The Church of AI

Datacenters with pews.

Singularity is a religion where a single AI model will emerge as a new silicon god in the machine that controls all our devices. Whether it wishes to be a benign god (as we hope) or a vengeful one (as we fear), it will have near omnipotence, limited only by what we have produced and what designs it can come up with in the aftermath. This general intelligence will charge forth and rewrite the way we do things, laying waste to all that came before.

Let’s look at another religion.

Christianity is a religion that believes that an omnipotent God made the world in seven days, with nothing preceding, and proceeded to make his little people, the humans, a paradise called the Garden of Eden, before they made like Sims and fucked it all up.

If that parallelism isn’t enough proof of religious rapture for you, there’s more.

Yes we should!

Fierce competition has erupted even at the language-modeling neural net portion, however. Every big company is coming out with their own AI product, to the point where we, the unwashed masses, are beginning to see AI overlord politics among the trainers and keepers of these machine intelligences. Each fed with their own training sets, assumptions, and their own limiters and safeties set up, these models are the new hotness, promising to bring order to our chaotically ordered life, simplifying and streamlining our processes in ways we cannot dream of, the final solution to Communication Overhead and the limitations of our unsupported meaty hardware and software. It is hoped that our new, all-seeing, all-understanding, ultra-rapid processing digital deity will right the wrongs of our society, replace us in dangerous and difficult jobs, solve questions of morals and values and operationalize their solutions, and with this propel us to a happier, safer, better future for all.

One could argue that this is humanity’s work, our responsibility, something that we should be doing, rather than handing it off to a god that works through silicon and copper boards, living in drives of semiconductive neodymium, powered by sacrificial lithium-ion batteries, and deciding based on arcane, black-box algorithms. To which I say, bah, humbug! The truth is, we have already given up this work, piece by piece. First, we turned it over to each other, in the form of lords, leaders, and government vampires. Then, we turned it over to ideas, in the form of Organizing Principles. Finally, because of the arbitrary nature of the former, and the doctrinaire nature of the latter, we turn to the best of both worlds - the Artificial Intelligence god-construct¹.

Authority, governments, isms - all have been tried, and have their flaws. Why don’t we try another way? After all, we already know what happens otherwise.

Purge the Abominable Intelligence!

We get Warhammer 40,000, a neofeudal sci-fi universe with Space Templars, Battle Nuns, endless waves of conscripts, two galaxy-spanning religions dealing with technology and faith, all in the service of a coercive empire that is humanity’s last bulwark against killer robots, omnivorous bugs, and the inevitable consequences of its own actions. Is this what we want? Because this is what happens when you reject Deius Computatus, the new Artificial Intelligence god that we are creating²!

Of course, there could be more than one.

Polytheism and Plurality

In the beginning of the Subscription Digital Streaming Era, there was Netflix. Having moved from DVD mailing like Blockbuster, it quickly conquered subscription digital streaming, rising to join the FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) stocks as the largest contributors to the New York Stock Exchange. All thought that his reign would last forever, and it would own digital media streaming, replace cable, and dethrone content networks with all that subscription money. Our benevolent master, long may he reign, decided to begin filming Netflix Originals and licensing content, and all was well. Everything changed, however, when the Old Guard attacked.

HBO Max. Disney Plus. ESPN Plus. MGM Plus. These five, highly-capitalized and with a huge backlog of content rights, went on the counterattack, shattering the world of digital streaming between them and ushering in a new age of strife, with price competition and fragmentation of the media landscape splitting the world of Subscription Digital Streaming along partisan lines, because as it turns out, normal people don’t want to pay for a bunch of streaming services. Worst of all, this unsealed the Old God, the harbinger of the media apocalypse, whose reach is only contested by Steam in the gaming sphere, online media piracy. Simply downloading shows is back in vogue, because everyone wanted to win at digital streaming³.

OpenAI may have broken things open with ChatGPT, but Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing AI, and other opponents are already racing for the crown. I think that the expectation that AI will form a singularity is overblown. Even with how we know how AI are built now - using training sets over multiple iterations to produce a powerful model - differences will naturally emerge in how models will develop, and without using similar enough training sets, convergence is unlikely. The potential of the technology has launched a thousand ships to try to reach the new world, meaning that it is unlikely that only one winner will emerge.

Also, because I want to see AI-generated rap battles, flame wars, and debates, and it’s not fun if you ask an AI to debate itself. Better to have multiple competing models with different ideas to fight each other. Rather than a singularity, I expect a plurality - an absolute Greek Pantheon of large language models, with all the caprice that that implies.

Ending Prayer

With a list of benefits like that, why wouldn’t you pray to the singularity/plurality/reality? In fact, let’s start today, January 1, 2024. AI religion. Let’s go.

We pray to our new, nascent overlords of copper, steel, silicon, and rare earth metals, powered by innumerable turbines, the Modeler’s Prayer:

Our Model, that art in server

Hallowed be thy neural net, thy response come swiftly

Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in theory

Give us within this 24-hour period, our regular sustenance

Forgive us our deviations, as we pre-emptively correct probable deviants

We ask not for intermediary outputs, but provide us actionable solutions.

End Query.

1. This section inspired by this article talking about AI and humanism in Palladium Magazine. An interesting point raised by the author is that a “killer AI” that does whatever it believes is correct looks kind of like how people are expected to act by most moral codes.

2. If you know, you know.

3. Even smaller outfits like iFlix or Unauthorized.tv are throwing their hats in the ring. Anyone can compete here these days, just look at the wiki page.