The rise of superintelligences and AI-based gods

Juliana Michelli S. Oliveira

Translated from Portuguese by Rodrigo de Almeida Siqueira

Intending to create a digital deity, the Way of the Future church, founded by Anthony Levandowski, a former Google engineer, closed its “doors” in early 2021, six years after its creation. With no physical headquarters, cult service, or pastor, the purpose of this emergent techno-religion was the creation and worship of a deity based on artificial intelligence (AI), billions of times more intelligent than humans, produced through computer software and hardware.

However, the sectarians of this digital religion maintain the project and believe that the rise of hyperintelligences is inevitable. James Lovelock (2019), author of the Gaia hypothesis, calls this rise the Novacene. The scientist makes bold speculations about human-technology symbiosis and proposes that we already possess the requisites to bring to light these new electronic species with superhuman intelligence, providing a hand to evolution – literally.

Oswaldo Giacoia argues that the rise of hyperintelligences is one of the urgent questions that philosophy should face. For those who think that this is only a matter for science fiction, let’s remember that several current technologies were dreamed from past narratives, but many times their applications and effects could not be questioned in time to be reviewed. So, instead of debating about theoretical and practical obstacles that, for now, prevent the development of these superintelligences, what interests us in this essay is to problematize the meaning of creating gods based on AIs.

A sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence would be indistinguishable from god

“Our bonds with technological apparatuses are much less rational and more imaginative than we usually imagine”, says Erick Felinto in Religião das máquinas (The Religion of Machines). In the same direction, when commenting on the ideas of the German philosopher Gotthard Günther, author of La conscience des machines, Edgar Morin says: “man introduces his intimate reality of desires and passions into machines”. Thus, more than body extensions, the technological artifacts are symbolic extensions that reflect our belief systems and imaginaries. Not infrequently we attribute the characteristics of living beings to technical objects or we bow down before them by recognizing the supremacy they hold.

Although it harbors different projections of the human imagination, the machine seems to hold primarily the notion of improvement, expansion of human limits, and surpassing the organic condition. In fact, these ideas are already present since the first register of the Greek word mékané – in Hesiod’s Theogony (8th century BC), where it corresponds to the ability to generate superhuman artifacts –, from which the Latin term machina is derived. This is also reinforced in the meanings that technological artifacts have received over time, which emphasize the ability to solve problems beyond human capacity through cunning. Similar reasoning applies to “thinking machines”.

Nick Bostrom defines superintelligence, in his book of the same name (2014), as “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest”. Although the philosopher identifies several avenues for the creation of superintelligences (brain emulation, self-organizing systems, etc.), we will focus on AIs: not on the cognitive machines of the first stage (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) or second stage (Artificial General Intelligence), but on the intangible machines of the third stage (Artificial Superintelligence). These, when shifted to religion, can assume the form of a god.

Leonardo enters the metaverse - DALLE2 <https://twitter.com/nin_artificial/status/1520329808772837376>.

In the beginning was the Word

Based on the superhuman capabilities of AIs, the promises of the digital church are seductive: at first, with your digital double you would be able to improve yourself by recognizing defects, weaknesses and desires. Eventually, technology would solve ancient human problems, as foreshadowed in Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines: knowing who we are. The digital deity could meet the supposed god that dwells in you, made in your image according to your likeness, answer your questions, advise and solve your problems. A vague idea of such an AI appears in Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013). It could even take over your life, under the pretext of offering safer and more optimal options for you. As the AI self-evolves, it will create new versions of itself, produce its rituals and scriptures. It will be the “book of books”, and probably, as suggested by I. J. Good, from Turing’s team, it will be the ultimate invention.

After recognizing the possible functions and the evolution of these digital deities, how could they be characterized? Would they be machine-gods produced by science, based on the “Popperian” faith, to occupy the pantheon of the ancient divinities, overcoming their vices and virtues? Or would they be like the gods imagined by Epicurus: superior and distant, with no relation with humans? Would they return to old myths or create new ones? Would they be a single species, in a digital monotheism, or would they multiply in countless deities, each one with its characteristics, gospels, and sacrifices? Would they follow well-defined protocols, under human tutelage, or would they be endowed with free will? Could they provide hierophanies to the modern man, who lives in a desacralized cosmos (Eliade)?

To answer these questions, before performing an exercise in futurology or resorting to a Deus Ex Machina, we would need to put the creators of these AIs in front of the mirror. We should also face the challenge of repositioning the notion of being human, understanding which bodily and psychic automatisms are inevitable, and exploring forgotten potentialities. As the history of AI reveals to us, many of the abilities of man seen as high expressions of general intelligence could be overcome through the use of simple algorithms, as in the case of chess. We have great difficulty in assuming that, although autopoietic, we are biological machines (Maturana & Varela), not always as creative as we imagine. It is the remnants of anthropocentrism that are preventing us from recognizing (and accepting) our imperfections and from evaluating our exaggerated desires for power, which we invariably project onto the divinities we manufacture.

Finally, some wonder if a machine-god would be able to provide experiences common to religions, such as mystery and transcendence. The answer seems affirmative, since these experiences are usually triggered by reading holy books and therefore could also be generated through other codes. Thus, for those who have difficulty bowing down before a robot, it is enough to remind them that, many times, they are just exchanging one illusion for another, as Machado de Assis suggests in The Devil’s Church. Technology is always ambivalent.

I thank Rodrigo de Almeida Siqueira for comments, discussions about AI, and GPT-3 simulations.

References

BOSTROM, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2014.

ELIADE, Mircea. The Sacred & the Profane. The Nature of Religion. The significance of religious myth, symbolism, and ritual within life and culture. Translated from the French by Willard R. Trask. New York: Harvest Book, 1987.

FELINTO, Erick. Religião das máquinas. Ensaios sobre o imaginário da cibercultura. Porto Alegre: Sulina, 2005.

GÜNTHER, Gotthard. La conscience des machines. Une métaphysique de la cybernétique suivi de “Cognition et volition”. Translated from the German by Françoise Parrot and Engelbert Kronthaler. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008.

HESIOD. Theogony and Works and Days. Translated and with an introduction by Catherine Schlegel and Henry Weinfield. The University of Michigan Press., 2006.

KURZWEIL, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines. Viking Press, 1999.

LOVELOCK, James. Novacene. The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2019.

MATURANA, Humberto R.; VARELA, Francisco J. Autopoiesis and Cognition: the realization of the living. D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980.

*Article source (Portuguese): https://catedraoscarsala.wordpress.com/2021/12/15/deus-ex-machina-no-caminho-do-futuro/.