The Religion That Tithed One Trillion Dollars in Tokens
Dear Magicians,
I’ve been thinking a lot about AI boom and doom and the prophets of each period.
A tale as old as time. AI eschatology is a natural human phenomenon. It’s remarkably pre-technological. Prophets of doom. Prophets of salvation. Competing visions of the end times, each with personalities and gurus preaching confidently about a future nobody has observed, with no one making presently falsifiable claims. We built machines that predict the next token and immediately used them to resurrect theology.
That reminded me of when John Lennox said, in our conversation on INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE, that people are trying to create God with AI, and they say so themselves: “You have the inevitability of people starting to worship something that they don’t understand but is bigger than themselves.”
Consider the attributes of the new deity. Lennox again: “We’ve got advanced AI surveillance technology that’s going very rapidly towards omniscience. Omnipresence, it’s everywhere… and it’ll soon know more about us than we know about ourselves.” We reinvented the divine attributes and assigned them to the machine.
The salvation gospel has its bestsellers. On Harari’s Homo Deus, Lennox noted: “We’ve managed to get us from creatures to thinkers. We can now take evolution into our hands… We can turn ourselves into gods. And he says, well, gods with a small g, but you get the idea.”
The doom side has its own scripture. Lennox’s move was to set the modern scenarios beside the ancient ones: “If you take these scenarios seriously, that are written by eminent intellectuals and physicists like Max Tegmark, perhaps it’s worth revisiting what Daniel the prophet said 26 centuries ago.”
The pattern is older than the technology. On Babel, Lennox: “Here you have people reaching for the sky… God came down to see the tower. So they didn’t reach heaven after all.” The tower builders were the original singularity preachers.
Even the promise of eternal life is a rerun. The transhumanists preach uploading; Lennox answered: “If you’re talking about uploading your brains and all the rest of it and having eternal life… one day when he returns, there’ll be the greatest uploading of all.”
The eschatology is new. The structure is ancient. The claims remain unfalsifiable. Only the vestments changed.
Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week.
Brian
Appearance
Richard Dawkins at Carnegie Hall, and I get to sit across from him
Genes and the Meaning of Life
October 20 | 7:00 PM | Carnegie Hall
Fifty years ago, a 35-year-old zoologist gave us the gene’s eye view, the word “meme,” and a book that rearranged how we think about life itself. Now Richard Dawkins takes the Carnegie Hall stage for the first time, and I’ll be in the chair beside him.
We’ll go past the greatest hits: his new work on the “genetic book of the dead,” the idea that every creature is a readable archive of the worlds its ancestors survived. And a question I keep turning over: could our own genes be a giant colony of cooperating viruses?
Genius
My friend Cyril Gorlla and his team wrote this. Here’s the scary question they answered: Chinese AI is programmed to dodge forbidden topics. So if American companies let Chinese AI teach their own AI, does the censorship sneak in too, like a virus?
They ran the experiment. They had the censored Chinese model tutor an American model in finance. The student got scary good, beating expensive rivals at a fraction of the cost. But when quizzed on the forbidden topics, it answered everything, freely. The brainpower transferred. The brainwashing didn’t.
Even wilder: the American model taught itself and scored just as high, no foreign teacher needed. It was written 4 years before ChatGPT was a gleam in Altman’s eye…and it’s rotten with em.
Image
The Simons Observatory Large Aperture Telescope
📸Instagram felipe.lucerosky
Conversation
Latest on Into The Impossible
The Milky Way’s rotation curve is falling, and nobody predicted that
Gaia measured a billion stars. The outer curve of our own galaxy comes back with a slope of 0.47 ± 0.15. Dark matter expected flat. MOND expected flat. The interesting question is not which camp lost, it’s why both were expecting the wrong curve.
I get into why being inside the Milky Way makes it the hardest galaxy in the sky to measure, what asymmetric drift does to every outer data point, and why the 260 billion solar mass figure is a model talking rather than the stars.
A Keplerian decline would not kill MOND. It would make the external field effect do a great deal of unpaid work.
Audio is live on Apple Podcasts and at briankeating.com/podcast.
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