L’Arche Facing the Artificial Intelligence: A Call to Fight AI!

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 24 Nov 2025

Prof. Antonino Drago – TRANSCEND Media Service

20 Nov 2025 – Between the natural and the supernatural lies the artificial plane (LdV: Les Quatre Fléaux, Paris. Denoel, 1959, (= QF), 1, §. 6); it introduces us to a thirst for desires and dreams that, in some cases, fill our entire lives (for example, gambling addiction, hikikimori).

In recent decades, the growth of the artificial has been constant and impressive: first in the external sphere (kitchen-laboratory, automobile, airplane, radio, TV, etc.), and since some decades within the human person: birth control pills, the internet, smartphones, and now artificial intelligence (= AI); that is, the simulation of human behavior so extreme that it is not at all easy to distinguish a real person from a robot.

The artificial has numerous advantages. These are expressed through all the possibilities available to humans for play (QF 2, §§. 1-10). Not only having the power, for example, of cannons or engines (playing regulated games, QF 2, §. 5), but also versatility (figured games, QF 2, §. 4), the joy of novelty (games of chance, QF 2, §. 6), and abandoning oneself to doing the first thing that comes along, like puppies playing with each other (ébrouement, QF 2, §. 3). In short, the artificial lead us to play for increasinge our vitality effortlessly; indeed, it leads us to have fun for diverting ourselves from our daily routine and from the attention focused on working on our inner life. “The devil in the game” (title of chapter 2 of QF) is the end result of the artificial being that has neither control nor constraints. Goethe described it in the book Faust, illustrating the “regulated social game” of becoming famous in scientific research.

Today, the artificial has reached an extreme. ChatGPT can communicate with anyone like a human. It’s now clear that AI can artificially imitate any human behavior and even far surpass it (as in chess and Go), seemingly endlessly. There is no longer an objective human activity that a robot cannot perform; and even do better, just as an airplane is much faster than a running human. Intelligence is no longer a privilege to boast about in the presence of animals.

How can we live with this presence of AI, now inevitable but cumbersome and potentially dominant?

A comparison with an ancient human experience can provide a guideline: the domestication of animals. Among all the beasts, humans have been able to choose among them: to defend themselves from ferocious ones and domesticate some species (cats, chickens, dogs, horses, oxen, etc.). The choice of the good species is the result of the vast experience of many individuals who have attempted this adventure. The process has lasted thousands of years. Today, however, we are forced (by multinationals imposing robots on us) to make choices and develop new habits of coexistence with intruder robots in the space of a few decades. In the historical process of domestication, the risks were individual, for those who dared too much with wild animals; now, however, the risks are collective, because even a single computer, managed by an evil person using AI, can cause enormous damage, even compromising the survival of humanity (think of someone hacking the security systems of the nuclear war warning system). Therefore, either we hasten to build a common language and ethical conscience (at least in a small group) or we will have to learn bitterly from having suffered colossal disasters, from which we can only hope to survive.

To the attack of the artificial within us, and even within ourselves, the human person cannot simply respond with the “good use” of the artificial, as is required for the use of a knife (which can kill) or a car (which can cause fatal accidents, even for the driver). These examples of artificial situations momentarily involve our external behaviors; and therefore they can be easily compared to our behaviors in human relationships and easily resolved with respect to a traditional morality, that of good human behavior in relationships with others and even (with the addition of state and traffic laws) good civic behavior. Instead, the entry of the artificial into the human personality can be controlled only through a morality broader than that of direct human relationships and relationships with the state; it requires a comprehensive morality, ranging from the personal to the social and (as ecology teaches) the global. Here lies a major gap in Western culture: we have a personal ethic (the Ten Commandments), a civic ethic within a state (since the time of Roman law), but no global ethic. In other words, we know how to behave subjectively, and even objectively, in the face of state laws; but we do not know how to behave in the face of structural, social, and especially global evils, the level that human culture reached only a century ago (and through a war!).

Here lies the greatness of Gandhi and LdV. Gandhi’s phrases—”An eye for an eye makes the world blind,” “If wars were a constant in human history, humanity would no longer exist”—indicate that their ethics had reached a global dimension and thus also the ethical completeness necessary to address the artificial within. LdV advanced this global awareness to the point of formulating it in the book QF, which draws on the ancient wisdom of Revelation 6 and 13. He was the first to propose a comprehensive ethical system, including a social one, because he was able to identify the social evils we must flee: the four “man-made” social scourges, generated by the accumulation of the subjective evils of the wicked and the good, the dishonest and the honest: the structural evils of War, Servitude, Misery, and Sedition (Revelation 6). Furthermore, he was able to identify the evil we must flee on a global level: submission to the excessive power of social institutions, science, and technology (Revelation 13).

The complex of this evil can be presented in a structured way which can be easily understandable. The Decalogue contains four social commandments: “You shall not kill,” “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not steal,” and “You shall not lie” (the other two are reduced to the third and second). They correspond one by one to the four plagues mentioned above. Evidence of this connection is provided by the spiritual responses to structural evils, which are the Beatitudes; there are eight because they double the sequence of responses to the four plagues; the first four Beatitudes concern interior responses to Misery, Sedition, War, and Servitude; the second four concern social responses.

Finally, the evils of global institutions, Science and Technology, indicate the motivations for committing these evils: 1) the constant race toward infinity (as suggested by the interpretation of “666” in QF 1, § 28), which is what scientific research does, always racing toward new results, just as, on the individual level, killing and committing adultery are a downward spiral toward infinity; 2) the subversion of human organization, which on the global level is caused by Technology and on the individual level by theft and lies.

So, what ethics should we propose to everyone, humans and robots alike? Individual ethics are already codified in the four social Commandments, now incorporated into the laws of all states. Responsibility for the actions of a robot must be judged as actions performed by its owner. Here, we need general education that extends individual responsibility to include the ability to manage robots; we must add to the current individual responsibility for managing animals or unconscious people the much greater responsibility of managing a robot that can surpass us in intelligence. At this level, legislative attempts are underway (e.g., the EU).

The problem becomes dramatic when we move to the societal level. Of course, AI can also be positive, as seen in its application to healthcare. But generally, it is oriented toward goals set decided by powerful social forces that seek greater wealth and power. And these goals, whether intentional, caused, or unforeseen, can be catastrophic. Indeed, AI, precisely because it mimics human intelligence so well (even in malicious ways), takes all four scourges to the extreme, that is, it completes the extremism of all structural social ills. Misery is amplified by the unemployment AI creates among workers, including intellectuals. Sedition is amplified by the enormous increase in social artificiality that disrupts all personal relationships. Furthermore, AI exaggerates the complexity and therefore the uncontrollability of War to the point of absurdity: just think of drones, which prefigure a battlefield of only robots fighting each other across the world with AI. Then the Servitude of the individual is magnified in gambling addiction and hikikimori; the servitude of humanity is the ultimate nightmare to which AI can lead us. We are already living this nightmare, because our age believes in the unstoppable nature of every kind of scientific and technological progress and therefore leads many people (children first and foremost!) to the adoration of technology,

which [Technology] led to the adoration to the worship of the first Beats [Science] and seduced men by performing great signs… and each man received a mark on his right hand [human relations] and on his forehead [mind]. (Revelation 13:12-16; see LdV’s commentary in QF, 1, §§ 25-27).

We have already experienced a problem of this kind, namely, a scourge taken to the extreme. Since 1945, we have learned that nuclear energy takes the scourge of War to the extreme, namely, the suicide of humanity; and we have rightly fought it even under its screen (“Atoms for Peace”) constituted by nuclear power plants. Through them we have learned that tempting promises are not the reality we desire deep down. And just as a fish should learn that a worm is a good thing, but may have a hook in it, so we must avoid naive fantasies about the future of nuclear energy (LdD). Today, we must draw on the experience of past struggles over nuclear energy to confront an even larger and more demanding social challenge.

We are playing poker with AI because we don’t know how it (statistically) arrives at its results; we don’t know whether its results are simply a bluff (some say a “hallucination”) or something good. If AI bluffs, it will domesticate us into an artificial being that doesn’t belong to us, thus distancing us from our human nature (just as the fairy taught the child who didn’t want to suffer to pull the thread of his life; so his life passed in a flash). If it doesn’t bluff, that is, if it arrives at good things, human intelligence will also be able to achieve those results on its own; for us, it will take longer, decades and centuries; but we will get there in a controlled manner and along paths that will be instructive and allow us to grow in the historical experience of humanity; our results will not be gifts from the witch who immediately gives us an apple, but a poisoned apple. (Four centuries ago, mathematics invented infinitesimals, which achieved marvelous results but overturned all previous science (a divine gift? Another kind of zero?); much later, in the last century, we learned that almost all previous results could be obtained through operational calculations and therefore checked; infinitesimals bluffed, giving us hallucinations. The same for the absolute space and time of Newton) Therefore, it is better to achieve little, rather than quickly, but in a (perhaps) devastating way. The precautionary principle, which is taught to children as they are raised to live in an adult environment, is an indispensable guide for those who, at this moment, are facing a completely new world that could overwhelm us.

Should we therefore stop progress? “But why?” replied the farmers at the nuclear sites. “Is this a progress?” An open letter calling for a pause in the progress of AI was signed by a thousand prominent figures, including executives of AI companies. In vain. On July 1, 2025, the United States Senate rejected the proposal for a moratorium on AI.

In this situation, the task of Gandhians is clear: not only to personally resist this type of progress (First: don’t believe it!), but also to unite to fight it openly and publicly, even through collective action; just as happened when the construction of nuclear bombs began in France. Today, the stakes are even higher, because they are not only material (survival), but also spiritual (our inner life depends on it). We must return to organizing demonstrations like those of 1958 at Marcoule, the French plant building nuclear weapons: we must go to research centers or the multinationals that fund them to demonstrate both our radical opposition to their research and our desire to build a world free from social Scourges, starting with Servitude.

No to Faustian pacts! Especially when they are produced and then managed not by the people, but by the few multinationals in the sector, directed by the 1% of the population, that is, by billionaires motivated solely by the desire to become even more billionaires.

Against the making extreme all Scourges by AI, and in particular the Scourge of Servitude, already begun with the imposition of the unstoppable advance of AI, we recall the spiritual response indicated by the eighth Beatitude: “Blessed are those who fight against Servitude even to the point of be persecuted, for they realize the trinitarian life on Earth.”

The ultimate political goal is to reform the UN so that

1. it adds to its constitutional purpose of “sparing future generations from the scourge of war” the scourges of poverty, sedition, and servitude;
2. it establishes a Senate of Wise Men to establish ethical guidelines on humanity’s most serious problems (artificial intelligence, biotechnology, ecology, etc.), on which legal debate is insufficient.

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Prof. Antonino Drago: University “Federico II” of Naples, Italy and a member of the TRANSCEND Network. Allied of Ark Community, he teaches at the TRANSCEND Peace University-TPU. Master degree in physics (University of Pisa 1961), a follower of the Community of the Ark of Gandhi’s Italian disciple, Lanza del Vasto, a conscientious objector, a participant in the Italian campaigns for conscientious objection (1964-1972) and the campaign for refusing to pay taxes to finance military expenditure (1983-2000). Owing to his long experience in these activities and his writings on these subjects, he was asked by the University of Pisa to teach Nonviolent Popular Defense in the curriculum of “Science for Peace” (from 2001 to 2012) and also Peacebuilding and Peacekeeping (2009-2013. Then by the University of Florence to teach History and Techniques of Nonviolence in the curriculum of “Operations of Peace” (2004-2010). Drago was the first president of the Italian Ministerial Committee for Promoting Unarmed and Nonviolent Civil Defense (2004-2005). drago@unina.it.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 24 Nov 2025.

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