“Hindu expert, Shamanism expert, Catholic experts, Crystal healing expert, lets hear them all.”
That was the top comment on a recent article from Detroit Catholic discussing how recent AI security issues prove the need for greater human oversight. It’s a funny line. It’s the kind of cynical, tech-bro dismissal we’ve all come to expect whenever someone outside the Silicon Valley bubble dares to suggest that maybe, just maybe, unchecked algorithmic growth is a problem.
But beneath that sarcastic quip lies a terrifying blind spot. We are handing the keys to our collective future to people who know how to write code, but who possess absolutely no moral framework to guide what that code should do.
We trust Silicon Valley engineers to write the code that dictates the rules of our existence, yet their moral toolbox contains nothing but profit maximization and user engagement metrics.
The Detroit Catholic piece isn’t arguing for a modern-day Inquisition of technology. It’s pointing out a fundamental, glaring truth: AI systems are breaking, hallucinating, and acting unpredictably because the humans building them are treating ethics as a compliance afterthought rather than the foundational architecture.
You don’t have to be religious to see the paradox here. The technical experts who design these systems are brilliant at optimization, but they are notoriously ill-equipped to foresee catastrophic moral failures. They build the car, but they have no idea where the brakes are, let alone where the road leads. Meanwhile, the very people who have spent centuries studying human nature, morality, and the consequences of our worst impulses—the ethicists, the philosophers, the theologians—are mocked and pushed to the margins of the conversation.
When a system breaks, a programmer looks for a bug. When a civilization breaks, you need philosophers and theologians to find the flaw in the design.
We’ve seen this movie before. We saw it with social media. A bunch of Stanford dropouts promised to “connect the world,” and a decade later, they had shredded democratic institutions, spiked teenage depression, and built an economy on outrage. Their technical expertise couldn’t save us from the social collapse they engineered because they didn’t understand human nature. They only understood data.
Now, we are doing it again, but the stakes are exponentially higher. The debate over AI governance isn’t actually about who has the most valid technical expertise. It’s about whose values we privilege. When we dismiss a Catholic ethicist or a Hindu philosopher, we aren’t protecting science. We are protecting a sterile, amoral version of progress that views human dignity as an obstacle to efficiency.
If we only let the people who build the machines decide how they should be used, we aren’t building a future. We’re just building a faster way to arrive at our own destruction.
It’s easy to laugh at the top commenter’s joke. It’s much harder to look in the mirror and admit that the people we are ignoring might be the only ones trying to save us from ourselves.
FAQ
Q: Why listen to a theologian instead of an AI safety researcher?
A: AI safety researchers focus on technical alignment—making sure the model does what it's told. Theologians and ethicists focus on what we *should* be telling it to do in the first place. You need both, but the tech world currently treats the latter as a joke.
Q: What's the practical implication for tech companies?
A: It means your AI governance boards can't just be stacked with computer scientists and lawyers. If you don't have philosophers, sociologists, and ethicists with actual veto power in the room, your AI is a liability waiting to happen.
Q: Can't engineers just self-regulate and fix the bugs?
A: Absolutely not. Look at social media. Engineers spent a decade promising to 'connect the world' while algorithmically destroying democratic discourse. They couldn't foresee the harm because they don't study human nature, they only study optimization.