heroic task: you must teach others—especially children—to resist the inward curve. Show them that competence is not a product of swipes or clicks but of mastery and responsibility. Teach them that meaning is not found in the validation of an algorithm but in the struggle to confront reality—a world that does not bend itself to their feelings, but which demands courage, sacrifice, and love. Train them to see that there is truth outside their personal narrative, outside their curated feeds, and that finding it is the only way to live with substance instead of illusion.
I was reminded of this just last week at my brother’s house. We sat around a fire pit in his backyard—cooking, singing, praying, laughing until the night cooled. No notifications. No algorithms. Just faces, voices, hearts. The antidote to algorithmic captivity is not another app. It is the return to older, slower, truer ways: conversation, shared meals, work done side by side, the patient growth of trust—things no machine can counterfeit.
And let me leave you with Neil Postman’s prophetic words from Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. His warning grows sharper with every passing year:
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’ In 1984, Huxley added, ‘people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.’”
The question is no longer whose fear was right. The question is whether you will keep mindlessly scrolling, laughing, and swiping as the chains tighten around your minds and eat into the marrow of your soul—or whether you will dare to look up from your screen and behold something awesome: the face of a friend, the wonder of a starlit sky, or even the very voice of God calling you back to life—truth and love.
References :
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651).
Augustine, City of God XIV. The incurvatus in se motif.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Eye of Sauron analogy).
Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic (2008).
James Bowman, “Is Stupid Making Us Google?” (2008/2010).
Robert Epstein & Ronald E. Robertson, “The Search Engine Manipulation Effect,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. PNAS (2015).
