Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, recently offered a reassuring vision of our technological future. Artificial intelligence, he predicted, will soon monitor police body cameras, security cameras, doorbell cameras, and vehicle dashboards. “Citizens will be on their best behavior,” he explained, “because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on.”
One cannot help but question whether “best behavior” includes the decision to construct an electronic surveillance state. Presumably, the algorithm will decide what constitutes acceptable conduct.
The surveillance state does not create moral citizens—it produces practiced actors. Ellison envisions AI supervising both police officers and ordinary citizens. If an officer acts improperly, the system will detect the issue and report it to the appropriate authorities. Drones may even replace police cars during high-speed pursuits, following suspects while artificial intelligence records and analyzes all involved.
As an atheist, Ellison desires an all-knowing entity that is perfectly good and judges human behavior. It is difficult not to admire this proposal’s efficiency: a deity suited for the modern secular mind—omnipresent, nearly omniscient, and conveniently owned by a corporation with promises of oversight.
For generations, atheists and secularists have claimed civilized people need no divine judgment. They dismissed such concepts as primitive, oppressive, and psychologically unhealthy. Enlightened individuals, they argued, do not require the threat of an all-seeing eye to behave morally.
Now, having removed God from heaven, technological elites propose installing His replacement on every lamppost. The secular project promised liberation from divine surveillance. Its culmination might be a camera that never blinks, connected to a machine that never sleeps and operated by authorities who never admit error.
Yet artificial intelligence is not God. It lacks human intelligence in its full sense—no conscience, no moral law, and no wisdom. It processes information according to purposes and standards set by humans. This creates a critical issue: If AI must report “bad behavior,” someone must first define it. Who will determine acceptable conduct? The programmers? Oracle executives? Government agencies? Or more AI? The same institutions that struggle to define a woman may soon be entrusted with defining behavior for every citizen.
AI can recognize faces, track vehicles, and perhaps detect raised voices—but it cannot explain why assault is wrong, why citizens possess rights, or why the government should restrain itself. The atheist insists there is no transcendent moral order. Human beings are products of matter and chance. Yet he speaks of justice, dignity, equality, and human rights as if they were eternal truths rather than temporary arrangements of atoms.
Having denied a Lawgiver above the state, he inevitably turns to the state as lawgiver. The God of Scripture sees everything but His omniscience is joined with perfect knowledge, righteousness, and justice. He understands not only what we do but why we do it. He judges the heart as well as outward actions.
Most importantly, God is not accountable to government contractors, political parties, or Oracle’s quarterly reports because He is the standard for what is good, righteous, and holy. AI surveillance offers omnipresence without wisdom, judgment without righteousness, and accountability without an objective measure of the good. It cannot produce virtue—only outward conformity in people who know they are being watched.
A man who refrains from stealing because theft is wrong possesses a measure of virtue. A man who refrains due to cameras and drones possesses only caution. The surveillance state does not make good citizens. It makes practiced actors.
Nor does recording everything solve the oldest political problem: Who watches the watchers? Ellison claims AI will report citizens to “the appropriate person.” But history offers few reasons to believe that person remains permanently responsible for an unlimited flow of population data.
The atheist rejected God because he did not want an authority above man. Now, he constructs an artificial authority beneath man—controlled by a small number of powerful men. This is the transfer of divine attributes to institutions lacking any divine character.
We were told that when God disappeared, mankind would come of age. Instead, humanity immediately began shopping for cameras. The choice is not between accountability and freedom from accountability. Every society holds its members answerable to some standard. The real question is whether that standard rests on a moral law higher than rulers or rules programmed by those in power.
A God who judges governments as well as citizens serves as a barrier to tyranny. An AI system operated by the government becomes an instrument of it. Our secular technologists have discovered that a society cannot survive unless people believe their actions are seen and judged. They have merely concluded that God’s greatest flaw was that He could not be purchased from Oracle.
