We have built our Towers of Babel, what’s next?
History has shown us that when humans unite, they can achieve anything… But why have we become none the wiser with all the knowledge acquired from one common language – AI?
Sam Altman stands at the edge of a precipice, a lightning rod in one hand with the power to illuminate darkened minds, while the other hand hovers precariously over a shimmering ring.
In the name of democracy, Altman has made available OpenAI’s technology to the U.S. Department of War for national security deployment. While Altman muses that no one should have monopoly over the “ring of power”, the very act of sharing a technology “that makes people do crazy things” with war planners ought to raise a few alarm bells.
Juxtapose this with OpenAI’s rival Anthropic who announced in February that they had rejected the same government’s proposal to remove safety guardrails from its Claude AI that’s extensively deployed across the war department’s mission-critical applications.
Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei cited ethical concerns that “frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons” and regardless of the government’s threats to blacklist them, they “cannot in good conscience accede to [the] request”.
Skyward Invasions
Ancient Greek mythology tells of two aggressive giants who attempted to stack three mountains – one on top of the other – to launch a skyward attack on the gods in Olympus. Their plans were ultimately thwarted by a greater power. Collectively named Aloadae, which means “to crush”, the giant twins also had individual names which meant “nightmare” and “insatiable”.
Another story recorded in both the Torah and Bible also tells of a similar effort – this time by a united humanity with an insatiable ambition – to build a skyscraper that will reach heaven so as to “make a name” for themselves.
Based in Mesopotamia, arguably the cradle of civilisation, the people at that time all spoke in one language. God who “came down” to see their monumental project remarked that “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them”. Through an act of divine intervention, their speech was broken up into multiple languages, their “Tower of Babel” was abandoned, and they were scattered across the earth.
Today, we have built our Towers of Babel in the form of at least 14,000 soaring satellites that reach tens of thousands of kilometres beyond the visible “heavens”, untethered to both physical and ethical anchors.
With the touch of a button, more than a few satellite-wielding regimes – assisted by nonhuman intelligence superior enough to supplant human decisions – could unleash untold devastation on all we hold dear.
United We Stand, Divided We Fall?
Perhaps when God said, “Nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them”, he was not so much concerned about a northbound attack on a celestial kingdom but alluding to the self-destructive power of collective humanity. Perhaps the Tower of Babel foretold a story of 21st century homo sapiens speaking in one AI language who built sky-scraping machinery that would wreck devastation on themselves.
Throughout history, kingdoms and diaspora states have strained at their seams to unite and expand in their quest for permanence, achievement and self-sufficiency.
Their ambition was not inherently evil, just as Hitler and Pol Pot's nationalistic agendas were birthed as utopian solutions to preserve and protect. History has shown us that humans become stupendously powerful when they cooperate in large numbers… but their coming together to share information and resources results in power being deployed foolishly.
Acclaimed historian, Yuval Noah Harari, summed up our present-day scenario in his book ‘Nexus – A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI’. He posited that over the past 100,000 years, humans have accumulated enormous information and technologies to make themselves more powerful; but instead of uniting to solve “existential challenges, international tensions are rising, global cooperation is becoming more difficult, countries are stockpiling doomsday weapons, and a new world war does not seem impossible”.
He added, “No matter where we live, we might find ourselves cocooned by a web of unfathomable algorithms that manage our lives, reshape our politics and culture, and even re-engineer our bodies and minds – while we can no longer comprehend the forces that control us, let alone stop them.”
As AI continues to evolve into what Microsoft AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, fetchingly calls a “digital species” (an upgraded term for the terabyte organisms we lovingly created), we need to ask ourselves if we have put in place sufficient guardrails to ensure that human rights and freedoms will not be thwarted and manipulated. How can we ensure our politics and culture will not be influenced by wayward players feeding us bad information such that even the wisest and kindest souls become corrupt?
Who is truly worthy of holding the “ring of power”? If human beings are fallible, can we trust non-human algorithms to help us enforce law and order?
Just look at Anthropic’s child, Mythos, a superior offspring of the Claude AI family that possesses advanced reasoning abilities which can exploit vulnerabilities in major operating systems. Put it simply, sinister actors or say, vengeful regimes, can harness Mythos to take down a country’s critical infrastructure, bankrupting or killing human populations overnight.
This is not science fiction. It has already happened – in September 2025, when a state-sponsored group manipulated the Claude Code tool to conduct a large-scale cyber espionage, successfully attacking global financial and tech institutions, chemical manufacturing companies and government agencies.
The Road Ahead
We are at an inflection point when AI technology can either be a tool for good or for evil. It need not be an apocalyptic ending, just as the splitting of atoms in nuclear energy – when harnessed correctly – can generate life and not destruction.
If AI represents all of us – our collective thoughts, ideas, intelligence, strategies – how can we amplify the good and bring out the very best in all of us?
Since 2015, the United Nations had laid out 17 global goals as a “universal call-to-action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people can enjoy peace and prosperity”.
All 17 goals are integrated which means that progress in any area will determine outcomes in others. Hence, any “development must balance social, economic and environmental sustainability”.
The rapid maturity of giant AI models has meant that their insatiable appetite for energy and water will continue to deplete the earth of its finite resources and rob the most vulnerable communities of immediate aid.
What if every AI expert were to channel their efforts towards providing marginalised societies with food, water, education, medicines, energy, and justice, instead of encouraging gluttonous data centres to gulp down insane amounts of power and water just to generate more slapstick videos?
Forget about manipulating codes to attack one another, what about leveraging algorithms to conquer the 17 UN goals that will bring about renewed trade and harmony, and in turn usher in a new era of global peace and prosperity.
It’s not up to Sam Altman nor Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos – keepers of soaring satellite towers. All of us hold the “ring of power”, and it’s up to you and me to harness the collective intelligence of humanity to be a force for good.
Do something.