The Cult of Technology Wants to Outsource Our Moral Judgement to Machines
Hey, it’s Chris Murphy. My new book, Crisis of the Common Good, comes out next week. It’s about America’s spiritual crisis - how we’ve lost a sense of connection to our neighbors and how the cults of profit, globalization, consumption, technology, and credentialism have made it harder to find meaning, purpose, and happiness in our lives. Below is an excerpt from the book about the danger of outsourcing the things that make us human — creativity, moral reasoning, and connection — to AI. I’m hitting the road next week to talk about all of these problems and how the left and right can come together to restore the common good. Check out the tour schedule below to see if I’ll be in a city near you.
From Crisis of the Common Good —
Hannah Arendt’s journey to a Jerusalem courtroom, where she sat in the spring of 1961 watching evil on the other side of a glass booth, was a long one. She was sixty-four years old, a German Jewish philosopher who had fled Germany during the war and had been stateless for twenty years, eventually finding refuge in America, where she became one of her adopted nation’s most formidable political thinkers. She had been sent to that courtroom by The New Yorker to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the SS leader who had organized the logistics of the Nazi genocide. Eichmann was in charge of the train schedules, the deportation orders, and the coordination between the ghettos and the camps that kept the extermination campaign running on time.
Arendt thought she knew what she would see on the other side of that glass: a madman, a fanatic full of vile animus for the people he sent to the slaughter. Instead, Eichmann presented as something different entirely: an anonymous functionary, a man incapable of thinking for himself. He didn’t speak of his hatred or prejudice. He coldly spoke of transport schedules and following orders. Arendt believed she was looking into the eyes of someone who could not think from the standpoint of someone else, who could not make independent moral judgments. Pursuing his self-interest, he surrendered to the system built for him. And as a result, he helped murder millions of innocent people.
I’m normally loath to make contemporary comparisons to the Nazi regime. No cult being foisted upon our nation compares to the moral horror of the Third Reich. But what Arendt witnessed that day caused her to think broadly about the danger of surrendering our moral judgment to systems designed by others—especially those who don’t have our best interests in mind, or who operate without any moral frame at all. She called it “the banality of evil.” Many readers grew angry at her apparent minimization of Eichmann’s crimes, and she may well have misunderstood Eichmann himself. But her larger point still resonates: that wrongdoing does not always arrive in a hurricane. Sometimes it is the quiet result of our surrender—the outsourcing of moral thinking and judgment to systems and authorities that spare us the burden of deciding for ourselves.
Arendt worried that the industrial age would facilitate this banality through its construction of vast, integrated systems that operated constantly and evolved incessantly, with a momentum beyond meaningful human control. She could not have imagined what we are building today: machines designed to replace not our physical effort but our mental life itself.
The outsourcing of human cognition to algorithms and large language models (LLMs)—or, more broadly, artificial intelligence (AI)—may be the greatest threat to meaning and purpose our species has ever faced. Improperly managed, the transition to a world dominated by social media and AI could prove spiritually ruinous—as we surrender not just moral reasoning but also creativity, expression, and genuine human connection to machines that cannot understand what they are taking from us.
The surrender is already happening in slow, devastating ways, the full impact of which is just coming into view. In May 2022, I visited Amity High School in Woodbridge, Connecticut, to talk about the social media regulation bill I had just introduced with three other senators—Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Katie Britt of Alabama, and Tom Cotton of Arkansas—all parents of school-age kids.
I was convinced the students would object most loudly to provisions of the bill that required age verification or parental consent. But I was wrong. These students were focused on a different provision—the ban on the use of the personalized content algorithm for users under eighteen. Almost the entire conversation was devoted to their deep worry over losing access to the algorithms on Instagram and TikTok that provided them with a constant conveyor belt of content. Most of these kids had become dependent on an algorithm feeding them customized information. They simply could not imagine a world in which they had to engage in real-life trial and error to discover new passions.
The generation raised on social media algorithms is missing out on a key rite of passage for adolescents—the ritual of discovery. There is work that goes into searching the world for things to care about. There is wonder in the chaotic hunt for passions and subcultures that make life worthwhile: your neighbor’s older sister who introduces you to classic rock, the tucked-away comic book shop where you discover graphic novels, the afternoon you wander into the local park and join a game of pickup football for the first time and decide you want to get good at it. The algorithm is certainly more efficient than the old trial and error of discovery, but kids get less practice in failure, negotiating real-world spaces, and teamwork.
These students at Amity High didn’t know what they were missing—all they knew was the reality that the social media system was delivering to them. As I left the school, a teacher quietly followed me out and whispered, “These kids don’t realize how addicted they are. It’s scary.”
This “system” has been constructed by technology industry elites consumed by profit obsession and greed, willing to inflict incalculable spiritual damage on our nation in order to become billionaires and, soon, trillionaires. These leaders long ago surrendered their own moral judgment, not to machines, but to the cult of technology—to an evangelical-like belief that all innovation is inherently good, that what can be built should be built, and that the all-knowing market will sort out any kinks or collateral damage. “Move fast and break things,” Facebook famously instructed its employees. But the cult-of-technology crowd never stopped to ask what, exactly, they were breaking; at what cost; and whether what they broke could ever be repaired.
The book comes out May 26 and you can pre-order it HERE.
Tour Schedule:
NEW YORK CITY: Tuesday, May 26 - 6:30pm ET
McNally Jackson at Judson Memorial Church
In conversation with Katie Couric
https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/event/senator-chris-murphy-katie-couric
WASHINGTON, DC: Wednesday, May 27 - 7pm ET
Sixth & I with Politics and Prose
In conversation with Jonathan Capehart
https://www.sixthandi.org/event/senator-chris-murphy/
CHICAGO: Thursday, May 28 - 7pm CT
WBEZ and Exile in Bookville at the Studebaker Theater
In conversation with Zeenat Rahman
https://www.fineartsbuilding.com/events/an-evening-with-senator-chris-murphy/
ST. LOUIS: Friday, May 29 - 7pm CT
St. Louis County Library with Left Bank Books
In conversation with Sarah Fenske
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/author-event-senator-chris-murphy-crisis-of-the-common-good-tickets-1986459544973?aff=oddtdtcreator
CAMBRIDGE, MA: Saturday, May 30 - 7pm ET
Harvard Bookstore at First Parish Church
In conversation with Heather Cox Richardson
https://www.harvard.com/event/chris-murphy
NEW HAVEN: Sunday, May 31 - 2pm ET
RJ Julia at Omni New Haven
In conversation with Emily Bazelon
https://rjjulia.com/event/2026-05-31/senator-chris-murphy-crisis-common-good
LOS ANGELES: Saturday, June 6 - 4pm PT
Writers Bloc and Book Soup at Moss Theater at New Roads
In conversation with Elex Michaelson
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/writers-bloc-presents-us-senator-chris-murphy-tickets-1985887343503
CORTE MADERA: Sunday, June 7 - 4pm PT
Book Passage
In conversation with Steve Kerr
https://www.bookpassage.com/event/us-senator-chris-murphy-crisis-common-good
SEATTLE: Friday, June 19 - 7:30pm PT
Town Hall Seattle with Elliott Bay Book Company
In conversation with Marcus Harrison Green
https://townhallseattle.org/event/senator-chris-murphy/
CHARLESTON: Friday, July 24 - 6pm ET
Buxton Books at Circular Congregational Church
https://charleston.boldtypetickets.com/events/183820953/crisis-of-the-common-good-an-author-event-with-u-s-senator-chris-murphy
ATLANTA: Saturday, July 25 - 7pm ET
A Cappella Books at Wild Heaven West End Garden Club
https://www.freshtix.com/events/murphycommon
It sounds like a great read.
This insight resonates with a note I posted three days ago. I agree completely with the moral point you are making:
Modern innovation, as it is promulgated by the tech industry, is not innovation. It is trapped within its own cosmological construct of necessity, where the future is treated as inevitable and human beings are asked only to adapt. But this denies the responsibility required in the radically contingent world we actually live in, where innovation, in its original sense, is necessary.
In this sense, the modern technological time we inhabit, and the ethos that corresponds to it, is not an ethos of engagement in the sense of technē, with its demand for phronēsis. It is an ethos of withdrawal. That is, an abdication of responsible action.
This abdication requires the silencing of artists, because the artist practicing technē keeps contingency knowable. The silencing occurs when technē is recast as epistēmē. If art is treated as that which must be, because it has always been, rather than as a making that could be otherwise, it ceases to be art as such. It is absorbed into the ethos of necessity, where moral agency has no place.
Generative AI “art,” in all its manifestations, is the engine of this reduction. Moral agency is denied epistemic validity, technē is collapsed into efficient process, and the artist as such is reduced to a nullity.