AI Gods

When I went to the men’s retreat in my church, we were asked to talk about something that was our god. You’re supposed to say something like money, alcohol, your car, yourself. But I was thinking about AI. And it dawned on me that AI was perhaps my god. The Christians say if you find something to be your god, it’s that thing that you put in place of God. It’s what you think about day in and day out. And for anyone working in tech, AI is really our god. It’s what we sacrifice to, even if it costs us our jobs.

Every job has this quality where if you do a good enough job, you’re no longer needed. You make yourself irrelevant. And everyone handles this a little differently. But what happens when someone else makes you less relevant? Besides worship, AI-provoked despondency is another side. So you put years of your life into a skill, sacrificing time with family and friends. But someone out there was smarter and more diligent and ended up replacing you before you could replace yourself. Suddenly, whole classes of jobs are up for grabs. If AI could generate math proofs, what’s to stop any 12-year-old from generating them if they just had the budget to do it? It might soon be possible, and same with anyone over 12 with a curious question.

This moment is interesting because I will go from interested and excited to feeling like nothing I do matters, or at least nothing will matter. Anyone looking at the trajectory sees this. I remember going into the Sacramento Public Library and reading about Kurzweil’s predictions in one of his books. At 2023, AI was supposed to outstrip human intelligence. I imagined what it would be like to build a truly intelligent machine. At the time it was just a curiosity, and I eventually forgot about it.

And now it’s 2026 and heaven itself is roaring down to do every task for us. We don’t need men, the feminists are telling us. In heaven, you don’t need work, and therefore you don’t need men. In the future there are only relationships. If you sacrificed towards anything else, you will find out soon, in a way you can’t rationalize away. People are more important than things.

We have Stockholm syndrome with work and toil, ever since Genesis: “cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life… In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” And now that heaven is knocking, we sometimes cannot bear to hear it because we don’t know what it means for us to have our chains finally lifted. Maybe it’s a trap, like every other technological advance. We imagine that it will free us, but down we go into deeper enslavement to toil.

Revelation 21:4: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

Hebrews 4:9–10: “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his.”

Matthew 11:28: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

There are two kinds of interpretations of the future that Christians debate. One is effectively the “heaven on earth” view. Or, technology will save us. The other is the view that heaven and earth will pass away and we wait for death for spiritual heaven to come. Technology will not cure our souls, and will enable greater evils. “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18).

Regardless of which view you hold, I believe that emptiness is going to drive many to the old religions to try to piece together some life meaning that isn’t fleeting. You could read them as ancient science fiction, because they also make predictions, and you could even argue that Kurzweil is a kind of prophet. He spoke into the void, and few heard him. And those that did were “saved.” But the other interpretation would be that this kind of materialistic view is also fleeting and another form of trap. The only heaven is spiritual.

There’s actually a third view, and it’s the rationalist one. There’s no God, or at least it’s not useful to imagine or behave as if one exists. It’s hard to find, but it exists. Scott Alexander thinks religions’ predictions leave too much room for interpretation, and sets out to prove it with his Antichrist lecture: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-antichrist-lecture. Very few people have seen this, but if you suspend just a tiny bit of disbelief, and allow yourself to accept his narrative tentatively, it’s quite good. His explanations fit Revelation.

But let’s imagine a world where all the manual work is done by machines. We could end up like WALL-E. Maybe we’ll all be psychologists, and we’ll dig deep into each other’s minds. In this regard, some of the people in my church are quite interesting, the old guys have had storied lives. One is a former sheriff who dealt with all kinds of people. Another was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and worked in a mental hospital.

The mind is a difficult thing to unravel. In Gary’s case, there was a girl who would brutally hit herself. Many of the people in his ward were like this. They had a name for it, SIBs (self-injurious behaviors). And the thinking was that they would self-harm as a way to get attention. This sounds insane, but it turned out it was true, because when these people learned of less violent ways to get attention, they improved. And I think about how I will “self-harm.” Maybe we let ourselves go, or maybe hang out too much with others, or something else — anything to get attention. We want someone to tell us, but in the kindest way, that they simultaneously love us in spite of our faults and that they will walk with us to make life better.

What this all practically comes down to for me is that AI is not going to get my daughter to bed on time. I’ve tried.

Now that musical chairs is playing, and all the chairs are opening up, we get a chance to step back and think about whether or not we enjoy what we do, and in what ways we could help those around us. Importance of mental and spiritual health will only grow.

ha-satan in Hebrew means “the accuser.” Someone is making you feel like everyone either deserves a better life, or that you are destined to stay where you are. The charm of the Bible is not that it has facts for you to memorize, or that it’s “true” in a way that should cause us to teach it along with Physics and Biology. But the value of it is it teaches us that the victims are not doomed. “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” Most people don’t have an issue with these things. We do take issue with religion telling us who we should sleep with, and under what circumstances. Both of these things are in the same book.

The rationalist view also comes with consequences for those adhering to it. The rationalists value the high decouplers. They are not squeamish and are willing to ask questions that would get you thrown out of most places. And so it appears that if you were to side with one or another, you would naturally want to piecemeal what you want to accept, likely based on personal convictions, and social norms. In short, there’s plenty to talk about.

If you like this post, please visit the Friends Church and the rationalists if you’re in Sacramento to have these conversations. The church people are somehow some of the friendliest people I’ve met even though they are cursed with a denomination called “Friends.” There is no one person dominating the church. Everyone has a role, and people are gracious to each other. And the rationalists in Sacramento are ironically the reason I stopped reading rationalist blogs. Collectively, they knew more about these things than I ever could, and I discovered them out of despair because I didn’t know anyone who was thinking about the things I was interested in.