Thank you, Dr. Safas, for your introduction. It's a pleasure to be with all of you today. Before I begin, let me recognize a few of the leaders in our community here with us this morning: His Eminence, Archbishop Elpidophoros of America, President of the Hellenic College Holy Cross, Demetrios Katos, and Consul General of Greece in Boston, Symeon Tegos. Thank you all so much. As was mentioned, I serve in the White House as President Trump's science and technology adviser. I oversee the administration's science and technology policy and implementation across the federal government. It is exciting and important work, and I'm very honored to do it.
What brings me here today is the intersection of that work with my identity as a Greek Orthodox Christian. Though I am not, I admit, an avid student of theology, my faith informs my work as it has shaped my mind, my heart, and my soul. I was baptized in Marousi, a suburb of Athens, at Agia Marina. Growing up, I served as an altar boy at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Columbia, South Carolina. Each summer, my parents brought me back to Greece, and especially to Chios, where each July we celebrated the annual panagiri of Agia Markella, and pilgrims made their march to the site of her martyrdom. As a child, I was blessed to visit the Phanar and the Hagia Sophia many times, and have had the gift of meeting both Ecumenical Patriarchs, Demetrios and Bartholomew. Those faithful servants of the church still speak as fearless prophets to a world hungry for wisdom, and their lives have been an example of holy service to all of us.
If there is one clearest way that my Orthodox faith has informed the public servant that I seek to be, it has been by upholding the virtue of philotimo. This combination of love and honor is a passionate drive, the motivating spirit a person brings to their calling and their labors. It is ambition, zeal, aspiration, earnest endeavor—always turned to the blessing of others and the service of God. In fact, philotimo finds its roots in some of the Apostle Paul's epistles. In Romans, for example, he writes, quote, "I make it my philotimon to preach the gospel." My own sense of philotimo and my career have led me to emerging technologies, and especially artificial intelligence.
In the last Trump administration, I led the development of the nation's first national AI strategy, helping set America on a path to global leadership in what I truly believe is a critical technology. In this administration, AI has been a priority since the president's first day back in office. On January 23rd, President Trump recommitted the United States to global leadership in AI technology and called for the development of America's AI Action Plan, which was released in July. As guided by the Action Plan, my responsibility, and if you will, my philotimo, is to ensure that this transformative technology grows to the benefit of America's workers, families, and children. We seek for America's AI systems to be trustworthy, designed to reflect truth rather than advance the agendas of social engineers. And we work to make certain our technologies are kept safe from misuse and theft by adversaries and malicious actors.
In his speech launching the Action Plan, President Trump called the AI race, quote, "a test of our capacities unlike anything since the dawn of the space age." My hope is that AI will be a tool for the growth and exercise of knowledge, and not an instrument of ignorance and fear. My certainty is that the race to build the future with wisdom and responsibility has no finish line. How then does Orthodox theology intersect with how a policymaker thinks about AI? Theology was called the queen of sciences in the Middle Ages, but although I'm the president's science adviser, it has not been my special area of study. Fortunately, His All-Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew's recent remarks upon the occasion of receiving the Templeton Prize provide a framework with which I believe even a layman like myself may build some observations about theology's application to the question of AI.
As His All-Holiness said in his speech calling for, quote, "marriage of scientific vigor and spiritual vigor," the separation of science and religion was, quote, "never meant to be." Science and religion cannot be disunited. They each speak of the same reality and inform human understanding of one created cosmos. Science judges itself according to its own scientific standards, which religion can and should respect. But as a domain of knowledge, it clearly has limits. It can only describe the world without being able to provide an account of the final purpose of the things it describes. As our scientific knowledge grows, so also should our sense of the mysteries it does not and cannot speak of. Religion, meanwhile, combines an account of created order with man's place in it, his purpose and his destiny. The Christian tradition speaks to every moment. His All-Holiness said of a religious perspective, quote, "We excel when we provide what the world desperately needs: the longer view, the deeper story, the bigger picture." That is the value of a gathering like this one, in which the wisdom of Orthodoxy can speak to one of the most important issues of our time.
In his remarks, which focus on humanity's relationship to the natural world, His All-Holiness highlighted three concepts which I believe can be brought to bear on this conference's question of how the divine and the digital intersect. The first was nepsis, saying, quote, "Against the numbing forces of indifference and despair, the Orthodox tradition offers a discipline of nepsis, watchful vigilance, the practice of staying alert or attentive to what is actually happening around us." The second concept was askesis: quote, "The Orthodox Church also speaks of askesis, not the grim self-denial often associated with the term, but the joyful self-discipline of discovering how much is enough." Asceticism's origin is the training and exercise of the athlete, and each of us as Christians is challenged to run a race of faith in life. The third concept His All-Holiness mentions was metron, calling us to discover, quote, "what the Greek philosophers called metron, a proper measure, the wonderful sense of proportion." In Scripture and the tradition, this term describes everything from a literal tool of measuring to the standard of justice by which judgment is made, the amount of something given or received.
So how do nepsis, askesis, and metron intersect with the problems of AI policy? His All-Holiness argued that they describe three aspects of the approach that we as human beings should bring to the whole order of creation. Since we as creatures are part of that creation, and what we build are acts of sub-creation within that order created, let me extend the Patriarch's argument. I believe these three concepts also describe aspects of the appropriate posture that we as Orthodox Christians should take to AI technologies, whether as builders, users, or public servants. First, practicing nepsis, our task is to take the potential disruptions of any new technology seriously, while also recognizing what Vice President Vance, speaking at a major AI conference in Paris earlier this year, called our, quote, "AI opportunities." We should succumb neither to the temptation of pure acceleration to no one knows where, nor to the spirit of fear that animates Luddite and doomer demands to regulate AI out of existence. I work in government on AI policy. Clearly, I believe there is a role for government to play here, but it is based on the watchful vigilance of nepsis. I believe the people's representatives must be alert to potential dangers, but honest about the situation at present and humble about what we can anticipate about the future.
Next is askesis. We find the discipline required to make these tools useful to us. AI technologies are extensions of human skills and capacities. Trained on human communication with human feedback by human ingenuity, they create the opportunity for human mastery. As our tools and our systems grow in scope and complexity, so do the opportunities to demonstrate the virtues of askesis. These are the opportunities for people to exercise the discipline required to use these tools responsibly for the good of others. In the practices of askesis, such as fasting, we Orthodox Christians shape ourselves in conformity with spiritual realities. It is by similar exercise and training of our habits of the will that we shape our use of technology to support and amplify human virtue.
Finally, in metron, we are reminded that all of this depends on measurement and standards. That includes the ability to measure these tools. This administration is committed to avoiding ideological bias in the models it employs in government work, but also a measured approach to regulating them. We have, for example, firmly rejected a global governance framework for AI. Setting aside the recent discussion of whether such a world system participates in the spirit of the Antichrist, it would be contrary to the standard of self-government set for Americans by our Constitution and history. But more than both those measurements, metron reminds us that we must measure ourselves, exercising judgment in light of a social and personal ideal in how we relate to these technologies, whether as builders, users, or public servants. But especially as Orthodox Christians, we know there is an image of excellence we hold before ourselves and should seek to imitate.
At heart, then, the question of AI is not so much what it is or what we do with it. As with every other tool, we face a perennial problem of what we are making of ourselves with its use. It is easy to forget this fundamental question of ethics in the discourse around AI, distracted by speculation about what this technology might become or represent. These speculations take on great urgency in part because of the resemblance so many see in large language models to the human mind. As AI models make progress in building computing systems that resemble mental capacities, they lend plausibility to the belief so common in technical fields that the human mind is basically comparable to our digital computers. In a largely secular society, this is felt by many to be a threat to humanity's special status or dignity. But progress in the utility of our AI tools only lends apparent plausibility for this reductive conflation, not evidence. The materialist account of the human personality, too, is in the end an act of faith. As resurgences in spirituality and interest in theological topics in Silicon Valley would suggest, naked materialism is by no means a necessary interpretation of the amazing improvements in these technologies, even for the non-believer. Even as our digital tools appear to solve old problems and reveal new answers to long-asked questions, many of our most brilliant technologists admit that their sense of mystery has only grown.
I use this word "mystery" here, of course, on purpose. It is a word pregnant with significance in our Orthodox faith. Mystery, the mysterion of not knowing, lies at the heart of the Orthodox experience of God and the communal life of His body, the Church. In light of our tradition, in the paradoxical light of mystery itself, I would suggest that people vastly overstate even the apparent threat to humanity's status that AI is alleged to present. In fact, I believe the growing capacities of our AI models to organize human information, to accelerate human science, even to simulate something that looks very like human thinking, represents a spiritual opportunity. For its advances make only more obvious that there are limits to human knowledge and there are puzzles where there is nothing to solve. It is in mystery where we meet God. As Greek Orthodox Christians, we believe the created order contains mysteries that lie beyond the place where mere reason and knowledge can make sense of them. As demonstrated in all the holy mysteries and divine liturgies of the church, reason's knowledge of the doctrines of God is secondary to the soul's experience of His presence.
Orthodox worship engages all of our senses as it affirms the goodness of God's creation and the significance of the reality of the incarnation of Jesus Christ. We know some things about the Triune God, and theology has been called faith seeking understanding. But it is better to know the persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit even without understanding. The knowledge of the head seeks, eventually in vain, to pull back the mysterious veil. But there is a knowledge of the heart which by faith finds its rest in the greatest mystery: God Himself.
As I conclude, let me reiterate how hopeful I am for the future that Americans will build in AI. Already, our frontier models can do so much so quickly, and we have only just begun to adopt them. The last half century of technological progress was defined by innovations in information and telecommunication systems. From computers to the internet to search engines and smartphones, each of these has been an incredible tool for the spread and extension of human knowledge. As technologies are the next generation of the descendants of the written word, we do not yet know what our boldest scientists and most imaginative researchers will learn with AI. We do not yet know what barriers our best engineers and most persevering inventors will use it to overcome. What we know is that there will be new testaments to human ingenuity. Like each technology before it, AI comes with its challenges, but the promise of using it well seems to defy limits. Yet it has limits. For as technology extends human knowledge, it makes the distinction between earthly knowing and the mystery of spiritual being all the more clear. As a tool for extending and amplifying our rational capacities, AI should also be a sign of our ignorance and the necessity of faith.
There is no place in the world that I feel my faith so strongly as in the majestic Hagia Sophia, with its soaring golden dome and glowing mosaics lifting the spirit towards God. There, the Orthodox Church has given all mankind a glimpse of the throne room of heaven and has made incarnate in earthly materials a beauty that belongs in eternity. This embodiment of divine revelation, like in the smaller icons Hagia Sophia contains in her luminous mosaics, offers to believers a deep experience of God, if only we will be still and silent enough to give Him our attention. Growth for the Christian is not a story of growing knowledge, but rather of the divine liturgy and the holy mysteries leading us deeper into the mystery that is mankind's communion with God. We do not go to church to understand with our reason; we go to meet God. I affirm that truth by faith even as I work eagerly for the growth of human knowledge and understanding. As I seek to practice nepsis, askesis, and metron in support of, one might say, my philotimo for the development and execution of America's AI policy, I pray that those virtues would grow in my heart and come to bear spiritual fruit. Thank you.
