Machines Are Not Gods—And Neither Are We

By Vilda Westh Blanc

May 20, 2025

In Response to Can We Resist the Appeal of Technological Utopias?

The promises of technological utopias—boundless progress, perfect efficiency, even immortality—have long enchanted the human imagination. In today’s age of artificial intelligence, these dreams have taken on new forms, from algorithmic governance to predictive policing and automated warfare. Yet, behind these dazzling futures often lies a profound forgetting: that human life is fragile, contingent, and irreducible to code.

My experience co-leading a software acquisition project with Palantir mentors has shown me both the promise and peril of emerging technologies. While these tools can improve decision-making and save lives, they also risk becoming instruments of domination when deployed without moral guardrails. I’ve seen how technological optimism, especially in defense and national security, can blind us to the ethical complexity of real-world applications—where precision often collides with uncertainty, and efficiency can obscure accountability.

The allure of utopia is its offer of control over chaos. But the AI era demands that we resist this impulse, not because we should abandon innovation, but because we must root it in humility. The most dangerous future is not one where machines become gods, but one where we forget that we are not.

There is wisdom in embracing what the philosopher Hans Jonas called the “ethics of responsibility”—acknowledging our power without succumbing to its intoxication. This means designing technologies with care for the vulnerable, anticipating unintended consequences, and accepting that no system, however intelligent, can resolve the moral dilemmas at the heart of human life.

Ultimately, resisting technological utopias is not a rejection of progress, but a defense of our shared humanity. It is an insistence that wisdom lies not in transcending our frailty, but in confronting it—with compassion, restraint, and a deeper sense of purpose than optimization alone can provide.

Vilda Westh Blanc (SFS'27) is a junior in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.