The opening line from Hölderlin’s poem Patmos is often quoted. It is a good example of how easily advocacy for technology gets drawn into pretension. Dario Amodei, the founder of Anthropic, makes clear the need to avoid grandiosity when talking about AI, for fear of sounding like a prophet leading people to salvation. ‘It is dangerous to view technological goals in essentially religious terms.’

There will always be tension between technological optimism and the moral humility demanded by tradition. Our shared history is shaped by this tension, by the clash between discovery and ethical restraint, and our capacity as individuals and societies to adapt and respond to change. This is what has formed our different cultures, our communities, and the stories we tell.

This tension is not new. Hölderlin’s Patmos is just one from countless stories that capture such themes. It is an account of exile, of journey, of fear and of hope. It has influenced many of the world’s greatest thinkers and revolutionaries. Its famous opening line, ‘God is near, yet hard to seize. Where the danger is, also grows the saving power,’ is often invoked to frame the impact of new technology, populist movements, or in response to a shock to our systems. In discussions concerning AI it is used to suggest that the technology is both threat and salvation; that it poses profound risk, whilst also delivering us from the very crises it brings about.

But this is paraphrasing, it is a reduction and loses all the ambiguity that is the beauty of the language and the message being conveyed. These stories teach us that it is in ourselves, in our repeating of human follies and moral evasions, that danger is found. In some translations the danger is our very habit of pretension, that causes humans to ‘become inhuman’. In Patmos, danger is not a thing in the world; it is the inhumanity of us as humans. The isolation it warns of is a dislocation, a forgetting of ourselves and of one another. Our journey is not a return but a reckoning with our hopes and fears. Our saving power does not arise from any belief we may have in our own inventions, but in the recognition of our limits, our understanding of those around us, and of that which makes us most human.