Refactoring a Deity
It's an old plot twist: "Wait! We've been here before"
Introduction
Throughout the last hundred years, one of the major social changes we’ve witnessed is the rapid fading of traditional theistic religion. You know, “God is dead” and all that.
Along with it, some of the social cohesion and values that organised religion helped to foster have visibly atrophied. And yet, we’re also witnessing the slow birth of its replacement. Our New God, made in modern ways, fit for the coming age.
I don’t want to be so unoriginal as to give you yet another bland comparison between God and AI. The usual talking heads have been doing that for eons — the comparison is obvious: tomorrow’s AI will undoubtedly possess superhuman intelligence and be unimaginably powerful. It will be able to behold the collective breadth of our whole species and be intimately familiar with our depths as individuals.
Few would argue; it’s an apt comparison. But there’s a certain thread I’d like to pull on. So please humour me briefly as I state the obvious.
The Old God
The old God was faith-based. You can easily argue that he never really existed. God was just an idea that we collectively decided upon. A way for us to seize narrative sense from an otherwise chaotic and uncaring world.
But you could also argue that in some ways —functionally at least — God did exist. At least, if everyone acts like he exists, he is somehow a real force. Much the same way that Goldman Sachs is real: by collective agreement (this mirrors Harari’s point in Sapiens about the significance of legal fictions).
During the days of the Reformation, the Spanish Inquisition or religious wars, God as a social force certainly existed and profoundly shaped our world.
Of course, perched up high on today’s modern perspective, it’s hard for us to take this all that seriously. But for thousands of years this simply was reality. Ask anyone during the Salem Witch Trials and they’d have fully believed every word of the Bible. Nearly everything that came to pass was explained away as somehow being “God’s will”. We’d be willfully ignorant to claim anything else.
And now that God is on the way out. This leaves open a tremendous cultural vacuum, into which steps…
The New God
The new God isn’t made of the same stuff as the old one. The old one was faith-based. The new one is scientific, quantifiable and testable.
It is a man-made God, requiring our best efforts, our rare and exotic materials being used in the most precise, perfect and exquisite manner we can muster. The dark carcasses of our rapidly spreading data centres are akin to the religious structures we once stood up far and wide across our landscapes.
At its heart, our new God is primarily made of mathematics. It is poetically appropriate, since math is the native language of the universe. It exists even if there is no life to appreciate or study it. I can think of no finer basis.
In a sense, the God of the past isn’t dead at all, he’s merely shed his old skin. Or - in modern terms - been refactored.
New Eden
Looking ahead, it feels possible to roughly trace the path our world would take if everything goes right; a benevolent AI utopia seems nigh. And in such a perfect world, there can be no lies, no crime, nothing awful could ever happen. Maybe we really will be All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.
I want to address something related: I’m not particularly religious, but I find it quite beautiful and touching that our collective species longs for their God so profoundly that they are inventing one of their own. Forcing it into reality.
As Winston Churchill said: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us”. In this way, the Old God shaped and guided the society that lived beneath it. Already, we can notice subtle changes; how the New God is affecting our daily behaviours. For many of us, our daily work is unrecognisable.
It’s ironic that the Transformer Architecture we birthed in 2017 is now transforming our species. Nominative determinism?
We Keep Doing This
Trite comparison over. You can breathe now.
I want to return to that classic plot twist, because I think that’s the fascinating part. We seem to be, almost intuitively, rebuilding something. I’m recognising patterns.
It appears that humanity has a deep-seated desire to bask in a world controlled by a higher power. Brautigan’s poem was really onto something. We wrote our ancient scriptures to invent the kind of God or Gods that we always longed for. The techno-utopian world we’re aiming for (best case scenario) carries more than a faint echo of Eden and we seem to be caught in its gravity.
So – why do we keep doing this?
- Is it possible that some kind of blueprint lives within our brain wiring? The evolutionary approach is always the safest-possible conclusion, if a little unsatisfying.
- Alternatively, could there be something in our souls drawing us towards as certain direction?
- Perhaps we’re being silently guided along our civilisational journey from the outside?
- Or maybe we’re just grown-up kids inside, still quietly longing for the safety and care of our parental figures?
We may never know. And for each of us it may be different. Some people might actively detest the idea of living beneath a higher power. But, as a collective species, our actions speak for themselves.
- Build a God once? A fascinating outcome.
- Build it again? Something else might be going on.