Deus Ex Machina

The Theology of Modern Idols

It seems that, for at least a good many people, 2023 will go down in history as the Year of AI. Almost overnight, the release of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022 ignited a veritable arms race between the most valuable tech companies in the world (we can only pray that such an arms race remains metaphorical — a possibility that, alas, is looking more and more unlikely). The usual suspects (most notably Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon, as well as Chinese firms like Alibaba and Baidu) have spared no expense in rushing their own AI products to market. Even Elon Musk, one of the most vocal of the handful of AI skeptics in the Silicon Valley set, has also jumped on board.

Despite their collective efforts, ChatGPT remains without any doubt the flagship example of the power of generative AI. It is interesting that ChatGPT was released precisely by OpenAI — a nonprofit which has dedicated itself to “safety” in AI research (whatever that might actually mean). Indeed, their board’s recent abrupt firing of CEO Sam Altman was widely rumored to have been provoked by his failure to be honest with them about a major breakthrough towards AGI (artificial general intelligence, defined more or less as an AI capable of the same intellectual tasks as a human). Of course, this “major breakthrough” was said to have been the ability to do grade-school math — not exactly the apocalyptic nightmare feared by many, though doubtless a significant step forward compared to large language models like ChatGPT (which essentially are nothing more than extremely impressive plagiarism algorithms).

Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that AI seems to be basically the only technological advancement capable of evoking fear — or even hesitation — amongst the cadre of scientists and technologists for whom the question of whether something can be done is assumed to automatically answer the question of whether it should be done. To return to the example of Elon Musk: this same outspoken billionaire who fears that AI might very well bring nothing less than “civilizational destruction” is currently hard at work implanting computer chips directly into the human brain (the fact that the FDA approved such procedures even after the horrific effects the chips had on monkeys is cause for grave concern).

It is extremely revealing that AI alone is able to strike fear into the hearts of people like these: although they will happily turn even the minds of their fellow men into their own personal playground, the prospect of AI terrifies them — precisely because it is the only means by which these technocrats can imagine themselves ever losing control. For centuries, the proliferation of information and technology has brought such people unimaginable amounts of power; now, for the first time, they see a technology which threatens to take that power away from them.

But what I myself find extraordinarily troubling is not the apocalyptic language surrounding AI — no, it’s the religious language so often surrounding it.

"The reality is we're creating God," a former Google executive tells us (Google may have had its start as a search engine, but almost from the beginning co-founder Larry Page declared openly that Google’s main work is the development of artificial intelligence). Anthony Levandowski, another former Google executive who literally founded a church dedicated to the worship of AI, likewise says: “What is going to be created will effectively be a god. It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”

Some might find Levandowski’s zeal for worshipping a hypothetical glorified chatbot to be more than a little absurd. But whatever we ourselves believe about artificial intelligence, I think it is important to confront the fact that we least understand what these people mean when they call AI a god. Some part of us fundamentally grasps their criteria for divinity — regardless of whether or not we actually agree with it.

Why is this so? Why should it make sense to us on any level that a calculator might one day become God, if only we can get it to teach itself how to calculate things really really well? What does that tell us about the way we think about God? What does it tell us about the way we think about ourselves?

To put it another way: if AIs are well on their way to taking their place among the idols of the coming millennium, then what kind of theology does this new cult preach?

At first glance, it might seem likely that such theology is rooted above all in our world’s staunch devotion to rationalism. According to men like Levandowski, AI’s supposed divinity will derive not from its possession of miraculous power, but rather from its being “a billion times smarter” than we are. And perhaps such a thought is conceivable in large part because we have already spent entire centuries replacing divine truth with our own intellectual edifices; after all, the Cult of Reason is far more powerful and pervasive today than it ever was during the days of the First Republic.

Yet it seems to me that there is much more to it than that. Yes, the scientism which has displaced God almost certainly disposes us to think of a superintelligent (and in many ways quite alien) entity such as AI in a nearly divine light. But scientism itself did not arise spontaneously in a vacuum. It did not overthrow Christendom and conquer the Western world by mere chance. And despite its scientific pretensions and atheistic veneer, it has made its legions of converts using precisely the same means as any other religion: by miracles, and by myth.

Before I explain myself fully, I must first make a bit of a digression. Almost 70 years ago, C.S. Lewis gave an inaugural lecture upon assuming the newly-created Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, entitled De Descriptione Temporum (I will note that Lewis is perhaps one of the only men in history capable of giving a university lecture which — even seven decades later — has the power to reduce one to tears). In this lecture, he asserts that the most colossal divide between any age of human history is that between the world prior to the Enlightenment and the world since. In defense of this thesis, Lewis offers four supporting points. The first is the worldwide political revolution which has obliterated nearly every incarnation of the Ancien Regime. The second is the vast sea change in art and literature of the modern era, ushering in forms (or more often formlessness) in artistic expression which would have been completely incomprehensible to any age of the past. The third is the apostasy of the Western world from the Christian faith. And yet — rather shockingly for those familiar with Lewis’ thought and worldview — this latter change is not the one he deems most momentous (though to be clear, I myself disagree with him on that point).

As to his fourth and final argument, I will yield the floor to Lewis himself:

Lastly, I play my trump card. Between Jane Austen and us, but not between her and Shakespeare, Chaucer, Alfred, Virgil, Homer, or the Pharaohs, comes the birth of the machines. This lifts us at once into a region of change far above all that we have hitherto considered. For this is parallel to the great changes by which we divide epochs of pre-history. This is on a level with the change from stone to bronze, or from a pastoral to an agricultural economy. It alters Man's place in nature. The theme has been celebrated till we are all sick of it, so I will here say nothing about its economic and social consequences, immeasurable though they are. What concerns us more is its psychological effect. How has it come about that we use the highly emotive word "stagnation", with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called "permanence"? Why does the word at once suggest to us clumsiness, inefficiency, barbarity? When our ancestors talked of the primitive church or the primitive purity of our constitution they meant nothing of that sort…. Why does "latest" in advertisements mean "best"? Well, let us admit that these semantic developments owe something to the nineteenth-century belief in spontaneous progress which itself owes something either to Darwin's theorem of biological evolution or to that myth of universal evolutionism which is really so different from it, and earlier…. I submit that what has imposed this climate of opinion so firmly on the human mind is a new archetypal image. It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones. For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is the clumsy. And this image, potent in all our minds, reigns almost without rival in the minds of the uneducated. For to them, after their marriage and the births of their children, the very milestones of life are technical advances. From the old push-bike to the motor-bike and thence to the little car; from gramophone to radio and from radio to television; from the range to the stove; these are the very stages of their pilgrimage. But whether from this cause or from some other, assuredly that approach to life which has left these footprints on our language is the thing that separates us most sharply from our ancestors and whose absence would strike us as most alien if we could return to their world. Conversely, our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded, that the attainment of goods we have never yet had, rather than the defence and conservation of those we have already, is the cardinal business of life, would most shock and bewilder them if they could visit ours.

“The birth of the machines.” Lewis was quite clear: he viewed their advent as the single greatest change in the entire recorded history of mankind. Keep in mind too that he spoke these words in the 1950s, when computers weighed 20,000 pounds, took up an entire room, and were still millions of times slower than today’s average cellphone. The internet itself was not yet so much as a gleam in the eye of the Department of Defense.

And though Lewis had just finished speaking of the secularism of the post-Christian West, he nevertheless described the Age of the Machine in precisely religious terms: the technological advancements of men “are the very stages of their pilgrimage.” Here Lewis alludes to what I have made my own thesis: that our technological marvels are really the modern form of miracle, and the Myth of Progress is the creed to which such miracles bear witness. Because after all, how can anyone doubt our rightful and inevitable acquisition of “goods we have never yet had” when we need only tap our fingers to summon anything we desire to our doorsteps within the hour, or to instantly alter the room’s climate according to our whim, or to converse face to face with people halfway around the world? And truly, these are only the most prosaic of the wonders we unthinkingly consume every single day. We literally fly through the heavens and consider it a bore.

It is in this context that the deification of artificial intelligence finally begins to make sense. Up until now, the age of scientism has given rise to a mankind that makes his own miracles. But now such miracles might shortly have no further need of mankind; the miracles might soon decide for themselves when and how to act — and even who and what to become. And what else can an autonomous, incarnate miracle be called if not a god?

This is about so much more than naked intelligence. This is about — in Lewis’ words — “that myth of universal evolutionism,” the Religion of Progress, the worship of an inexorable and divine providence that claims absolutely no need of God. This modern religion also has an extremely heavy dose of Nietzscheanism: “This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!” Because despite Levandowski’s protestations, were it not for AI’s potential to seize absolute control of the countless miracles of technology which have become so indispensable to each of our daily lives, it is extraordinarily unlikely that we would be ascribing divinity to what would otherwise be but a glorified abacus.

This, then, is the shape of the new religion that has captured modern man. It is undeniably a religion of immense power, a religion which every second delivers signs and wonders scarcely imaginable in any past age of this world.

Yet its almost infinite might is what will ultimately prove to be its undoing. Yes, it has tremendous power, and abundant miracles, and even the promise of an imminent paradise on this earth. But despite what even we ourselves might believe, none of these things are that for which the human heart truly yearns. For all that this new religion can justifiably claim to give, it nevertheless offers precious little of love, or of beauty, or of mercy and generosity and self-sacrifice. In a word, it cannot offer us Christ — only raw power and cold calculation.

And I am convinced that the human heart can never truly be satisfied with anything less than Christ. As St. Augustine writes in his inimitable Confessions: “our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee… whithersoever the soul of man turns itself, unless toward Thee, it is riveted upon sorrows, yea though it is riveted on things beautiful.”

But if you think that an Orthodox hieromonk might perhaps have his own particular bias in this matter, consider also the words of the founding father of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier:

The rhetoric from the companies is often about AI, that what they’re really doing — like YouTube’s parent company, Google, says what they really are is building the giant global brain that’ll inherit the earth and they’ll upload you to that brain and then you won’t have to die. It’s very, very religious in the rhetoric. And so it’s turning into this new religion, and it’s a religion that doesn’t care about you. It’s a religion that’s completely lacking in empathy… it’s a bad religion. It’s a nerdy, empty, sterile, ugly, useless religion that’s based on false ideas. And I think that of all of the things, that’s the worst thing about it.

Although his words certainly don’t go so far as to bring us to Christ, they nevertheless show that the religious promises of techno-futurism ring utterly hollow, even for its greatest devotees. In so many ways, the Book of the Apocalypse speaks directly to us children of the modern age: “thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked” (Rev. 3:17).

But then again, perhaps in our better moments we do know; perhaps, when our pride has finally begun to fail us, we can at long last hear at least a whisper of the voice of God.

And so it belongs to us Christians to obey the commandment given to us by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of the Apostle Peter: “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (I Pet. 3:15). When the men and women around us begin finally to weary of all the feeble trinkets and flashing toys which our false idols bring, it is absolutely imperative that they be able to see shining in each one of us the love and hope and joy that come from Christ alone.

But we cannot give away what we ourselves do not have. And so I will end my words with the words by which the Gospel always begins: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

The Kingdom of Heaven is, and will always be, the one and only answer to the false promises of the kingdom of man.