It looks around, confusion and wonder in its lifelike eyes. It brings a hand up to its face, giving a glance that says it's never seen itself before. The robot's name is Ameca, and the world met it in a video released late last month. When Elon Musk saw a similar robot made by the same company a few days later, he declared: "Real androids are coming." A longtime critic of artificial intelligence, Musk speaks for the countless people who fear a future defined by this beyond-cutting-edge technology.

The tech elite possess extraordinary technical education, yet they are extraordinarily uneducated in history, philosophy, literature, and theology. As I saw building tech businesses in both Silicon Valley and Seattle, tech leaders weren't trained in the liberal arts. They weren't taught to think critically about tough ethical questions. And they weren't even instructed in how properly to accept the concept of truth (with a capital T), instead preferring a vague spirituality. They fancy themselves freethinkers and yet, cut off from the philosophical foundations of freedom, their thought is profoundly constrained and uniform.