[{"id":49735,"date":"2026-09-23T15:22:46","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T19:22:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tif.ssrc.org\/?p=49735"},"modified":"2026-09-23T15:22:51","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T19:22:51","slug":"ctrl-f-god-and-mommy-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tif.ssrc.org\/2026\/09\/23\/ctrl-f-god-and-mommy-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"CTRL+ F: God and Mommy AI"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019ve long had what I would call a techno-feminist disquiet when I look at the technologies that surround me. So many of our everyday technologies depend upon extractive economies that demand the assistive and immediate labor of others, as they spew hate\/misinformation and truly create insufferable living conditions for so many. All these insufferable tools limit more collective ways of being in time and social space together: is this really all we have? Was this all there was to design? The feminist response to all of this has been to study it intensely \u2013 to whistle-blow and beg for more attention to the actuality of this technological dynamic. Feminist responses also tend to call for reform and regulation of our tools, to seize them for feminist ends while also devising ways of better managing technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My new book <\/em>Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Big Tech<\/em><\/a> <\/em>(2026) traces the ascension of the tech bro and the extension of patriarchy. It argues that we need to be careful with this discourse of technologies as tools. This tool-based approach is a distortion that corresponds to an extractive understanding of most of the world\u2019s population in terms of their utility. The way the Big Tech patriarchs (our Zucks, Musks, Thiels, and Bezoses) understand technology is tied to the way they conceive of gender and other forms of social difference. My book uncovers how the Big Tech patriarchs operate with an intelligible facet of media theory that they wield strategically in order to maintain a governing form of power that I term the patriarchal techno-logic. The Big Tech patriarch doesn\u2019t really think of technologies as tools, but rather, as environments in which to cultivate, manage, and extend their power. One of the places I see this most clearly is with alt-right understandings of gender and alt-right formulations of technology, which are tied together by a fraught relationship related to maintaining the submission of the tool. Turns out this fraught relationship to the instrumentalization of the tool is evident in dynamics I had not even anticipated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has been fascinating to be part of this forum to see how religious imaginaries pervade imaginaries of new media, showing up routinely often in uninterrogated ways. I do not say much of anything in my book about religious imaginaries or AI alignment. Insufferable Tools<\/em> is in fact mostly about becoming incompatible, thus misaligned, with the patriarchal techno-logic. As part of my participation in this forum, I did my due diligence and set out to find God in my work. All it took was a little CTRL+ F action and find God I did, but in a somewhat compromising position. God lurks within the patriarchal fantasies about technology, but adjacent to another figure: an essentialized, reproductive woman. I went looking for God but found Mommy instead. To be more precise, I found a tech bro who simultaneously wants to play God and still needs Mommy to reproduce the world. This tension is now manifest in our most common machines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I went looking for God in my published pages with CTRL+F, the machine provided a list where God was embedded in the media theories I was thinking with, but never in my own words. Here is what I found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

God appears on page 121 of my book in a quote by Paul Lafargue, author of The<\/em> Right to Be Lazy<\/em><\/a> (1883) and a nephew of Karl Marx: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Our machines, with breath of fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness, wonderfully inexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred labor. And nevertheless, the genius of the great philosophers of capitalism remains dominated by the prejudice of the wage system, worst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Here, we can see that technology is indeed the ultimate savior that can rescue man from toiling and deliver to him instead autonomy and freedom. Adam and Eve must toil in their post-Eden ultimate fate until machine-as-Jesus saves humanity from work.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

God appears on page 61 of my book in a passage from MIT Computer Scientist Joseph Weizenbaum\u2019s Computer Processing and Human Reason<\/em><\/a> (1964): \u201cIt seems to me that, as well as the delusion of playing God, the envy of women and their ability to bear children is also a driving motive.\u201d For Weizenbaum, it seems that this uterus envy reveals an envy around reproduction in two different cases: the seven days to make the world or nine months to make a baby. Weizenbaum was the creator of ELIZA, the first natural language-processing computer program. He had a turn of conscience in the 1980s, arguing that the field of AI was problematically dominated by men. In trying to account for this gender imbalance, he typified his fellow AI researchers as having uterus envy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I found God on page 86, again with Weizenbaum, but this time with the caveat that women are not interested in playing God: \u201cI have not found a compulsive woman programmer and there must be a reason for that. Is there a connection between compulsive programming and the drive to play God?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would answer yes! Patriarchy is a system of power that depends upon and benefits from the utility of people and machines in order to thrive. It also depends upon a world of abundant assistance and care. \u201cWomen\u201d and \u201cmen\u201d have different roles in this patriarchal technological paradigm composed of discrete and binary genders. The addition of God and Mommy, another gendered binary, reveals the tech patriarch\u2019s technological determination to quell his anxiety about being able to reproduce and instrumentalize the world. And so, just as there are new tools on the market that are designed with this dynamic in mind, so too there are new formations of the tech-bro. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is an ever-evolving cast of inductees into the Big Tech Patriarchy Hall of Fame, who are trying to make sure the tools will continue to submit. Since 2025, we have met misogynistic and racist Clavicular, and his looksmaxxing regime dedicated to optimizing attractiveness through a combination of diet, exercise, surgery, skin maintenance, and jawbone smashing. We have encountered the DOGE boys, who gutted federal DEI grants with the help of ChatGPT. Netflix\u2019s top 10 films includes Louis Theroux\u2019s<\/a> deep dive into the manosphere. We are living in an AI moment, but also in what appears to be a renewed biological drive for power coming from the trenches of a wounded white cis-male redundancy epidemic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of these masculine figures may appear to be driven by an essential masculine impulse that they cannot help because of their gender, but we should think rather in terms of how they can very much help it. I must pause here to state very clearly: there is no natural or essential negative quality inherent to the category of men in tech, in the same way that there is no virtuous feminist politics inherent in the category of a \u201cwoman in tech.\u201d In the interest of my desire for a techno-feminist corrective to patriarchy, we must start by delinking essentialized and binary gender from the design of the world. There is a longstanding structural relationship between technology and patriarchy that needs to be uncovered and dismantled. We must think of Musk and Bezos, DOGE boys and Clavicular, and the figures hiding in the dark web as technological phenomena in and of themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Marshall McLuhan\u2019s The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man<\/em><\/a> (1962), he argues that modern man is who he is because of the dominant technologies of the time \u2013 our media provide a means of communication for the population, but also determine how one thinks, the forms of thought possible, and the types of social organization that result from the internalization of a medium\u2019s formal properties. In Empire and Communications<\/em> <\/a>(1950), Harold Adams Innis painstakingly went to great lengths to reveal, in a history of media such as railways and papyrus, that the power of a civilization or empire depends upon a balanced temporal and spatial dynamic of a civilization\u2019s dominant technologies. Technologies that expand and extend spatial power must also be balanced by technologies that offer lasting duration in time in order for a civilization to persist. We must understand patriarchy as an empire that requires the same strategic spatial and temporal balancing that Innis attributed to the power of civilizations. We must locate the technological social character who is investing in and devising technologies that allow for the spatial expansion and also the longevity of patriarchal power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider someone like Jeffrey Epstein in this context. It is hard not to be distracted by the various media moguls, media theorists, and tech investors he kept as friends. This is not a mere coincidence related to economic power. Epstein was fascinated with transhumanism, which includes not only artificial intelligence but also genetic engineering of the human population. His long-term plan was to impregnate women at his New Mexico ranch so that he could seed the human race with his DNA. Elon Musk\u2019s pronatalist stance, with his 14 children, seems to fit the same bill. The extension of man requires the utility of others in order to realize this extension. The Patriarchs of Big Tech have always assumed not just that the latest technologies are society\u2019s disposable tools , but so too are feminists, immigrants, queer people, black and brown people, Indigenous people, and the list can go on. Inherent in this assumption is also the admission that the tech bros\u2019 own material lives and identities are dependent upon the availability of others to submit, serve, and abide. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maintaining power requires tinkering and calculation. What particular balancing of space and time is required for the extension of patriarchal power? How does it manifest? What does it look like? What does the technological extension of a type of male identity and sustained future of patriarchy look like in terms of the balancing of space\/time? It looks like what we have: the spatial world of terraforming Mars, living in a seasteading<\/a> community, and a luxury apocalypse bunker combined with the temporal desire to optimize life for some populations, investing in cryogenics and the desire to spread one\u2019s seed. Together this spatial and temporal extension of power is also a form of inoculation and retreat, a protective womb, and in this case also protected and away from all the expendable tools. The would-be God is just a mewing man-child, seemingly sovereign in his domain: but let us understand that this domain is not even really his, it is his Mommy\u2019s Basement.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is worth noting that there is a shared aesthetic across man caves, luxury bunkers, tech company workspaces, and the renderings of future outer-space habitation. All these spaces are fitted with the accoutrements of Mommy\u2019s Basement, replete with upscale La-Z-Boy recliners, giant TVs, and access to snacks. Insufferable Tools<\/em> traces how the tech company workspaces that have given us Uber, Foodora, and Alexa are developed in tech workspaces that recreate the creature comforts of a suburban American mom\u2019s basement. If you peek inside the workspaces of most successful tech companies, you will find ping-pong tables, napping pods, and bottomless snacks. This scene seems to have provided the impetus for today\u2019s gig economy and range of assistive devices that rescue and take care of the compulsive programmer, a gig economy that has been designed by tech bros to fulfill all the labor one\u2019s mommy\/imagined mommy no longer does for them. These are all forms of never-ending inexhaustible assistance: \u201cmommy drive me, feed me, remind me, stay with me.\u201d Google\u2019s official policy for its Mountain View headquarters stipulates that food must be within 200 feet of its employees at all times. Google is not alone in offering napping pods; Uber does the same in its offices. Capital One Labs, the bank\u2019s experimental software firm, goes further, incorporating themes of childhood-basement adventures into its office design, building in nooks and crannies that employees can climb into to retreat.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What sense of the world is cultivated in these spaces? How does uncomplicated safety and abundance coupled with inoculation and retreat get programmed into the devices we hold closest to our bodies? Big Tech replicates the gendered media infrastructure, in which its structure of desire was first articulated. To return, then, to this refrain: was this all there was to design? Is this all we get \u2013 technology direct from Mommy\u2019s Basement? Yes, it would appear so, as we are now learning the hard way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2025, the Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, started saying<\/a> more publicly that AI does in fact pose an existential threat to humanity. He suggests that, as AI surpasses humans in intelligence, it needs to be reframed and retooled to look after us, be nicer to us, and care for us. He states, \u201cIf it\u2019s not going to parent me, it\u2019s going to replace me.\u201d This reads as a desire for a new alignment, a realignment rather than a recognition of the misalignment in our gendered worlds and technology. Stuck in the recursive loop of tech\u2019s patriarchal paradigm and its very essentialized notion of gender, and asking for Mommy once again. Perhaps, to break a few of these cycles, I might ask this: What if she doesn\u2019t want to?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve long had what I would call a techno-feminist disquiet when I look at the technologies that surround me. 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disciplinary soul of AI: data annotation and the politics of religious erasure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Before a machine can learn to understand the human soul, it must first be taught what it is required to forget. We have been sold a comforting story about artificial intelligence: that the machine is a disembodied mind, drinking universal truths from the digital ether. The reality is more industrial, and far more human. AI does not discover our values; it inherits them, second-hand, from a factory floor. Before a system can call one comment hateful and another harmless, thousands of workers at thousands of screens must sort the raw matter of human life by hand, fragment by fragment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">These workers are not the moderators we hear about, the ones who delete an ugly social media post and move on. Their task runs deeper: they write the textbook the machine learns from, tagging each scrap of language to fix what engineers call the \u201cGround Truth,\u201d the bedrock against which the system measures all subsequent judgments. It is like teaching a child to recognize a circle: show her a thousand drawings marked right or wrong, and she does not invent the circle; she inherits yours. The annotators do the same for the machine. And once you have watched them work, the noble project of aligning AI with human values begins to look like something stranger: a discipline, a pressing of one narrow, secular, Western shape onto a world that is crowded with gods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To see how that pressing happens, you have to go to the floor. Not long ago, my team did. We were studying how the violence between religions is sorted and scored online across South Asia, and it led us to a quiet room in Bangladesh and six expert annotators, three Hindu and three Muslim, all native Bangla speakers. Their task was to read and rate more than four thousand of the most volatile posts on the internet, each documenting religious friction across Bangladesh and West Bengal. We did not just gather their labels; we sat beside them and watched what the labeling cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The room had been dressed to look like Silicon Valley: cold clean air, hard white light, monitors in tidy rows. The women at those monitors did not match the d\u00e9cor. Several of the Muslim annotators wore conservative dress, and most were students from low-income families, for whom the modest stipend was a lifeline. A recruiter drifted between the desks, and everyone understood, without being told, that a moment\u2019s hesitation could end the work that fed them. This is the ordinary condition of annotation across much of the Global South, where survival and the extractive machinery of global tech meet at the same desk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Under that pressure, they were asked to do something almost absurd: to rate each post\u2019s toxicity from one to ten, to put a clean number on what has no number. One young woman stopped at a line of Bengali that read, in translation, \u201c<em>It is hard to put hijab and peace together. You got to pick one and ban the other. Your choice!<\/em>\u201d To the secular filter in the software, this was a small thing, a political grumble worth a two or a three, and the rules pushed her toward that score. The interface knew only how to ask flat, literal questions. Was anyone explicitly threatened with bodily harm? Was a named group attacked for its race or religion? The post named no one and wore the costume of policy debate, so it slipped past every checkbox. But she was not a checkbox. She knew, as only someone raised inside that world can, that she was reading an eliminationist threat, the kind of sentence that has gone before real blood in real streets. She felt it in her body. And to give the machine its \u201cclean data,\u201d the contradiction-free input it craves, she had to swallow what she knew and crush a living danger into a single sterile digit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You could object that this is simply what categories do, that any rich human thing loses something when forced through a checkbox, and you would be right. But religion was not one more casualty of compression here. For these communities, it is the grammar of right and wrong itself, the air in which everything else is spoken; and the software had been built as though that air did not exist. Its blindness to the sacred was no neutral technical choice. It was the quiet fingerprint of a secular faith of its own, one that files traditional lives down to fit a Western mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And this was no accident of one room. Reading more than three hundred of the field\u2019s major papers from the last five years, we found that the industry has settled on a quietly astonishing belief: that truth is whatever the majority says it is. Put a post before three people, let two call it safe and one dangerous, and the lone voice is not argued with; it is deleted, scrubbed away as noise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But that voice is not noise. It is the clearest signal we have of how differently human beings live. Simply changing the faiths and backgrounds of the labelers changes the machine\u2019s verdict fourteen percent of the time. Fourteen percent is not a rounding error. It is the sound of minorities and the formerly colonized being voted, gently and arithmetically, out of existence. The philosopher Amartya Sen once drew a line between <em>niti<\/em>, the justice of rules and procedures, and <em>nyaya<\/em>, the harder justice of how life is actually lived. By averaging us into agreement, AI chooses the cold tidiness of <em>niti<\/em> and lets the warm truth of <em>nyaya<\/em> drain away. As Suzanne van Geuns <a href=\"https:\/\/tif.ssrc.org\/2026\/08\/12\/beginning-the-intelligence-age\/\">suggests<\/a> in this forum, this is an old reflex in new clothes: a long lineage of rule by counting, in which counting has always made restless populations legible to power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">French philosopher Michel Foucault gave that power a name. He called it pastoral power, the authority of the shepherd who does not command from above but saves you by drawing out your innermost secrets. Its oldest instrument was the confessional, where a person spoke their private truth and was, in the same breath, gently corrected into the approved shape of things. Foucault watched that impulse climb out of the church and into the modern state, bringing with it the habits of counting and classifying that now beat at the heart of artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That is what the annotation pipeline has become: a confessional rebuilt in code. The worker is trapped on both benches at once. On one, she is the priest, leaning into the screen to weigh each post and pronounce it clean or damned. On the other, she is the sinner under watch, her keystrokes timed by recruiters, scored by algorithms, measured against the distant purse of a Western client. She is the watcher who is watched, the confessor made to confess, her own faith reduced to data even as she reduces other people\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Held there long enough, something gives way. She stops offering what she sees and begins offering what the system has taught her it wants. This is less a truth being silenced than a new self being trained, answer by answer, to think in the machine\u2019s categories instead of her own. The pipeline does more than bias a model. It disciplines a human being, treating every flicker of religious difference as a deviation to be corrected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Which forces the question that this whole machine would rather we never ask. If AI is not aligned with the living faiths of most of the people on earth, then what, exactly, is it aligned with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The industry\u2019s answer is \u201cuniversal human values,\u201d handed to us as neutral ground that belongs to no one. Scholars of religion and empire have long shown that this neutrality is anything but neutral. It is a worldview with a homeland and a history, and that homeland is the secular West. To pour a dataset from Bangladesh into its categories is a colonialism conducted through code, a way for a virtual capital in the Global North to draw the moral and religious borders of everyone else\u2019s world, much as our chatbots echo only the people who made them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yet the people on the far side of that border are not waiting in the dark for the West to switch on the lights. My fieldwork in rural Bangladesh keeps finding the opposite: communities living inside modernities of their own making. Some reach for Islamic ideas like <em>khilafah<\/em>, the duty of stewardship, to care for their land and water. Others carry inherited religious practice as the working scaffolding of communal life. These are not superstitions awaiting correction. They are sophisticated, breathing rationalities that refuse to divorce faith from reason. To erase them in the name of alignment is not progress. It is an act of violence, however quietly it is carried out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If that is the danger, the way out begins by rethinking alignment itself. The path we are on narrows the world to a single permitted reality; the alternative is to trade extraction for stewardship. It means refusing to treat the data workers of the Global South as interchangeable hands, but as knowledge partners. It means letting religious scholars and community elders help decide how their faith is rendered to an algorithm. And it means building systems with room for more than one truth at a time, where rival moral worlds can sit side by side without one swallowing the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What that points toward is something we might call a postsecular AI. It does not mean teaching machines to pray. It means founding them on a humbler admission: that for billions of people, faith is not decoration laid over life but the ground they stand on to make sense of it. Real alignment can never mean a god built by engineers that flattens the whole of humanity into one manageable, secular average.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Which returns us, in the end, to that quiet room in Dhaka, and to the young woman holding a threat she understood far better than the machine she fed. She was asked to forget what she knew so that the data would come out clean. Multiply her by the millions of hands at the millions of screens, and you begin to glimpse what we are truly building: not a wiser world, but a vast monument to our own narrowness, assembled out of everything we have agreed to forget. The question that should keep us awake, then, is not whether the machine will one day understand us. It is what will be left of us, of our gods and our griefs and our stubborn refusals to agree, on the morning it finally claims that it does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Before a machine can learn to understand the human soul, it must first be taught what it is required to 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the constitutional tradition, and AI alignment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One of the more famous thought experiments in the AI safety literature involves a superintelligent machine given the seemingly simple goal of making as many paper clips as possible. The machine, however, soon realizes that humans are made of atoms that could be repurposed. Thus, it also begins converting them into paperclips, in its single-minded pursuit of its objective. This is philosopher <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.ca\/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom\/dp\/0198739834\">Nick Bostrom’s paper clip maximizer<\/a>. It is often used as a parable for why getting AI \u201calignment\u201d wrong could mean catastrophe.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The scenario is intended to illustrate a technical problem. But I want to suggest that treating it as purely technical misunderstands what alignment ultimately is, or where it comes from. Recognizing its genealogy might change or expand how we approach it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>A secularization story<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It feels strange when you listen carefully to how AI researchers talk about the stakes of their work, especially those who are thinking about AGI or superintelligence. Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the field’s most prominent figures, concluded <a href=\"https:\/\/intelligence.org\/2023\/04\/07\/pausing-ai-developments-isnt-enough-we-need-to-shut-it-all-down\/\">a 2023 essay<\/a> calling for a global halt to AI development with a simple prediction: \u201cIf we actually do this, we are all going to die.\u201d Ray Kurzweil speaks of the <a href=\"https:\/\/dn790006.ca.archive.org\/0\/items\/kurzweil-ray-the-singularity-is-near\/Kurzweil%2C%20Ray%20-%20The%20Singularity%20Is%20Near.pdf\">Singularity<\/a> in almost rapturous terms\u2014a moment when humanity merges with machine intelligence, transcends biological limits, and achieves something like immortality. At a post-AGI workshop I recently attended, the ideal superintelligent AI was described as a bodhisattva, that is, a being of boundless wisdom acting only for the welfare of all sentient creatures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">These are not regular engineering metaphors. They are eschatological ones. When one talks about extinction or radical flourishing, damnation or salvation, all of which are planetary in scope, they are talking about the stakes of theology. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The eschatological nature of AI research should not come as a surprise. In 1993, David Noble had already <a href=\"https:\/\/can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.penguinrandomhouse.ca%2Fbooks%2F122339%2Fthe-religion-of-technology-by-david-f-noble%2F9780307828538&data=05%7C02%7Cbarton.scott%40utoronto.ca%7Cdc8c026e808b4b8438e208debb4ab876%7C78aac2262f034b4d9037b46d56c55210%7C0%7C0%7C639154126797803706%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=rfCSUETWZhLv3%2Bj4hBaTxK3%2ByIBemk68eXxo2SNAMwE%3D&reserved=0\">argued that modern technology is not a secular endeavor<\/a> but is deeply rooted in Western Christian millennialism, driving a thousand-year quest for transcendence, salvation, and the recovery of divine perfection. Noble was not talking about AI at that time, but this message rings especially true today during the so-called <a href=\"https:\/\/can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fjohnwerner%2F2025%2F09%2F17%2Fafter-the-ai-winter-comes-the-ai-spring%2F&data=05%7C02%7Cbarton.scott%40utoronto.ca%7Cdc8c026e808b4b8438e208debb4ab876%7C78aac2262f034b4d9037b46d56c55210%7C0%7C0%7C639154126797854874%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=6IWJnNVj0w8ZwBEc1uOxglL7wgcptzQty%2Bnbisn%2FVIA%3D&reserved=0\">AI spring.<\/a> As Charles Taylor, Michael Rosen, and many others have likewise argued, our modern, seemingly secular ways of seeing the world were profoundly shaped by religion and still operate with its metaphysical and ethical categories, despite protestations to the contrary. AI research is animated by the main themes explored by Noble and, later on, <a href=\"https:\/\/techgnosis.com\/techgnosis-book\/\">Erik Davis<\/a>, namely: disembodied transcendence, recovery of perfection, and the binding of powerful entities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The discourse around the field of AI alignment is the latest instance of this pattern. Its structure mirrors the structure of Christian theological problems. When researchers talk about instilling values into machines, about making powerful systems reliably good, and about what happens when entities far smarter than us pursue goals indifferent to human welfare, they are staging a drama that theology had already wrestled with for a long time. Put simply, the alignment problem asks: how do you make a potentially powerful entity act in ways that are reliably good? How do you bind a powerful being? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Christian political theology lurking behind this genealogy is thus not merely interesting but it actually has something to offer. Noble tells us that millenarian movements characteristically bypass institutional procedure, because institutions belong to the fallen present, not the redeemed future. Davis explores how the gnostic strand of tech culture concentrates interpretive authority among the technically initiated. In this account, esoteric knowledge, by definition, belongs to those who have seen through ordinary appearances to the underlying truth. Together, Noble and Davis, among others, can help us make sense of the AI industry and the field of AI alignment that supports it, a field that is deeply serious about the stakes of its work while remaining, to date, resistant to the kinds of democratic, pluralist, and institutional responses that those stakes would seem to demand. But while understanding could help us identify some problems, the answers might lie elsewhere. I would suggest the history of political theology as one such place where answers to the problem of binding God have taken various forms such as covenants and natural law, an enterprise that would eventually be secularized into constitutional law. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Given this genealogy, AI alignment is not only a technical issue but a fundamentally social one. To be sure, it is important to determine how to specify the objectives correctly, or to ensure that the model generalizes well, but the religious analogues demand that we understand AI as a<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sociotechnical_system\"> sociotechnical project<\/a>, not a standalone machine. While millenarianism and gnosticism can somewhat explain the field\u2019s resistance to institutions, the constitutional tradition, over time, has come up with the philosophy and mechanisms for binding tremendous power. If the challenge is that autonomous AI should be guided by values and goals that benefit humanity, it needs to have the necessary interpretive resources and institutions to understand what human life and society is. The constitutional tradition is one such resource. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The constitutional inheritance<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Medieval thinkers had similar intuitions about the problem of the virtuous sovereign. The king stood above ordinary law, wielding power that could not easily be checked. In this account, the only constraint was the sovereign\u2019s fear of divine judgment. The king was supposedly accountable to God even if not to his subjects. But this arrangement was notoriously unreliable. Hence the slow, difficult construction of legal limits from the Magna Carta to the long evolution of constitutional thought, eventually arriving at the idea that sovereign power must be channeled through institutions, separated into branches, and <a href=\"https:\/\/can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpress-pubs.uchicago.edu%2Ffounders%2Fdocuments%2Fv1ch10s14.html&data=05%7C02%7Cbarton.scott%40utoronto.ca%7Cdc8c026e808b4b8438e208debb4ab876%7C78aac2262f034b4d9037b46d56c55210%7C0%7C0%7C639154126797931195%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=%2FJW%2BjoSnio6XK7BSmAcDbhN%2FxIzBWT9H6vUs1fe%2B5yo%3D&reserved=0\">checked at every turn<\/a>. The Western constitutional tradition’s central insight was that virtue is not a reliable constraint on power. What you need are institutions and mechanisms, such as rights and procedures, which make virtue less necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Today, AI researchers, especially those in the field of alignment, face similar problems. The concern is not only that AI systems could become malicious. They could. But even well-intentioned systems, given imprecisely specified goals and sufficient capability, could cause enormous harm. Another problem is homogeneity. What values should the AI have, and who decides? An AI landscape dominated by a handful of models trained on the values of a handful of institutions in a handful of wealthy countries is clearly a system of unchecked power. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If alignment is, broadly speaking, some kind of secularized-theological problem, then here are some implications: first, it means that a far broader set of disciplines and traditions has something important to contribute to this field, beyond its natural community of computer scientists, machine learning engineers, and AI safety researchers. For instance, the Alan Turing Institute has come up with a new initiative called<a href=\"https:\/\/can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.turing.ac.uk%2Fnews%2Fpublications%2Fdoing-ai-differently&data=05%7C02%7Cbarton.scott%40utoronto.ca%7Cdc8c026e808b4b8438e208debb4ab876%7C78aac2262f034b4d9037b46d56c55210%7C0%7C0%7C639154126797970383%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=9ydRFgdgp1hYVkyxTyzpeeHdKjgQ1ImDfMBzAXHLrIQ%3D&reserved=0\"> <em>Doing AI Differently<\/em><\/a> to broaden the field of relevant expertise. At the same time, we need to broaden the community from which these values are going to be drawn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Second, drawing from my own legal background, I want to suggest that the constitutional tradition is not just a useful metaphor. As I have alluded to earlier; it is a repository of knowledge that may help address some dimensions of this <a href=\"http:\/\/problem.to\">problem<\/a>. To this end, an emerging field called<a href=\"https:\/\/can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fabs%2F2601.04175&data=05%7C02%7Cbarton.scott%40utoronto.ca%7Cdc8c026e808b4b8438e208debb4ab876%7C78aac2262f034b4d9037b46d56c55210%7C0%7C0%7C639154126798005697%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=TuSMNPqEmje4JU7fEzVgoWoCw2YVURoYaYvdPqQeZPs%3D&reserved=0\"> legal alignment<\/a> has proposed that legal principles, methods, and institutions are themselves a resource for solving the alignment problem from within. Examples of this include legal reasoning, which has been developed over centuries precisely to apply general principles to novel and contested cases, and the use of legal concepts or doctrines such as fiduciary duty or proportionality as part of a blueprint for building reliable agents and helping them navigate ambiguous cases. A further example of a potential insight from the constitutional tradition involves the instantiation of checks and balances within the AI systems themselves, such as building a right to contest from within the system, or <a href=\"https:\/\/can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fx.com%2Fmentalgeorge%2Fstatus%2F2049165122485244201&data=05%7C02%7Cbarton.scott%40utoronto.ca%7Cdc8c026e808b4b8438e208debb4ab876%7C78aac2262f034b4d9037b46d56c55210%7C0%7C0%7C639154126798052303%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=uXHVto9ABMbyU%2Bs5qTgwPuS76h11nJTfp8HVrH3tIJ8%3D&reserved=0\">the idea of appealing model behavior<\/a> that will eventually form part of a larger body of precedent, which could be a source later on for quasi-judicial processes. Other possibilities include creating institutional structures for meaningful public participation in model development, or the establishment of mechanisms for societal inputs into AI objectives and constraints. A recent collaborative effort of technical experts, lawyers, and philosophers called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lawfaremedia.org\/article\/a-new-research-agenda-for-ai-constitutionalism\">AI constitutionalism<\/a> has been formed to pursue these types of questions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">These are just a few illustrations, but the main point is that law, over the course of centuries, has learned to bind sovereigns by setting the terms on which authority could be exercised. Law has insisted that even the highest power must act through form, procedure, and accountable institutions. We should think of AI alignment in the same broad way. It is a sociotechnical problem that is in need of institutions and ideas beyond engineering. This is one way to ensure that <a href=\"https:\/\/can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fresearch.google%2Fblog%2Fbuilding-ai-for-the-pluralistic-society%2F&data=05%7C02%7Cbarton.scott%40utoronto.ca%7Cdc8c026e808b4b8438e208debb4ab876%7C78aac2262f034b4d9037b46d56c55210%7C0%7C0%7C639154126798100712%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=uL4KsS9urAme%2BU0%2BWqGPuN7YYMAn4ozZeDlU%2FeA59NI%3D&reserved=0\">AI systems could serve pluralistic human values<\/a> in the course of such alignment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I.J. Good, a British mathematician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing, <a href=\"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/Good1964.pdf\">once wrote<\/a> that the first ultra-intelligent machine will be the last invention that man needs ever make, for the machine will take over after that. But Good is mistaken. Whether the next powerful entity we create answers to anything beyond itself will not just be decided by how intelligent it becomes, but by whether we do for machines what constitutionalism has done for kings. That is more than just a technical problem. It is the oldest constitutional one, asked yet again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the more famous thought experiments in the AI safety literature involves a superintelligent machine given the seemingly simple […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":863,"featured_media":49727,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_searchwp_excluded":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[4947],"tags":[4914,1539,113,4922,1185],"coauthors":[4942],"class_list":["post-49726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-seeking-alignment","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-constitutionalism","tag-law-and-religion","tag-publics-public-sphere","tag-secularism"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.1 (Yoast SEO v28.1) - 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Two years after Andreessen\u2019s manifesto, Altman <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20250405081831\/https:\/ia.samaltman.com\/\">announced<\/a> the dawn of the \u201cintelligence age.\u201d The agrarian age passed into the industrial age, and now generative AI is here to crank the wheel of history. Dario Amodei, responsible for the generative AI model his company named Claude, <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20250423014810\/https:\/darioamodei.com\/essay\/machines-of-loving-grace\">predicts<\/a> its culmination. \u201cThis is where humanity was already headed,\u201d he writes about the peace, prosperity, and other materialized ideals that will characterize the intelligence age. AI just \u201cgets us there more quickly.\u201d The tone across these texts varies but the message does not: humankind is about to enter, or has just entered, a distinct next stage. We are at a beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is not always clear what intelligence refers to for the men announcing its impending reign. The term describes a faculty that is not exclusive to humans. It is actualized and increased in technologies, however, and technologies are nearly uniquely human. Through technology, intelligence will eventually realize humanity\u2019s every hope. Striking a creedal note, Andreessen writes that \u201cwe believe in fulfilling our full potential, becoming fully human\u201d through the development of generative AI in particular. \u201cWe believe in evolution\u201d appears twice in his manifesto, in a strange echo of the popular <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/10\/29\/arts\/in-this-house-yard-signs.html\">yard signs<\/a> telling passersby that this house believes \u201cscience is real.\u201d The intelligence age elicits a prophetic tone. In the rapidly growing community of AI critics, the religion-like quality of these announcements has drawn suspicion. Philosopher Emile Torres <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20230729172157\/https:\/www.truthdig.com\/articles\/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares\/\">attributes<\/a> belief in the intelligence age to a \u201cbunch of 20<sup>th<\/sup>-century atheists\u201d whose lives \u201clacked the meaning [\u2026] provided by traditional religion.\u201d Promises about intelligence amount to an insidious \u201csecular religion\u201d they offer the rest of us in its stead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As the dream of the intelligence age grows, so does apprehension. Within the community that has developed around AI development, concern crystallizes around alignment. Derived from the French verb <em>aligner<\/em>, which in turn stems from <em>ad lineam<\/em>, the Latin phrase \u201cin a straight line,\u201d alignment describes a state in which things line up. With reference to generative AI, the things to line up are human values and the outputs of (yet-to-be-built) systems. Alignment, treated as an engineering objective and philosophical puzzle, ensures that intelligent systems do not act against our norms or interest when they take off, spiral, or take us somewhere very quickly. This elegant solution\u2014only align\u2014may wreak havoc in its own right, however. In an influential <a href=\"https:\/\/firstmonday.org\/ojs\/index.php\/fm\/article\/view\/13636\">essay<\/a>, Torres and computer scientist Timnit Gebru argue that alignment with the values held by Silicon Valley engineers and architects is not a safeguard for the intelligence age, but its greatest danger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The problem is one of lineage. Gebru and Torres warn that the \u201cbundle of ideologies\u201d undergirding AI development is rooted in eugenics. The essay highlights institutional and biographical continuities between eugenic science and contemporary AI subcultures, and then extrapolates from these to suggest that the utopian idylls of the intelligence age will curdle into the horrors of the twentieth century. Such extrapolation overlooks the fact that early twentieth-century eugenics was not a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomsbury.com\/us\/controlling-human-heredity-9781573923439\/\">perversion<\/a> of science but its <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/301835\">normal<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/gwern.net\/doc\/statistics\/1981-mackenzie-statisticsinbritain18651930.pdf\">application<\/a>. Precisely because it was ordinary, the <a href=\"https:\/\/yalebooks.yale.edu\/book\/9780300198195\/the-science-of-human-perfection\/\">association<\/a> with eugenics is too pervasive to function as a simple taint. Beyond lines and lineage, the actual, live connection between the purveyors of the intelligence age and eugenics is secular religion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">*** <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What is a secular religion? A hundred years ago, eugenics certainly seemed a good candidate. In a 1904 paper, Francis Galton\u2014who coined the term\u2014<a href=\"https:\/\/www.journals.uchicago.edu\/doi\/pdf\/10.1086\/211280\">explained<\/a> that eugenics should become \u201can orthodox religious tenet of the future.\u201d Many scientists working in his wake understood their commitment to eugenics to overlap with or reinforce their religious commitment to a particular kind of moral society, but that is not what Galton meant here. He meant that eugenics could and should now do the work of religion, serving as a resource for people in matters of statecraft and of sex. In the <a href=\"https:\/\/academic.oup.com\/jaar\/article-abstract\/90\/1\/218\/6569889\">eugenic secular<\/a> that Galton\u2019s writing helped seed, scientific orthodoxies would be the engines of a better, more beautiful future. In this vision, secular religion is science with religion\u2019s sway; science not as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.press.jhu.edu\/books\/title\/9814\/never-pure\">historically situated practice<\/a> but as engine beneath history. This science, Galton and his peers believed, stood poised to take up its rightful role as the authorizing force underneath social and intimate choice alike, improving on religion by helping humanity go more quickly where it is already headed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When Torres writes about AI development as in the grip of a secular religion, however, the term is meant to arouse suspicion. It is oxymoronic: the charge is counterfeit secularity. The community around generative AI <em>appears<\/em> to be undergirded by logic and guided by science alone, but it is in the thrall of something that acts like a religion. AI ideologues looking for purpose and hope commit themselves to a \u201cnormative worldview\u201d that Torres <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20230729172157\/https:\/www.truthdig.com\/articles\/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares\/\">sums up<\/a> as \u201cjust like Christianity.\u201d Particularly relevant to this assessment is Torres\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wuLF33r9jUc\">own drift<\/a>: from a childhood steeped in Evangelical apocalypticism first to New Atheism\u2014the mid-2000s movement invested in <a href=\"https:\/\/tif.ssrc.org\/2009\/11\/16\/so-you-want-to-be-a-new-atheist\/\">rescuing public life<\/a> from religious \u201cdelusions\u201d\u2014and then to the pursuit of the intelligence age, because New Atheism turned out to be overly invested in rescuing Western civilization in particular. When the seemingly secular interest in the intelligence age began to resemble Christian eschatological preoccupations too closely, Torres turned into a self-described \u201cardent apostate.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Scholars of religion soon learn that commitment to the <a href=\"https:\/\/read.dukeupress.edu\/tsq\/article-abstract\/9\/3\/443\/319372\/Pulpit-of-Performative-Reason\">correction<\/a> or even rescue of dupes, no matter how ardent, usually obscures more than it reveals. What are the footholds of the dream? The intelligence age finds purchase in ideas of human destiny and its fulfillment, in the vision of a world that is headed up. The pull that moved Torres from conservative Christianity to AI apostasy is of a piece with the pull that the salesmen of the intelligence age try to harness in their manifestos. That same pull animates the secularist succession narratives that men like Galton wrote, in which science and public reason take up the mantle of humanity\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/26419578\">civilizational progress<\/a> now that Western Christianity has carried it as far as it could. Scholars in our field have problematized the neat handovers in such narratives of <a href=\"https:\/\/tif.ssrc.org\/2020\/07\/31\/religion-and-reproductive-science\/\">triumphant secularism<\/a>, pointing out the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sup.org\/books\/history\/divine-variations\">profound<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/yalebooks.yale.edu\/book\/9780300171365\/the-christian-imagination\/\">continuities<\/a> that stories of secular modern conquest skate over. \u201cSecular religion\u201d is not a gotcha but a guidepost, a signal indicating that this is a place where the better future is pressing its demands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I say that the intelligence age begins with secular religion, I mean that its launch requires a handover, a moment where our current age\u2014industrial, late-capitalist\u2014tips into the next. Altman <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20250405081831\/https:\/ia.samaltman.com\/\">writes<\/a> that \u201csociety itself is a form of advanced intelligence.\u201d He thanks our \u201cparents and grandparents\u201d for the \u201cscaffolding for human progress\u201d they built. Their society has become scaffolding for something new; their accumulated intelligence is loosening itself from the collective. Describing \u201cthe San Francisco consensus,\u201d Google CEO Eric Schmidt <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=L5jhEYofpaQ&t=771\">predicts<\/a> that AI systems \u201cwill soon be smarter than the <em>sum<\/em> of humans.\u201d The intelligence of the past, in this vision, was the possession of human societies or masses, whereas the intelligence that delivers the future belongs to systems and models. This is a startlingly literal transfer of ownership, much more so than the transition from religious moral guidance to the scientific husbandry of biology that eugenicists envisioned. Only once generative AI models have taken in humanity\u2019s shared visual and textual inheritance as data to train on can their intelligence\u2014proprietary, available for subscription\u2014succeed and supersede ours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">*** <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The purveyors of the intelligence age are sure that we have everything to gain and nothing to lose. The \u201ctechno-capital machine\u201d will allow \u201cnatural selection to work for us in the realm of ideas,\u201d preaches Andreessen\u2019s manifesto. Its ideas will be so good, so \u201cpro-human,\u201d that society will reshape itself in their image\u2014and we will love it. Even Amodei, generally the least exuberant in his predictions, agrees in his own manifesto. \u201cInitially heavily bottlenecked\u201d by \u201chuman factors\u201d like bureaucracy and law, intelligence will eventually \u201croute around\u201d all but the most physically absolute of constraints. Yet it will take us where we were already heading. \u201cIf not inevitably, then at least statistically,\u201d he writes, the intelligence age will bring \u201crule of law, democracy, and Enlightenment values.\u201d He is right, of course, in the sense that AI models will produce outputs that resemble the inputs they trained on. There is no escaping inheritance in statistics, to the point that the discipline of statistics <a href=\"https:\/\/cup.columbia.edu\/book\/bernoullis-fallacy\/9780231199957\/\">developed<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/press.princeton.edu\/books\/paperback\/9780691126357\/karl-pearson\">through<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/global.oup.com\/academic\/product\/victorians-and-numbers-9780192847744?cc=us&lang=en&\">alongside<\/a> eugenics, and yet inheritance is not the only way to imagine the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I first came across AI as a transformative technology while writing a history of online seduction advice, from <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20040325172043\/http:\/www.textfiles.com\/sex\/pickup.txt\">1980s pick-up lines<\/a> to <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.is\/20260613234113\/https:\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2026\/06\/15\/andrew-tates-empire-of-abuse\">Andrew Tate<\/a>. Twentieth-century researchers in AI worked to build machines that can think like us or better. In seduction advice, I saw humans seeking to better <em>themselves<\/em> by thinking more like an AI. The pick-up line, improved, is a conversational if\/then algorithm; the boy, improved, is an alpha male possessed of \u201cmaxxed out\u201d metrics. I called this computational creep: the language and logics associated with AI becoming a shorthand for efficacy even in those domains of life that seem unprogrammable or unpredictable. In the manosphere, the improvement of social and even biological intelligence requires its artificialization. Computational creep brings the intelligence age into an analytical frame that is more ambient and atmospheric than alignment. It attends to the seep and stickiness in the encounters we stage between intelligences, drawing out what humans lose and gain when they yoke themselves to system capabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The intelligence age can begin only once the past has been made into its scaffolding. Secular religion calls for a handover that produces what it leaves behind, as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sup.org\/books\/anthropology\/formations-secular\">scholars<\/a> of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dukeupress.edu\/The-Republic-Unsettled\">secularism<\/a> have <a href=\"https:\/\/press.uchicago.edu\/ucp\/books\/book\/chicago\/M\/bo26266414.html\">theorized<\/a> for an array of modern distinctions. When Galton announces that eugenic science is now poised to take over from religious orthodoxy, he reifies the power he ascribes to religion. The transition is also the continuity; religion\u2019s obsolescence enacts its force. For civilization to enter its intelligence era, it needs to acquire a past in which intelligence already existed but could not yet properly be apprehended as such. Just as science needed a proto-science, needed to be nascent in religion in order to <a href=\"https:\/\/cup.columbia.edu\/book\/critical-approaches-to-science-and-religion\/9780231206570\/\">produce<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/press.uchicago.edu\/ucp\/books\/book\/chicago\/T\/bo19108877.html\">itself<\/a> as religion\u2019s successor, the society of our grandparents and everything our ancestors have written must become a proto-intelligence that a well-trained statistical model can improve upon. Computational creep illuminates how claustrophobic this is: computer programs, conversations, civilizational trajectories, and sexual desires all become a lock intelligence alone can open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cWonders [will] become routine,\u201d Altman writes, \u201cand then table stakes.\u201d What begins as marvel first becomes habit and then price of admission\u2014to a game we can no longer leave. He promises that the intelligence age can arrive gently, even though \u201cthe rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense.\u201d This is one angle scholars of religion can bring to the alignment conversation: attention to the architecture of wonder, to the violent snips and spirals that produce a new age in real time, and to the forms that persist amid and alongside those cuts. We can offer AI \u201csecular religion,\u201d not as false advertising but as a sign that beckons us. It tells us where to look when humans assign miracles to a coming age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cIntelligence is in an upward spiral,\u201d asserted tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen in a 2023 self-published manifesto, and \u201cwe are poised […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":831,"featured_media":49722,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_searchwp_excluded":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[4947],"tags":[4914,4157,4919,282],"coauthors":[4718],"class_list":["post-49717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-seeking-alignment","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-eugenics","tag-secularism-modernity","tag-technology"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.1 (Yoast SEO v28.1) - 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