The Singularity – Further Annotations

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Other scholars recognise elements of theism in the discourse around AI and its potential impact on our future. Robert Geraci suggests in his 2010 book, Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality, that AI can fulfil the same role in apocalyptic imaginings as a singular theistic god. Bearing in mind that the biblical apocalypse is an optimistic cosmic transformation, he also draws out parallels with the aims of AI, which often describe hopeful aspirations for a world-yet-to-come, an AI eschatology. In an early part of this particular work, Geraci draws on Rudolph Otto’s 1917 description of god as mysterium tremendum et fascinans (Otto 1917), using it to identify a type of awe-inspiring and fearsome being that at different times in our history can be a god, or in our contemporary modern world, AI. Elsewhere, Geraci’s work has engaged with virtual worlds, drawing attention to the role of transhumanists, including Giulio Prisco, discussed below, in claiming new potential spaces to practice and evolve religion towards transhumanist ends. In such spaces, including Second Life and the World of Warcraft (the MMORPG-a massively multiplayer online role-playing game), Geraci argues a step closer to the fulfilment of transhumanist salvation is being made- “a heavenly realm to inhabit” (Geraci 2014 177). Twitter is another virtual space, but one dominated by discourse rather than aesthetics and virtual embodiment like Second Life and World of Warcraft. However, this article proposes that the expressions of religious metaphor, parody, and tropes on Twitter as in the BBtA tweets represent continuities of theism, continuities enabled by new technological spaces as well as uncertainties about the nature and the volition of ‘the algorithm’.

However, the ‘AI fits into the god-space’ argument can be in danger of supporting a rather strict version of the Secularisation Thesis, and this idea’s historical veracity has been debated by anthropologists and sociologists of religion (see Ward and Hoelzl 2008). This article, and connected research, seeks to add to this debate in by drawing attention to continuities of religiosity and enchantment in super-agential concepts of AI and AI NRMs. Second, this god-space argument can suggest that religion is spurred on by ‘need’ only, a pathology interpretation of religion that ignores other elements of religious inspiration and innovation such as desire, culture, aesthetics, and, often in the online environment, affective virality.

Theistic interpretations of AI do undeniably owe a lot to older cultural conceptions of a singular god. Randall Reed pares this kind of god down to three theological characteristics (with long historical and philosophical roots) that often map easily onto our conceptions of AI superintelligences. These are omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence (Reed 2018, 7). Reed also raises the question of omnibenevolence. He notes that AI philosophers such as Nick Bostrom of the Future of Humanity Institute have focussed on the issues of malevolence through “perverse instantiation”, a failure of value alignment leading to unforeseen damage from a superintelligent AI, such as in Bostrom’s famous Paperclip Maximiser thought experiment (Bostrom 2003). Bostrom’s Orthogonality Thesis from his 2012 paper ‘Superintelligent Will’ is also relevant; the argument that intelligence is not intrinsically linked to ‘goodness’, and that an AI could have any number of combination of degrees of both characteristics (Bostrom 2012).

– “Blessed by the algorithm”: Theistic conceptions of artificial intelligence in online discourse by Beth Singler

‘It is the theme of black magic through which Goethe’s Faust is linked, in almost a sixteenth-century fashion, with Goethe’s morality of knowledge. What, we may well ask, can black magic mean to Goethe’s sophisticated mind? The black magic of Faust is the poetically fantastic rendering of Goethe’s belief that evil arises from any knowing and doing of man that is in excess of his “being.” Man aspiring to a freedom of the mind fatally beyond the grasp of his “Concrete imagination,” seeking power over life through actions that overreach the reaches of his soul, acquiring a virtuosity inappropriately superior to his “virtue” – this was Goethe’s idea of hubris, his divination of the meaning of black magic. Absolute activity, activity unrestrained by the condition of humanity, he once said, leads to bankruptcy, and “everything that sets our mind free without giving us mastery over ourselves is pernicious.” He saw something spiritually mischievous, something akin to black magic, in every form of knowledge or technique that “unnaturally” raises mans’ power above the substance of his being. In his Faust black magic almost always works the perverse miracle of such “de-substantiation.” Whether Faust conjures up the very spirit of Nature and Life, the Erdgeist, only to realize in distracted impotence that he cannot endure him; whether the body politic is being corrupted by insubstantial paper assuming the credit that would only be due to substantial gold; whether Homunculus, a synthetic midget of great intellectual alacrity, is produced in the laboratory’s test tube, a brain more splendidly equipped for thinking than the brains that have thought it out: the creature capable of enslaving his creators; or whether Faust begets with Helena, magically called back from her mythological past, the ethereal child Euphorion, who, not made for life on earth, is undone by his yearning for sublimity – throughout the adventures of his Faust, Goethe’s imagination is fascinated, entralled, and terrified by the spectacle of man’s mind rising above the reality of his being and destroying it in such dark transcendence. This, then, is black magic for Goethe: the awful art that cultivates the disparity between knowledge and being, power and substance, virtuosity and character; the abysmal craft bringing forth the machinery of fabrication and destruction that passed understanding.’ – Erich Heller, “Faust’s Damnation” in The Artist’s Journey into the Interior and Other Essays.

[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, and goodreads.]

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