We’re now deep into the AI era, where every week brings another task that AI can accomplish. But given how far down the road we already are, it’s all the more essential to zoom out and ask bigger questions about where we’re headed, how to get the best out of this technology as it evolves, and, indeed, how to get the best out of ourselves as we co-evolve.

There was a revealing moment recently when Sam Altman appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. Carlson was pressing Altman on the moral foundations of ChatGPT. He made the case that the technology has a kind of baseline religious or spiritual component to it, since we assume it’s more powerful than humans and we look to it for guidance. Altman replied that to him there’s nothing spiritual about it. “So if it’s nothing more than a machine and just the product of its inputs,” says Carlson, “then the two obvious questions are: what are the inputs? What’s the moral framework that’s been put into the technology?”

Altman then refers to the “model spec,” the set of instructions an AI model is given that will govern its behavior. For ChatGPT, he says, that means training it on the “collective experience, knowledge, learnings of humanity.” But, he adds, “then we do have to align it to behave one way or another.”

And that, of course, leads us to the famous alignment problem — the idea that to guard against the existential risk of AI taking over, we need to align AI with human values. The concept actually goes back to 1960 and the AI pioneer Norbert Wiener, who described the alignment problem this way: “If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere... we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire.”

But there’s actually a larger alignment problem that goes much farther back. To align AI with human values, we ourselves need to be clear about the universal values we ascribe to. What are our inputs? What’s our model spec? What are we training ourselves on to be able to lead meaningful lives?

These are the questions we need to answer before we decide what inputs we want AI to draw on. Even if we could perfectly align AI with where humanity is right now, the result would be suboptimal. So now is the time to clarify our values before we build a technology meant to reflect them.

Because right now we’re experiencing a profound misalignment. In our modern world, we’ve lost our connection to the spiritual foundation that our civilization, both Western and Eastern, was built on. We’ve been living in its afterglow for centuries, but now even the afterglow has dimmed and we’re unmoored and untethered.

That foundation began to slowly crumble with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, but kept drawing on these eternal truths. We were voicing them — and even believing in them — less than before, but we were still guided by them. But now that the connection has been severed — the ultimate severance — and in order to train AI to align with human values, we first need to excavate them and reconnect with them.

We can see the severance in how many people were surprised when Erika Kirk forgave her husband’s murderer. “That man, that young man, I forgive him,” she said. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the Gospel is love, and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.” Of course, as she says, forgiveness is at the core of Christianity — and indeed every spiritual tradition — but in our current moment, even expressing that seems shocking.

Loving one’s enemies is the highest aspiration — the ultimate way to put love into action. It acknowledges the truth that life, and the spiritual growth that gives it meaning, is a journey and that we’re all works in progress.

And there are glimmers of this truth reasserting itself across our culture. James Talarico, a state representative and candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas who is also studying to be a pastor, spoke shortly after Charlie Kirk’s death. “Our politics are broken,” he said. “Our media are broken. Even our relationships with each other feel broken… We’re conducting an experiment on humanity in real time of what happens when you take this believing species and rob it of any community to make sense of the world. I honestly believe that’s why we see higher rates of anxiety and depression, especially among young people, because they’re growing up in an incoherent universe.”

It was these missing eternal truths that author and Harvard Business School professor Arthur Brooks gave expression to during a speech at Utah Valley University, where Charlie Kirk had been assassinated two weeks before. “You have been chosen for a great and vital journey,” he told the students. “You have been called to respond to this murder by following the most countercultural teaching in the history of humanity: to love our enemies.”

To shed light on what that means, and what it can mean in our lives, Brooks pointed to Martin Luther King’s focus on creative and redemptive love. In his sermon “Loving Your Enemies,” delivered in 1957, King said that “love has within it a redemptive power,” and “if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption.”

That kind of love isn’t exactly coursing through our culture. Indeed the opposite — outrage and hunger for revenge and retribution — are fed by the tools we now use to communicate. That’s not just a byproduct of the technology. That is the product.

Augusto Del Noce, one of the foremost Italian philosophers of the post-war era, lamented the “death of the sacred.” For Del Noce, the key to understanding modernity was to focus on what was missing. “What is excluded,” he wrote, is “religious transcendence.” 

In her diaries, Virginia Woolf writes of a conversation she had with John Maynard Keynes, who told her, “I begin to see that our generation — yours and mine V., owed a great deal to our fathers’ religion... We had the best of both worlds. We destroyed Christianity and yet had its benefits.”

In his new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, Paul Kingsnorth explores the truth that every culture is built on a sacred order. “This does not, of course, need to be a Christian order,” he writes. “It could be Islamic, Hindu, or Taoist.” The Enlightenment disconnected us from that sacred order, but, as Kingsnorth puts it, “society did not see it because the monuments to the old sacred order were still standing, like Roman statues after the Empire’s fall.” What we do see is the price societies pay when the sacred order falls: “upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics right down to the level of the soul.”

Isn’t this exactly what is happening right now? “It would explain the strange, tense, shattering, and frustrating tenor of the times,” Kingsnorth writes. “It would start, too, to get to the heart of what we are lacking, for we modern creatures are people with everything and nothing all at once. We — at least if we are among the lucky ones — have every gadget and recipe and website and storefront and exotic holiday in the world available to us, but we are lacking two things that we seem to need, but grasp at nonetheless: meaning, and roots.”

In fact, the word “religion” comes from the Latin root religare, meaning “to bind” or “to tie.” This can happen both individually, binding us to our spiritual foundation and to each other, and collectively, binding communities and society through shared values.

In his conversation with Tucker Carlson, Sam Altman talked about AI being trained on the “collective experience” of humanity. But are we ourselves actually accessing the full collective experience of being human? Carl Jung’s framework for that experience was to contrast the limited ego — our conscious selves — with the more expansive and comprehensive Self. “The Self is not only the center but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious,” Jung wrote. “It is the center of this totality, just as the ego is the center of consciousness.” Being disconnected from “the daily need of the soul” confines us to an “awful, banal, grinding life.”

It is the opposite of a life connected with what Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel called “the presence of mystery in all things, an intuition for a meaning that is beyond the mystery, an awareness of the trans­cendent worth of the universe.”

But the daily needs of the soul cannot be so easily disposed of. As David Foster Wallace said, “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”

Or, as one of my favorite quotes — attributed to G.K. Chesterton — put it, “When men cease to believe in God, they will not believe in nothing, they will believe in anything.”

So some have chosen to worship party politics. Some technology. And some have chosen to worship what Del Noce called the “totalitarian conception of science” in which “every other type of knowledge — metaphysical or religious — expresses only subjective reactions.”

Celebrating the huge advances of science doesn’t mean we have to reject our spiritual essence. That was the theme of this year’s Templeton Prize acceptance speech by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the worldwide spiritual leader of 300 million Orthodox Christians. Established in 1972, the prize honors those, including scientists, philosophers, religious leaders, who “employ the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it.”

Over the centuries, he said, there’s been a “a tragic alienation — religion withdrawing to its sanctuaries, science retreating to its laboratories, each suspicious of the other’s claims upon truth.” But, as he argues, “There is no sacred and secular, no spiritual and material — only one truth, a single reality, shimmering with interconnection, pulsing with divine presence.” To thrive, individually and collectively, we need to draw on both scientific discoveries and centuries of wisdom that have “sustained human communities through previous transformations.”

This is certainly a time of exponential transformation. And to ensure a better future, we need to first go back to the spiritual foundations of the past.

Erika Kirk and James Talarico come from very different sides of the political spectrum. They are likely aligned on very few policy positions. But they are aligned on love, forgiveness and redemption as the core values of our civilization. And as we build a transformational technology that’s going to change everything about our lives, we need to ensure that we train it on the fundamental and unchanging values that define us as humans.