Gains and gravity

In recent months, AI tools have helped researchers detect breast cancer sooner, forecast storms earlier, restore speech to people with damaged brains, and repurpose drugs with greater speed and accuracy. These are wonderful goods. They belong to the category of mercy.

The same society that builds healing machines also builds addictive platforms, mass surveillance, and automated judgments about human worth. We detect more cancers while depersonalizing the sick. We predict storms earlier while leaving the vulnerable exposed. We can restore speech and still refuse to listen.

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The strange pairing: prophet and processor

Martin Luther King Jr. and artificial intelligence sound like an odd pairing: a prophet and a processor.

King is pulpits, marches, jail cells; the moral drama of a nation deciding whether it has a soul. AI is research labs and product roadmaps, corporate deployments and investor decks: “models,” “agents,” “automation.” Put them together and it feels like a category mistake, like asking what Selma has to do with Silicon Valley.

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Then you actually read King.

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He talks of “machines that think” and “computer minds.” He imagines classrooms where instruction is outsourced to recorded systems; human presence replaced by mechanism; responsibility thinned into procedure. It’s unsettling not because King “predicted” our tech, but because he saw something more enduring: a temptation that grows in proportion to power.

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We tend to talk about technology as if it arrives neutral. King treats it more like fire. Fire can warm a home or burn it down; either way it changes the room. It intensifies what is already there. It expands the reach of whatever rules the heart of a society.

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And that is why King belongs in our technological moment. ​King is diagnosing a temptation: when our tools grow more capable, we become more willing to confuse capability with goodness, to call power “progress,” even when it shrinks the soul.

 

King’s core diagnosis: growing power outrunning the moral knowledge and character.​​

 

Poverty of spirit

King’s central concern was that human beings would remain morally stunted. Still willing to dominate, exploit, and discard one another while acquiring new powers to do it faster and with less felt responsibility.

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In the early 1960s he states it in a line that still cuts: 

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“The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided man. Like the rich man of old, we have foolishly minimized the internal of our lives and maximized the external. We have absorbed life in livelihood. We will not find peace in our generation until we learn anew that "a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth,” but in those inner treasuries o f the spirit which “ no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth.” [10]​

 

King’s claim is a criterion. Any society that maximizes exterior control while neglecting interior transformation will become more competent at the vices it refuses to name. The question becomes practical and institutional. What forms of education, worship, friendship, and political economy can rehabilitate ends? What can train desire, restore responsibility, and recover a thick vision of the good, so that power is re-tethered to persons rather than deployed against them?

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King's Nobel lecture presses the same wound:

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"Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success... Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance."[2]

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Morally under-formed people whose capacity has been amplified. When power grows without wisdom, the oldest sins acquire new efficiency. Greed scales. Violence becomes remote. Exploitation becomes administrative. The neighbor becomes a data point.

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New powers don’t need to be intrinsically demonic. They intensify whatever spirit inhabits the will, and a will unformed in love will predictably use amplified means to secure shrunken ends of status, control, comfort, victory.

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That’s why technology accelerates a society’s dominant orientation—toward persons or toward things—and the consequences become harder to hide.​

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Persons vs. things: the distinction that organizes everything

​One year to the day before his assassination, King stood at Riverside Church and named the moral disorder with a terrifying clarity: 

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“We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”[4]

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The point is the moral sentence in which he places it: not as entertainment, not as neutral progress, but as an object of misplaced devotion. A thing-oriented society does not merely build tools. It enthrones them, treating technique as salvation and efficiency as innocence.

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King recognizes that this lag is not merely unfortunate but existentially perilous: “Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul.”[1] Once you see that, “machines and computers” stops sounding quaint. It starts sounding like a description of our air.

Engagement metrics as a moral proxy. If it “moves” people—captures attention, retains users, drives shares—it is treated as justified. The metric becomes a substitute for judgment.

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Optimization as a substitute for wisdom. The system gets better at hitting a target while few pause to ask whether the target is worthy. Who will we become trying to hit it? And if we do hit the target? 

 

“Stewardship” in a layoff deck. The meeting is called “restructuring” because “firing” is too human. Slides click forward. Strategic alignment. Operational excellence. Runway. People translate into costs. And costs fall under justification. Next justification becomes a kind of righteousness. Nobody says, “we chose this.” Instead, “It was the numbers.” Everyone leaves feeling responsible because the process felt professional.

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A thing-oriented society provides us with moral cover. It turns the person into raw material for the system’s goals. Then it tells itself the system is benevolent because it is “innovative.”

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Notice how King’s line binds together what we keep separating: racism, materialism, militarism, and the technological order that makes them efficient. A thing-oriented society can build astonishing tools while remaining committed to astonishingly old forms of domination, only cleaner, quieter, and more scalable.

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A thing-oriented society does not accidentally become unjust. Injustice is what happens when persons are downgraded and things are upgraded.

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The soul's displacement: the internal eclipsed by the external

King often describes modern life as a confusion between two realms of human existence, the internal and the external.​ The realm of intrinsic value and the realm of instrumental value.

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The internal is the realm of ends, the goods that give life meaning, art and literature, moral judgment, worship, the slow work of becoming a certain kind of person. These are the things that move us from the inside. The external is the realm of means, the devices, techniques, mechanisms, and systems by which we secure and organize life. The things that tend to move us from the outside.

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The crisis emerges when instrumentality colonizes what should remain intrinsic: "Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live."[2]​

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A system can get so large and so smooth that no one feels responsible inside it. Harm becomes procedural. Decisions become “policy.” A person is “potential.”

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King once made a side point that turned prophetic. He imagines the professor recording the lectures to remove the need for presence. He returns to find the students have done the same. [6] The classroom becomes a conversation between devices. Encounter disappears. The degree survives. The education does not.

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Yes, our tools heal. They also habituate. They train our reflexes. They offer a world in which speed feels like virtue and control feels like safety. They make it easier to live without face-to-face obligations. Without costly attention. Without the slow formation that love requires.

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Technology doesn’t merely add capacity. It enacts an anthropology. You are a user, a consumer, a worker-node, a data-body, a glitch. King’s whole project is to resist that anthropology by insisting the human person is not a thing. A person is never an instrument, never a mere means.

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Neighborhood without brotherhood

King’s most prophetic “today” line may be the one that sounds least technical: 

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"Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood."[3]

 

Neighborhood is proximity. Brotherhood is obligation.

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We live in the full bloom of neighborhood: global connection, instant communication, constant access.

We can coordinate relief or coordinate cynicism that swarms every disaster with scams. We can crowd-fund survivor care or bankroll disinformation. We can mobilize solidarity or manufacture outrage. We can assemble crowds for the public good or for intimidation.

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Technology shrinks distance, accelerates communication, and creates networks of interdependence. Brotherhood requires ethical commitment, mutual recognition, and shared responsibility. These are the moral dimensions that technology cannot generate.

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"We are tied together," King explains, "in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."[3]

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Technology makes this mutuality visible and consequential, but it does not automatically transform neighbors into brothers. That transformation requires the moral and spiritual work technology cannot perform.

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A neighborhood can be built by cables and platforms. A brotherhood cannot. Brotherhood requires moral and spiritual formation. Sisterhood requires the capacity to treat the other as a person when it costs you. Love requires the strength to tell the truth when lies would benefit you. Love requires the discipline to refuse the easy cruelty of distance.

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This is why a thing-oriented society thrives in a hyper-connected world. The same networks that could intensify mutuality can also intensify instrumentalization. If the dominant aim is engagement, the system will learn what enrages, what polarizes, what retains, what sells ads for more things. If the dominant aim is profit, the system will discover how to turn attention into extraction. If the dominant aim is control, it will discover how to render life legible and manageable.

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King’s point is not that technology makes brotherhood impossible. His point isn't that technology makes love more difficult, although it can. His point is that technology cannot make brotherhood inevitable. Proximity is automatic now. Love is not. That is, until you are the kind of person truly permeated by love. But if that is you, technology will not be a problem.

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So when we look at our fractured public life, our thinned friendships, our performative outrage, our anxious scrolling, our loneliness amid constant contact, King tells the truth. We built the neighborhood. The brotherhood remains unfinished.​​

 

Moral formation that can govern power 

​If power outruns wisdom, the answer is not to wish for less power. The answer is to become the kind of people capable of consistently governing power for the good of the public, out of cherishing what is good. 

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Four days before his assassination, King gave his final sermon. At Washington National Cathedral, March 31, 1968, he invoked this framework:

 

“There can be no gainsaying of the fact that the great revolution is taking place in the world today. In the sense it is a triple revolution: that is, a technological revolution with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare; then there is the human rights revolution with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world.” [12]

 

This is not a call to abandon technology but to subordinate it. The issue is priority. Do we organize society around things or around persons? King recognizes that when technological artifacts, economic mechanisms, and property systems become ends rather than means, they enable systemic evil. The "giant triplets"—racism, materialism, militarism—flourish precisely when persons are instrumentalized and things are sacralized.

 

Against technological determinism, he insists that orientation is chosen, not inevitable. We need to understand that today. "A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy."[4] The shift from thing-orientation to person-orientation requires revolutionary change in values; what King calls "a radical revolution of values."[4] 

 

King’s remedy is not a technical fix. It is a reordering of life in which persons become the measure and things return to their proper place. Not the abolition of tools, but the dethroning of them. Not the rejection of power, but the spiritual formation required to keep power from becoming an instrument of cruelty.

 

Cowards of Efficiency?

I wonder if we have become cowardly while calling it efficiency. A thing-oriented society learns to harm without the courage to own it. The harm becomes a workflow. Exploitation becomes policy. Domination becomes an output. A dashboard triggers a termination. A risk score denies a benefit. A model flags a person as “high risk,” and the institution treats the label as a verdict. The costs do not fall evenly: they land first, and hardest, on those already subject to disproportionate surveillance and punishment.

 

Perhaps the ultimate illusion of modern power is this: it disperses agency until no one feels responsible for what we can change, and then concentrates guilt until everyone feels responsible for what they cannot. Technology becomes the alibi, "The system required it," so no one has to own it. And when the tension becomes unbearable, it resolves it the old way, by scapegoating. We blame “bad users,” “edge cases,” or a few rogue actors so the machinery can keep its innocence.

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This is why King keeps returning to ultimate ends, to the human soul, to the kind of people we are becoming. 

 

A person-oriented society puts responsibility back into a face, a name, a public space, a decision that costs. It accepts accountability and the embarrassment of being wrong. It refuses the relief of distance. It chooses the risky work of presence, which can only be done by people. Courage is one thing no machine can supply. ​

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King’s warning about “guided missiles and misguided man” exposes a moral strategy. We build systems that let us act without courage. Distance replaces restraint. Procedure replaces conscience. Automation becomes the respectable form of cowardice. The public language is optimization, safety, outcomes. The private reality is avoidance. To often we do not want to love our neighbor. To often, we want to manage risk, liability, optics, quarterly expectations, anything but the neighbor as a person.

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A thing-oriented society does not merely mistreat people. It arranges life so no one has to look them in the face. The revolution of values begins there, in the refusal to let responsibility evaporate into architecture.