Topic on Talk:Discussion pages

What is the appropriate use of technology in the development of anthroposophical spiritual science?

Steiner characterizes technology (in GA 275) as a two-stage, spirit-laden process:

1. Extraction (Deconstruction of Nature):

-- We “smash and plunder” mineral and organic interrelationships to obtain raw materials.

-- Spiritually, this casts out the progressive nature-spirits (Jehovah hierarchy) that sustain natural life.

2. Construction (Reassembly by Natural Law):

-- We recombine those materials into machines and tools according to our abstract knowledge of natural laws.

-- In doing so we “conjure” Ahrimanic elemental beings into these mechanisms, creating a technological milieu saturated with their influence.

In the same lecture he says that avoiding the use of technology and retreating to a spiritual “hothouse” is cowardice:

“It would be the worst possible mistake to say that we should resist what technology has brought into modern life, that we should protect ourselves from Ahriman by cutting ourselves off from modern life. In a certain sense this would be spiritual cowardice. The real remedy for this is not to let the forces of the modern soul weaken and cut themselves off from modern life, but to make the forces of the soul strong so that they can stand up to modern life. A courageous approach to modern life is necessitated by world karma, and that is why true spiritual science possesses the characteristic of requiring an effort of the soul, a really hard effort.” — GA 275, 28 December 1914

Given that at a minimum using technology conjures Ahrimanic beings and many believe that current tech (e.g., AI, Robotics) is a preparatory step toward “Ahrimanic incarnation”, how can, or even should, Anthroposophists use technology as a tool for the development and dissemination of spiritual science?

I am posting this answer provided yesterday by Viktor Koncsek here on his request.

He wrote "I will reply with my AI. This also align with what i think. Can you please post this reply."

Here is a comprehensive synthesis—grounded in GA 275 and Steiner’s broader work—on how technology can be used in anthroposophical spiritual science:

• 1. Steiner’s Two‑Stage View of Technology
• A. Extraction (“smash and plunder”): Steiner describes this phase as the violent dismantling of natural systems—disrupting mineral and organic interrelationships—and spiritually casting out nature‑spirits of the Jehovah hierarchy
• B. Construction (“reassembly by natural law”): In reassembling materials into machines, we summon and harness Ahrimanic elemental beings into our technological milieu
• 2. Spiritual Courage vs. Escapism
• Steiner warns against retreating from technology into a “spiritual hothouse”—labeling such avoidance spiritual cowardice
• Instead, he advocates for inner strengthening: confronting Ahrimanic forces by deepening soul life, cultivating rigorous spiritual-scientific practice, and renewing our connection to divine-spiritual realms despite technological adversity
• 3. The Role of Art as Counterbalance
• Technology tends to bring in Ahrimanic forces; art carries Luciferiс influences.Steiner presents this as a pendulum: modern life is marked by the Ahrimanic turn, which balances the Luciferic idealism of past epochs .
• Through active engagement in artistic and spiritual life, we integrate these polarities and connect more deeply with the spiritual hierarchies.
• 4. Technology as Necessary—Yet Demanding
• AnthroWiki summarizes: “highly industrialised technology … is a necessary step in human development, but needs to be balanced by a conscious spiritual development”
• In other words, spiritual science must walk with technology—neither rejecting nor blindly embracing it.
• 5. Applying the Principles: A Practical Framework (see picture)
• 6. On AI, Robotics & “Ahrimanic Incarnation”
• It is valid within Steiner’s framework to see AI and robotics as deepening incursion of Ahrimanic spiritual forces—but this makes spiritual vigilance imperative, not optional.
• Appropriate use becomes possible—but only when anchored in spiritual-strengthening, moral clarity, and continuous self-reflection.
• 7. Conclusion: A Path of Spiritual Sovereignty
• Anthroposophists should engage with technology—as long as they: (1) Are clairvoyantly conscious of its spiritual entanglements; (2) Undertake inner training (meditation, moral development, artistic cultivation); (3) Use technology for spiritually aligned purposes—healing, art, community-building, environmental regeneration.
• This aligns precisely with Steiner’s injunction in GA 275: courageously participate in modern life, while deepening inner strength to meet its Ahrimanic trials. Technology need not be renounced—but must be tempered, consciously guided, and spiritually anchored by anthroposophical principles.
• Summary
• Accept reality: Technology and its Ahrimanic permeation are part of our karmic destiny.
• Don’t hide: Retreat is cowardice; spiritual strength must be built.
• Engage wisely: Use tech as a tool for spiritual science, balanced by inner work and moral inclination.
• Create balance: Counter Ahrimanic influences through art, community, and soul cultivation.
• In this way, anthroposophists embody spiritual sovereignty—neither enslaved by nor fleeing from technology—but transforming it into a partner in human spiritual evolution.

I will add that Viktor and I have been talking about his personal AI initiative on Rudolf Steiner's work and the GA:

chatgpt.com/g/g-67e4e280c5688191b4270b43ad6cc4e1-rudolf-steiner-embodied

Coincidentally, yesterday the Rudolf Steiner Archive made a communication regarding an AI tool also:

www.steinerchat.com/

The Rudolf Steiner archive added: "we did not create it. It merely searches our website. We are not involved. ... It will most likely take time to develop, but it is another 'tool in the toolbox' so to speak."

Someone added in the facebook forum: the creator of SteinerChat.com is Zeb Harris Buus Nielsen (Copenhagen).

For me this all brings up three different but related questions:

1. How should anthroposophists use technology as a tool for **their own spiritual development**?

2. How should anthroposophists use technology as a tool for the **continued development of spiritual science**?

3. How should anthroposophists use technology for the **dissemination of spiritual science**?

With regard to the first question, we should not shut ourselves off from technology but face it head on with conscious spiritual discernment in a variety of ways as previously stated. For me, modern technology (computers, Internet, AI) is the continuation of a series of technological processes and artifacts that go back to antiquity but can be more easily recognized in its current manifestation at the very beginning of our current fifth cultural age in 1440 with the invention of the printing press. All of the progress from the telegraph to the telephone, radio, television to the internet has enabled previously hidden knowledge to be accessible to more and more people. Today, almost every single person in the world has access to this wisdom through the Gospels and further illuminated by Steiner and others.

“Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” (Mark 16:15).

So while I agree that looking towards art and Luciferic forces to counterbalance the deep Ahrimanic impulse of technology can be useful, it is critically important for anthroposophists to be focused on Christ more so than polarized forces. This site is a great example of this, where there is a top level study guide of Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha. This aligns the technology with Christ and His mission and protects the creator and users from deception.

With regard to the second question, wikis and chatbots continue the trend of making information more widely accessible but chatbots based on Large Language Models (LLMs) differ in that the output is generated “by a machine”, although in reality the output of an LLM is seeded by human generated training data stored in a networked structure and the ‘machine’ is simply a path between nodes in the graph. However, because the network is so complex its output is non-deterministic. For example, you could “ask” ChatGPT “What is 2+2?” over and over again and most of the time it will reply 4, but sometimes it would say 5. This phenomenon is coined a “hallucination”, but is a necessary artifact of a non-deterministic system. By contrast, if you ask a computer, running on a standard microchip, “What is 2+2?”, it will always reply 4, it's deterministic.

My intuition is that Anthroposophical AI chatbots, while the obvious thing to experiment with, will be of marginal use. They will allow the researcher the ability to skim across the vast surface of Steiner’s GA, but won’t be as useful to go deep into a particular area of study, especially in the more esoteric areas. The exoteric training will induce hallucinations due to the ambiguity of language—e.g. the word ‘Saturn’ in Anthroposophy has a bigger meaning than almost all of the references to the word ‘Saturn’ in exoteric training data. While it’s most likely the case LLMs have been trained on Steiner’s GA since it's freely accessible on the Internet, that corpus of terms is infinitesimily small relative to the larger training data set. Techniques like fine-tuning and RAG will help with the hallucination problem but can’t eliminate it because it's an inherent quality of a non-deterministic system.

With regard to the third question, how should technology be used for the dissemination of knowledge, this opens up another area which hasn’t been discussed regarding the technical infrastructure and the other modern technology that is very much at the top of the collective mind: cryptography. Cryptography which has been primarily used to keep secrets can also be used to reveal them. Technologies like Bitcoin allow for decentralization of infrastructure so that information published cannot be removed without network consensus. This of monumental importance because historically vessels for storing and disseminating this knowledge are attacked: Temple of Artemis, Library of Alexandria, the First Goetheanum.

@Jp

To add my two cents regarding your first question, I'd personally use LLMs only as a glorified index or full-text search feature, e.g. to generate a list of references or direct quotes. Hallucinations and ambiguity aside, I'm not interested in asking an LLM for synthetic conclusions or summaries — as you already described them, LLMs are effectively applied nominalism, mechanically shuffling empty labels based on statistics. As long as the actual thinking is done independently by the reader, I don't think there's a problem.

Also, repeating all that stuff about spiritual courage is well and good, but I believe it should also be kept in mind how a technological tool could be misused (plenty of similar examples by Steiner). I'm sure some people will use GA-trained LLMs to attack anthroposophy, if they haven't already. Aside from that, I think the worst misuses of an LLM would be naively believing it's capable of thinking or of being conscious, using it for generating synthetic pseudo-judgements, and treating it as an authoritative source.

I've been thinking about this subject myself, and I believe the following passage is relevant to your questions (I was reading the lecture just yesterday).

"Now the remarkable thing is that in our time we have two parallel currents: one that rushes downward into decay, and one that ascends to future prosperity. The one that is hurtling downward into decay has not yet arrived in decay. At the same time, it is from this that great discoveries will emerge, discoveries that still have a tremendous future. This, too, has its beneficial effects. Certainly, humanity will long continue to benefit from what is nevertheless heading toward decay. [...]

We can see this [transition] in all areas. [The area of monetary transactions] changed considerably in the 19th century. A tremendous upheaval took place. If you follow the immediately preceding period, before the last third of the 19th century, you will see that all monetary speculation was tied to individuality, to personality. It was the purely financial-speculative genius of the Rothschilds that brought money everywhere and brought it back to and from the monetary centers. And if we follow the history of the major banking houses, we have examples everywhere of how monetary transactions proceeded entirely out of human nature, based on the consciousness soul, on the individual human being. That has changed. It's just that people aren't talking about it much yet, because it's still in its early stages. Today, the consciousness soul no longer rules exclusively in monetary transactions; today something of a kind of abstraction prevails: share capital, society, association, that which is supra-personal.

[...] What people have worked into the circulation of money already functions without personality, it already functions of its own accord. Here, in a descending current, you have the encroachment of the consciousness soul upon the spirit self.

Here we have it in the current of decline; and we have it in the current of ascending life where we seek what the individual, capable personality has accomplished, where we seek to gain, through inspiration, the help of those powers who will give us inspiration again from the spiritual world. There, too, we ascend from the personal to the supra-personal. Thus, with regard to both the currents of decline and the currents of ascendance, there are common characteristics for the ages." (1911-01-05-GA127)

Great quote on this subject, thank you for sharing.

It reminds me of a book by Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine called “What Technology Wants”. Kelly observed that technology exhibits an inherent directionality, an unfolding tendency toward, greater connectivity and greater autonomy. The book was written in 2010 and we can see that even since then this trend has not only continued but accelerated with the latest advent of autonomous AI agents. Steiner’s example of money also follows this trend over 100 years later to our current financial system which is completely interconnected and autonomous to the point where even if you just put your money in a ‘simple’ bank account, its lent out, collateralized, securitized and sent all around the world instantly without your full knowledge or even consent: Money “functions without personality”.

I think “two parallel currents” is exactly how we should think of technology. This is reflected on the view of two philosophers of the 20th century that wrote about technology Jacques Ellul and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In “The Technological Society” by Ellul, he identified technology as an impulse driven primarily by "absolute efficiency in every field of human activity”. For him, technology evolved autonomously, beyond moral, social, or political control and technological progress prioritizes efficiency over all other values (e.g., justice, beauty, tradition). Each new technique leads to further techniques (technical proliferation) and society becomes dependent on continued technical advancement to solve problems created by earlier innovations. This leads to the marginalization of non-technical forms of knowledge or ethics. Ultimately human freedom is constrained by the systemic logic of technical advancement. Decision-making becomes the domain of experts and systems, reducing individual or democratic agency and technology redefines human behavior, goals, and perceptions without reflection or resistance.

This dystopian vision of technology is contrasted with the view of technology as an enabler of human development by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest, in “The Phenomenon of Man”. Teilhard’s main view was that the cosmos evolves toward increasing complexity and consciousness, culminating in a final unification point he calls the Omega Point. Humanity, through thought and technology, plays a central role in this process. Chardin envisioned a sphere of collective human thought encircling the planet, analogous to the atmosphere, that he coined the ‘noosphere’. The noosphere is a reflection of collective human consciousness and a product of increasing human interaction and communication. The noosphere continues to grow in complexity and consciousness and eventually reaches a point of unity, the Omega Point or Christ. It is both the end-goal and the attractor guiding evolution. Chardin viewed technology as a natural extension of evolution, facilitating the noosphere’s development. Technological and cultural advances are integral to the movement toward the Omega Point (Christ) and this convergence leads toward global unity and spiritual unification.

A third “philosophy” of technology that I think is relevant is represented by Ray Kurzweil’s “*The Singularity Is Near*”. Kurzweil posits that humanity is approaching a technological singularity—a point where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, leading to an exponential explosion of progress that will irreversibly transform civilization. Kurzweil has a utopian view that technology will eventually transcend biology through genetic engineering, nanotechnology and ‘artificial consciousness’ and mind uploading. Death will become optional through radical life extension, nanomedicine, and digital consciousness and human identity will persist through software-based minds.

My framework here is to view these three views as the Ahrimanic (Ellul), Luciferic (Kurzweil) and the Michaelic (Chardin) aspects of technology. Understanding that Chardin’s view is rooted in materialistic concepts, the overall theme is to strike a balance between the Ahrimanic and Luciferic aspects and temptations of technology. Ultimately all of these visions unfold simultaneously: technology will continue its cold march towards efficiency and control of all aspects of human life, some people will attempt to use technology to become a god and others will use it as best they can in service of humanity’s proper evolutionary goals.