Only a God will save us… some reflections on the enormity of AI

Greek dystopia

The Greeks understood, profoundly, the philosophy of technology. In Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, when Zeus hands Prometheus the power of metallurgy, writing and mathematics, he gifts it to man, so Zeus punishes him, with eternal torture. This warning is the first dystopian view of technology in Western culture. Mary Shelley called Frankenstein ‘A Modern Prometheus’ and Hollywood has delivered for a nearly a century on that dystopian vision. Art has largely been wary and critical of technology.

Yet we may not be thinking deeply enough about what AI brings. For all the chat about its power, we need to see it as a technological event that eclipses the invention of stone tools, writing, printing and the internet. It may be the culmination of all of these, as it already promises physical tools as robots, multimodal capabilities beyond the world of text, global dialogue with an another intelligence at any time from any place on anything in any language. It seems to transcend other technologies, with implications beyond past technologies into future unknowns. These are a few reflections on these unknowns.

God as maker

But there was another more considered view of technology in ancient Greece. Plato articulated the philosophy of technology, seeing the world, in Timaeus, as the work of an ‘Artisan’, the universe as a created entity, a technology. Aristotle makes the brilliant observation in his Physics, that technology not only mimics nature but continues “what nature cannot bring to a finish”. They set in train an idea that the universe was made and that there was a maker, the universe as a technological creation.

Monotheism rose on the back of cultures in the fertile crescent of the Middle East, who literally lived on the fruits of their tool-aided labour. The spade, the plough and the scythe gave them time to reflect. Interestingly our first written records, on that beautifully permanent piece of technology, the clay tablet, are largely the accounts of agricultural produce and exchange. The rise of writing and efficient alphabets made writing the technology of various forms of capitalism and control, holding everything to account, even our sins. The great religious books shaped us for Millenia, and still do.

The two-thousand year history of Western culture after the Greeks bought into the myth of the universe as a piece of created technology. As we entered the age of industrial design and production, Paley formulated it as a modern argument for the existence of God from design, using technological imagery, the watch, to specify and prove the existence of a designed universe and therefore a designer - we call (him) God. In Natural Theology; or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, he uses an argument from analogy to compare the workings of a watch with the observed movements of the planets in the solar system to conclude that it shows signs of design and that there must be a designer. God as watchmaker, technologist, has been the dominant, popular, philosophical belief for two millennia. 

Technology, in this sense, helped generate this metaphysical deity. It is this binary separation of the subject from the object that allows us to create new realms, heaven and earth, which gets a moral patina and becomes good and evil, heaven and hell. The machinations of the pastoral heaven and fiery foundry that is hell revealed the dystopian vision of the Greeks and continues in the more exaggerated form of Promethean, doomster AI ethics.

Technology is the manifestation of human conceptualisation and action, as it creates objects that enhance human powers, first physical then psychological. With the first hand-held axes, we turned natural materials to our own ends. With such tools we could hunt, expand and thrive, then control the energy from felled trees to create metals and forge even more powerful tools. Tools beget tools. 

Technology slew God

Technology may have suggested, then created God, but in the end it slew him. With Copernicus, who drew upon technology-generated data, we found ourselves at some distance from the centre of the Universe, not even at the centre of our own little whirl of planets. Darwin then destroyed the last conceit, that we were unique and created in the eyes of a God. We were the product of the blind watchmaker, a mechanical, double-helix process, not a maker, reduced to mere accidents of genetic generation, the sons not of Gods but genetic mistakes. Dawkins titled his book The Blind Watchmaker as an evolutionary counterpoint to Paley.

We have now resurrected a modern form of animism with AI and software, that we first used to our ends but then realised that we ourselves are animistic beings, driven by software in our brains. The separation of us from the natural world is no longer viable. Human exceptionalism was wounded by Copernicus and Darwin, now killed dead by AI.

Anchors lost, we are adrift, but we humans are a cunning species. We not only make things up, we make things and make things happen.

We are makers

Once God was dead, in the Nietzschean sense of a conceptual death, we were left with ourselves and technology. We got our solace not from being created forms but by creating our own forms. We became little Gods and began to create our own universe. We abandoned the fields for factories and designed machines that could do the work of many men. What we learned was scale. We scaled agricultural production through technology in the agricultural revolution, scaled factory production in the industrial revolution, scaled mass production in the consumer revolution. Then more machines to take us to far-off places – the seaside, another country, the moon. We now scale the very thing that created this technology, ourselves. We alchemists of AI have learned to scale our own brains.

Small Gods

Eventually we realised that even we, as creators, could make machines that could know and think on our behalf. God had died but Little Gods are emerging. We may return to that pre-agricultural age, as hunters and gatherers, hunting for meaning, gathering ideas and enthusiasms and making new worlds for ourselves. In an age of an abundance we, once more, will have to reflect on the brief folly of 9-5 work and learn to accept that was never our fate, only an aberration. Technology now literally shapes our conception of place and space. With film, radio, TV and the web but we spiders may have got entangled in our own created web and the danger is that it begins to spin us.

Technology is not now a ‘black box’, something separate from us. It has shaped our evolution, shaped our progress, shaped out thinking - it will shape our future. Forget the simplistic ‘it’s about people not technology’ trope. There has always been a complex dialectic between our species and technology, that dialectic has suddenly got a lot more complex with AI. That dialogue has just got very real, as with the invention of writing, then printing, the sum total of human cultural knowledge was gathered and used to train LLMs, small Gods. We now engage in dialogue with these small Gods. We are speaking to a created small God - US.

Only a God can save us

As Martin Heidegger said in his famous Spiegel interview, “Only a God can save us”. What I think this commentator on being, technology and the human condition meant, was that technology has become something greater than us, something we now find difficult to even see, as its hand has become ever more subterranean and invisible. It is vital that we reflect on technology, not as a ‘thing-in-itself’, separate from us, but as part of us. Now that we know there may be no maker God, no omnipotent technologist, we have to face up to our own future as makers. For that we need to turn to philosophy – Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche and Heidegger are a good start….

The postscript is that AI may, in the end, be the way forward even in philosophy. In the same way that the brain has limits on its ability to play chess or GO, it may also have limits on the application of reason and logic. Philosophical problems themselves may need the power of AI to find solutions to these intractable problems. AI may be the God that saves us....