Rutger Bregman on Fighting For Humanity In the Age of the Machine

“Here's my warning to Silicon Valley … I think you're awakening a dragon. Public anger is stirring, and it could grow into a movement as fierce and unstoppable as the temperance crusade a century ago.”    –Rutger Bregman, 2025 Reith Lecturer

Every year since 1948, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) has invited leading thinkers to explore some of the most pressing moral, political, and intellectual questions of their era. Named for the BBC’s first director-general, Lord John Reith, the Reith Lectures have since aimed to “inform, educate, and entertain” by engaging listeners in rigorous discussions about the world’s most urgent challenges. Lectures by luminaries such as Bertrand Russell, Robert Oppenheimer, Margaret Mead, Carl Sagan, and Oliver Sacks have encouraged audiences to challenge deep-rooted assumptions and imagine a better future.

In 2025, that mission brought Dutch historian and writer Rutger Bregman to Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business to deliver the final lecture of his four-part series, Moral Revolution. The event, co-hosted by the Corporations and Society Initiative (CASI) on November 11, drew students, faculty, and community members from the Stanford campus and beyond.

BBC host Anita Anand opened the program by noting that in his previous lectures, Bregman had sharply criticized political elites for their decadence and lack of seriousness. Now, she said, he would turn his attention to Big Tech.

“Is Big Tech threatening the very essence of what it means to be human?” she asked.

In the midst of Silicon Valley and its tech giants such as Apple, Meta, and Nvidia, Bregman addressed the deep question that would frame his lecture: what does it mean to fight for humanity in an age of machines?

Bregman began with a memory from his teenage years. When he was 15, he sat hunched over a Pentium 4 computer, convinced he had uncovered a philosophical bombshell. Free will, he concluded, could not possibly exist. Every decision was simply the inevitable result of genetics, upbringing, and circumstance, a collision of forces far outside his control. The realization staggered him and left him feeling that the moral framework he’d grown up with had suddenly dissolved.

“It was like standing on the edge of a cliff and realizing the ground beneath me had always been an illusion.”

The crisis only deepened when, at 18, he discovered Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Raised as the son of a pastor, Bregman had always believed in a purposeful narrative behind human existence.

“But how was I supposed to square that with evolution, with millions of years of endless suffering, of life devouring life?”

One morning he awoke with an unsettling clarity: Bregman no longer believed in God or religion. What followed did not feel like liberation, he told the audience, but like “falling out of a story.”

At Utrecht university, Bregman studied history and encountered a new set of thinkers. Most influential was Dutch philosopher Herman Philipse, who emphasized the moral obligation of intellectual honesty. Prompted by Philipse’s challenge to choose an “intellectual hero,” Bregman went searching, and discovered British philosopher, mathematician and public intellectual Bertrand Russell. Russell’s combination of analytical rigor, moral conviction, and activism captivated Bregman, from his pacifism during World War I to his fight against nuclear weapons. Even the controversies that dogged Russell, including a New York court declaring him “morally unfit to teach,” only reinforced Bregman’s admiration for Russell’s independence.

What resonated most deeply was Russell’s humanity. Bregman noted that Russell had wrestled with the same crises of faith and questions about free will that had once shaken Bregman, yet Russell emerged with a renewed commitment to honesty and compassion.

“His intellectual advice was to see the world as it really is, not how you'd like to see it. And his moral advice was to tolerate our differences. Or, in his words, love is wise, hatred is foolish.”

For Bregman, Russell offered a model for how to build a life of meaning. Russell’s life, he suggested, was proof of a different kind of immortality: not through divine promise or technological fantasy, but through the act of shaping one’s life into something that endures.

Bregman admitted to the audience that when the BBC first invited him to speak, he had never heard of the Reith Lectures. Learning that Bertrand Russell had inaugurated the series in 1948 left him both surprised and humbled.

“Of course, I had a massive case of imposter syndrome,” he said.

Looking back on Russell’s time, Bregman described how the philosopher had spoken just after World War II, when the atomic bomb gave humanity the ability to destroy itself. Russell, he said, stood at a hinge point in history, questioning what humanity had become and what it might yet choose to be.

“We too, are living at such a moment,” Bregman declared. “Wars are breaking out. Democracy is faltering, and once again, a revolutionary technology is threatening our very existence.”

For the first time in history, he said, we are building machines that may rival or even surpass our intelligence. “The stakes could hardly be higher.”

Bregman then shifted to a broader concern: how to face this era without the comfort of religion. Ever since losing his own faith as a teenager, he explained, he has returned to the same core questions that religions attempt to answer: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? How should we live? And what, if anything, is sacred? Bregman said his books, Utopia for Realists, Humankind, and Moral Ambition, are his attempts to find in history the guidance others seek in theology.

He suggested that the crisis he once experienced privately is now unfolding across society. Traditional sources of meaning such as faith, community, and a shared moral framework are weakening, leaving many people cynical and profoundly disappointed by their leaders.

 “We are a culture adrift,” he said, searching for meaning but largely finding distraction.

That search for meaning, he noted, has connected all four of his lectures. In his first lecture, Bregman diagnosed a moral decay in which dishonesty rises and integrity fades. The second lecture explored how past moral pioneers from the abolition  (anti-slavery), women’s suffrage, and the civil rights movements forged new paths, and the third translated their lessons into a plan for today. This final lecture, he concluded, would step back for a wider perspective, providing “a God’s-eye view” to consider the larger human story in an age of machines.

Bregman noted that Silicon Valley, where companies are “summoning a godlike intelligence” is a fitting place to revisit the five enduring questions of religion. He opened with the first, Who are we? Although he had long regarded evolution as a grim story, his research for his first book, Humankind, revealed a more optimistic truth. Humanity’s greatest advantage, he argued, is not dominance or brainpower but cooperation, what scientists call “survival of the friendliest.”

For the second question, Where did we come from? Bregman noted that for most of human history, people lived as egalitarian hunter-gatherers, with little evidence of warfare before agriculture. The farming era, he said, brought hierarchy, conflict, and oppression, a shift the scientist, historian and author Jared Diamond famously called “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”  The Industrial Revolution eventually lifted people out of subsistence yet also thrust humanity into a period of exponential growth that left “apes with godlike powers” reshaping the planet.

Turning to the question, Where are we going? he warned that the rise of AI may become a new “mistake in the history of the human race.” Big Tech’s first wave has weakened literacy, mental health, and social connection; the next, he argued, may amplify these harms as we race to build systems we struggle to understand or control. What social media promised as connection has instead delivered isolation, outrage, and what Bregman called “the survival of the shameless.”

The fourth question, How should we live? led him to a moral revolution he hadn’t yet discussed: the temperance movement. In the 19th century, he explained, alcohol was a social catastrophe with no guardrails placed around advertising or access. Saloons consumed wages, fueled violence, and devastated families. Women and workers, seeing addiction as a loss of agency, led one of the largest democratic movements in history. They valiantly fought for measures ranging from taxation to outright prohibition. Bregman suggested that today’s attention-hijacking technologies exploit a different type of addiction, and like alcohol, involves loss of agency and creates harm. AI threatens to supercharge it all. He issued a stark warning to Silicon Valley.

“I think you're awakening a dragon. Public anger is stirring, and it could grow into a movement as fierce and unstoppable as the temperance crusade a century ago.”

Bregman noted public surveys showing people in the West think AI will worsen almost everything they care about, from our health and relationships to our jobs and democracies.

“By a 3 to 1 margin, People want more regulation. History shows how this movement could be ignited by a small group of citizens and how powerful it could become,” he said. “Just as Bertrand Russell led mass protests against the nuclear arms race, we may soon see mass resistance to the AI arms race.”

Finally, Bregman asked “What is sacred?” He argued that the answer lies not in religion but in our shared humanity. Love, knowledge, compassion, friendship, art, nature, and attention itself, these, he said, are the things worth defending at this hinge moment in history.

In closing, Bregman acknowledged that he has long since lost interest in debates about belief versus unbelief. “What matters, I think, is not what people believe. But what they do.”

He pointed to the fight against slavery as a model. Progress depended on a movement powered by both religious compassion and Enlightenment ideals, which is proof that moral revolutions occur when people unite across worldviews to defend what they hold sacred.

Bregman ended by outlining the “secular religion” that had emerged from his reflections on history: when we look at others, we should see the histories and that shape them and respond with understanding; when we look at ourselves, we should recognize our own agency and responsibility to act.

“So let us throw ourselves fully into the task. We know it will not be easy. The future holds no guarantees, no certainty that our species will endure or that our story will end well. But that has always been the human condition.”

Bregman claimed that even without certainty of success, there is beauty in the attempt, in showing courage and in making the effort to live fully. We may not build monuments of stone that last forever, he concluded, but we can build “monuments in time.”

Bregman’s lecture left the audience with a final challenge: the future cannot be delegated to machines or to the companies that build them. It must be shaped by the choices people make now, and whether our moral courage can keep pace with technological power.