In 1997, a physicist named Mark Gubrud coined a term that would eventually drive trillion-dollar valuations and reshape our entire technological future: “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI).
At the time, the world was drunk on the optimism of the dot-com boom. We believed the internet would democratize information and naturally lead to a more open, free society. But Gubrud saw a different trajectory. He didn’t create the phrase “AGI” to hype a product or sell a vision. He created it as a warning. He used the term to distinguish human-level agency from narrow tools, specifically to highlight the existential danger of creating minds we could not control.
Gubrud diagnosed what he called the “Babel problem”—humanity’s persistent inability to coordinate, communicate, and act collectively despite possessing the technological capacity to do so. He feared that without solving this fundamental coordination crisis, advanced AI would not save us; it would only accelerate our fragmentation.
Today, his warning feels prophetic. In a recent Wired interview, the 66-year-old revealed: “I am a 66-year-old with a worthless PhD and no name and no money and no job.” The man who named the race has been left behind by it. The phrase he designed as caution tape has been turned into a finish line.
The Original Babel Problem
The biblical narrative of the Tower of Babel is often read as a “just-so” story about why we speak different languages. Humanity, united by a single language and a common purpose, decides to build a tower “whose top may reach unto heaven” and to “make us a name” (Gen. 11:4). It is a project of supreme human engineering and self-assertion.
God’s response is not to destroy the tower, but to confuse their language. The project fails not because the engineering was bad, but because the coordination collapsed. When we cannot understand one another, we cannot build together.
Gubrud was right: we are living through a second Babel. We are building digital towers that reach for the heavens—systems of godlike intelligence and capability—yet our ability to coordinate on safety, ethics, and shared values is fracturing.
The landscape of AI discourse today is a cacophony of conflicting tongues. On one side, “accelerationists” preach a gospel of unbridled capability, viewing the expansion of intelligence as the highest moral good. On the other, safety researchers warn of imminent catastrophe. Nations race against nations, corporations against corporations, each terrified that if they pause to ensure safety, the “other guy” will build the tower first. We are speaking different languages—one side speaks of speed and abundance, the other of alignment and caution—with no shared moral grammar to mediate between them. We are building the tower before we have solved the language problem.
The Hidden Etymology
But there’s a detail everyone missed—one suggesting the solution was encoded alongside the problem.
For millennia, we have translated “Babel” through the Hebrew pun balal, meaning “confusion.” But to the ancient Akkadians who built it, the city was Báb-ilim. It didn’t mean confusion. It meant “Gate of the Gods.”
The difference is profound. A tower is humanity trying to force its way up to heaven through effort and ingenuity. A gate is an opening where heaven comes down to earth.
In 1844, as the industrial revolution accelerated forces leading to our modern crisis, a young Persian merchant took the title “The Báb” (The Gate). He didn’t preach new tower-building methods. He taught that the era of fragmentation was ending, to be replaced by an age of oneness.
The Missing Foundation
This fragmentation isn’t accidental—it’s structural. The Bahá’í Faith offers a diagnostic principle: the essential harmony of science and religion.
When separated, disaster follows. Science without religion’s moral compass becomes materialism—a blind giant building towers that reach heaven but crushing people below. Religion without science’s reason becomes superstition—a confused builder rejecting reality’s tools.
The Babel of today is the result of a civilization that has mastered the material mechanics of intelligence while discarding the spiritual mechanics of unity. We have built the engine but thrown away the steering wheel.
From Tower to Gate
The Báb’s message—and the Bahá’í Faith that followed—offers a direct counter-narrative to the Babel problem. It suggests that our coordination crisis cannot be solved by better engineering or smarter algorithms alone. The “alignment problem” in AI is ultimately a spiritual problem in humanity.
At Babel, unity was horizontal: “Let us build”—self-aggrandizing and fragile. The Báb proposed vertical unity: aligning humanity not just with each other, but with transcendent moral reality.
This clarifies the true challenge. Technical alignment merely ensures a model fulfills its given task. The deeper crisis is alignment with human values. But which humans? Which values? If humanity is fractured, any AI we align to ourselves will amplify our fractures.
True alignment requires vertical orientation. We must align the builders—and their creations—with a higher standard of truth. The Báb taught that the “Gate” isn’t a tower we build up, but a revelation we accept down. Our power to unify comes not from cleverness, but from submission to common spiritual truth.
Mark Gubrud saw that AGI requires human unity we don’t yet possess. He was ignored because we prefer building towers to doing the hard work of spiritual and ethical coordination.
As we stand at the threshold of this new era, we face the ancient builders’ choice. We can keep building higher, hoping engineering saves us from our disunity. Or we can seek the Gate—recognizing that true power comes not from what we construct, but from what we’re willing to receive, understand, and unify around.
The “Gate of God” was never closed. We just forgot how to walk through it.
Views and opinions expressed by authors and editors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of AI and Faith or any of its leadership.
