By Robert Maginnis

Spend enough time in Pentagon briefing rooms, and you learn to recognize a certain look — the confidence of those who believe they have finally solved the unsolvable. I saw it when weapons contractors unveiled weapons systems that would end conventional warfare. I saw it during the early networked-warfare years, when theorists spoke of “full-spectrum dominance” as though geography and human nature had been permanently overcome. I am seeing it again now, and the stakes are higher.

The builders of Babel wore it too. Genesis 11 records their ambition plainly: a tower “with its top in the heavens,” constructed to “make a name” for themselves independent of any higher authority. They believed that collective human ingenuity, meticulously organized, needed nothing beyond itself. God scattered them before they could find out how wrong they were. Humanity is attempting something similar again, this time in silicon and code. The tower is already rising.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become the dominant knowledge architecture of the modern world. Data centers process volumes of information no human mind could absorb. Language models trained on billions of documents generate the answers, predictions, and recommendations that now govern decisions in medicine, finance, education, national security, and daily life. In my 2025 book “AI for Mankind’s Future,” I traced how this transformation is reshaping nearly every sector of civilization. But the more urgent question is what forces we are setting in motion — and whether we recognize them for what they are.

Many technologists speak openly about building AI systems capable of organizing the world’s knowledge and improving upon human decision-making. Some envision a “global brain” — a distributed intelligence capable of managing complex systems better than elected governments or trained specialists. The ambition is striking in its scope and strikingly familiar in its spirit: “Let us make a name for ourselves.” Human pride has not fundamentally changed in four millennia. The materials have simply improved.

The geopolitical dimension compounds the spiritual one. Research organizations including the RAND Corporation and Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology have documented how AI dominance is reshaping global power. Nations that lead in AI will hold decisive advantages in military capability, economic productivity, and political influence for decades to come. In “The New AI Cold War,” which publishes this April, I argue that the competition between the United States and China has already entered a dangerous new phase. Each side is racing to build AI systems the other cannot match — integrating them into weapons platforms, intelligence analysis, and battlefield decision-making at a pace that has outrun any governance framework capable of managing it. What is missing from this race is not ambition. It is humility, and no algorithm can supply it.

Even secular analysts acknowledge that humanity may not fully understand what it is unleashing. AI systems can generate convincing falsehoods, behave in ways their own creators cannot explain, and drift beyond meaningful human control before anyone notices. The Apostle Paul identified this pattern with unsettling precision: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22) — a warning written to a civilization that had substituted the creature for the Creator. Ancient societies carved their idols from wood and stone. Ours is more sophisticated. They speak in confident, measured tones. Younger generations are turning to them for moral guidance, emotional support, and truth. That is not a technology problem. It is a spiritual condition.

The real danger is not malfunction. It is misplaced trust. We are outsourcing our judgment to systems we do not understand, built by institutions whose interests do not always align with the public good — and we are doing so faster than we are reckoning with what we are surrendering. That has always been the Babel temptation: not the decision to build, but the conviction that the building itself places us beyond accountability.

None of this is an argument for abandoning artificial intelligence. Used wisely, AI can help physicians diagnose disease earlier, accelerate scientific discovery, and sharpen national defenses. AI technology is not the problem. The posture is. Every era of accelerating human capability produces the same intoxication — the conviction that this time, ingenuity alone is enough. History consistently counsels otherwise. The societies that survived technological revolutions did so not because their tools were superior, but because they retained the wisdom to recognize their limits, and their own.

Proverbs 9:10 does not say wisdom begins with better data, greater processing power, or more sophisticated models. It says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. That is not an abstraction. It is the one thing the builders of Babel rejected, the one thing the architects of our current AI moment seem least inclined to consider, and the one thing that cannot be coded into any system. The tower is rising. The question is not whether we can build it. The question is whether we are wise enough to fear the One who can scatter it.

Robert Maginnis is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, senior fellow for National Security at Family Research Council, and the author of 14 books. His latest, “The New AI Cold War,” releases in April 2026.

This article originally appeared here.