The Small God of AI

It is something of a commonplace to recognize that people are talking about AI in religious terms. Sam Altman, of OpenAI, famously said that entrepreneurs don’t want to start companies — they want to start religions. And so, they might, but let’s not mistake the religions of AI (or Disney or Oprah, or anything else for that matter) with something like a transcendent being or supernatural entity. While the AI hype-machine is great at churning out overblown prose about the power of AI to work really hard in ways that humans would rather not work, they are notably under-blown in their conceptualizations of God.

If the idea is a machine that can answer any question and synthesize new ideas is “God,” I’m afraid that pales in comparison to some of the most basic theological constructs in Judaism (I can’t speak for others). I should say, off the bat, that I’m not a theologian. Or, at least, I’m not more of a theologian than your average person on the street. I’m not worried about evil or even whether or not God exists. In Judaism, at least, belief is not a precondition for religious practice, so I’ll begin where that begins: with practice.

If I take just the ideas from the morning liturgy as examples, there are loads that consider a deity or a higher power, or a force that is, in a very basic way, far more than a person can imagine. Take, as one example, the text of this meditation:

Were our mouths filled with song as the sea, and our tongues with melody as the multitude of its waves, and our lips with praise as the expanses of the firmament, and our eyes shining like the sun and the moon, and our hands spread like the eagles of the sky, and our feet swift as the hinds — we would still not suffice to thank You … and to bless Your name.

I’m always impressed when Claude performs some function in minutes that it would have taken me hours to do, or when ChatGPT can answer some weird question about which I have only the sketchiest sense of the right answer. Frankly, I love it. But do I feel that I could not sing the praises of Claude wholly or fully even if I could harness the depths of the seas or the light of celestial bodies? Hardly. My ancient forebears, who wrote this text presumably to try and express their sense of the ineffable, captured something more here than just the appreciation of something that had all the answers.

Again, I’m not a theologian — or at least I’m not more of a theologian than anyone else — but I’m pretty sure that’s the whole point: that whatever deity one engages with is or ought to be waaaay more than an answer machine. There has to be more to God than just knowing lots of stuff.

If you believe that AI has crossed some human rubicon and become God, I think you’re underestimating God. And not in a smitey, fire and brimstone way, either. But in a way that seems to me to be essential to the meaning of being human and trying to figure out what we’re all doing here and what it all means (whatever it might be). God seemed to be the name (or one of the names) for part of that logic and it seems equally capable of inducing wonder, fear, awe, terror, rhapsody, beauty, exasperation, tears, and joy. When my computer provokes some of these feelings from me, it might seem like magic, but it’s not mysterious. Or, at least, it does not invite me into the mystery of existence and the cosmos.

Talk of AI-as-God often seems to shrink those cosmos down into a set of results, a compelling-ish narrative or some answers to a question. This is all incredibly useful in a utilitarian kind of way. But God? Not quite. The humans’ version of AI as God seems to me to be incredibly small, theologically speaking.