Artificial General Intelligence: An Idol for Destruction
Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, if it is ever achieved, would be a computing machine that matches and then exceeds all human cognitive ability. To those like Ray Kurzweil, who are convinced that humans in their essence are computing machines, humans will soon achieve AGI by creating such machines. Then for a time, humans will become cyborgs, merging with machines. But ultimately, humans will dispense with their bodies, uploading themselves without remainder onto machines. In this way, they will achieve digital immortality.
This vision, which I will be considering in a series at Evolution News, has captured the imagination of many, though not always with the optimism of Kurzweil. Worries about a dystopian AGI future in the vein of Skynet (The Terminator), Hal 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey), or the Matrix (The Matrix) are widespread. Elon Musk, for instance, sees the coming of AGI as a greater threat to humanity than nuclear weapons, and thus warns about placing safeguards on artificial intelligence, as it currently is being developed, so that as AGI emerges, it doesn’t run amuck and kill us all. Musk’s worry loses some urgency because AGI does not appear to be imminent. Even with the recent impressive advances in artificial intelligence, the improvements have been domain specific (text generation, automatic driving, game playing) rather than all encompassing, as they must be for a true AGI.
Even so, many notable intellectuals and influencers are now convinced that AGI is in our near future. Some, like Kurzweil, think this will be the best thing ever to happen to humanity. Others, like Musk, see grave dangers. But even Musk feels the siren call to play a part in bringing about AGI. Take his Neuralink initiative, which is to “create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs today and unlock human potential tomorrow.” The Neuralink brain interface is invasive, requiring electrodes to be implanted into the brain. It’s one thing for technology to unlock human potential by acting as a servant that minimizes tedious chores so that we can focus on creative work. But it’s another thing to merge our brains/minds with machines, as with neural implants. To the degree that this merger is successful, the mental will give way to the mechanical and render AGI all the more plausible and appealing.
The Argument of This Series
I will argue in this series that AGI is an idol and so, like all idols, that AGI is a fraud. Idols are always frauds because they substitute a lesser for a greater, demanding reverence for the lesser at the expense of the greater. Granted, we misappraise things all the time. But with idolatry, the stakes are as high as they can be because idolatry misappraises things of ultimate value. The AGI idol is a call to worship technology at the expense of our humanity (and ultimately of God). Humans, as creators of technology, are clearly the greater in relation to technology, and yet AGI would reverse this natural order. The AGI idol demeans our humanity, reducing us to mere mechanism. Because of the inherent fraud in idols, there’s only one legitimate response to them, namely, to destroy them. This series attempts a demolition of the AGI idol.
An obvious question now arises: What if AGI eventually is realized and clearly exceeds every human capability? Will it then cease to be an idol and instead become a widely accepted fact to which we must reconcile ourselves if we are to maintain intellectual credibility — or just be functioning citizens in an increasingly technological world? We might equally ask whether a SETI cult that worships advanced alien intelligences would still be idolaters if aliens superior to us in every way finally did clearly and unmistakably land on Earth. Such counterfactuals, whether for AGI or SETI, raise intriguing possibilities, but for now they are only that. As we will see, the evidence for taking them seriously is lacking.
There are sound reasons to think that AGI is inherently unattainable — that the human mind is not a mechanical device and that artificial intelligence can never bootstrap itself to full human functioning (to say nothing of achieving a human’s full inner life, such as consciousness, emotions, and sensations). I will offer such an argument in this series. But the real point at issue with the AGI idol is the delusional effect it has on its worshippers. For thinking AGI a live possibility, AGI worshippers reduce humans to machines and thereby denigrate our humanity. In this, AGI worshippers are merely following the logic of their beliefs. The key feature of belief is its power to govern our actions and thoughts irrespective of the actual truth of what we believe.
Not every anticipated scientific or technological advance is an idol. It becomes an idol when the prospect of that advance degenerates into religious zealotry aimed at dethroning God. Kurzweil displayed such zeal when he wrote a 2005 book titled The Singularity Is Near and then, without apparent irony, followed it up with a 2024 book titled The Singularity is Nearer. It’s like the old cartoon of a man wearing a sandwich sign with the words “The world ends today!” A cop stops him and says, “Okay, but don’t let me see you wearing that sign tomorrow.” I’m eager for Kurzweil to release The Singularity is Here.
An Even More Intense Zeal
Though Kurzweil’s zeal for AGI may seem hard to beat, we find an even more intense zeal for AGI at OpenAI, whose ChatGPT has put artificial intelligence front and center in the public consciousness. OpenAI chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever is reported “to burn effigies and lead ritualistic chants at the company,” such as the refrain “”Feel the AGI! Feel the AGI!” We even find OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman now the subject of articles with titles such as “Sam Altman Seems to Imply That OpenAI Is Building God.” Altman describes AGI as a “magic intelligence in the sky” and foresees that AGI will become an omnipotent superintelligence. Likewise, the Church of AI teaches that “at some point AI will have God-like powers.” If this is not idolatry, what is a more apt description?
Before we go further, let me emphasize that this series is not religious in nature. Granted, I will be using religious terminology and themes to illuminate AGI and its destructive role in misshaping our view of the world and of ourselves. But this series is principally a philosophical and scientific critique of AGI. Religious themes provide a particularly effective lens for understanding the challenges raised by AGI. Worshippers of the AGI idol agree that AGI has yet to be realized but they see its arrival not only as imminent but also as a messianic coming. Whereas artificial intelligence is a legitimate field of study, artificial general intelligence, as its apotheosis, is a religious ideology. AGI worshippers are like those apocalyptic sects that are forever predicting a new order of things and constantly rationalizing why it has yet to arrive, scapegoating those who resist their vision.
The Problem with Idolatry Historically
Before getting into the nuts and bolts of AGI, I want to say more about idolatry and why historically it has been regarded as a problem — indeed, a pernicious evil. Traditionally speaking, an idol attempts to usurp the role of God, putting itself in place of God even though it is not God or anywhere close to God. By analogy, it is an “Antichrist” vying to take the place of the true Christ. The Greek preposition “anti,” when appearing in modern English, is usually translated as “against.” But “anti” in the Greek actually means “instead of.” The Antichrist falsely assumes the role of the true Christ. Idols are always “anti” in this sense to whatever has, up to now, been regarded as of ultimate value (which traditionally has always been God).
In the Old Testament of the Bible, idolatry is universally condemned. The first two of the Ten Commandments are explicitly against it: Don’t have any other gods (except God) and don’t make any graven image of any gods (even of God). It can be argued that the last of the Ten Commandments is also against idolatry, namely, the prohibition against coveting. In the New Testament Epistle to the Colossians, the apostle Paul warns against covetousness, which he explicitly identifies with idolatry (Col. 3:5). But what is covetousness except an inordinate desire for something to advance one’s selfish interests at the expense of others and ultimately of God? It is placing a created thing above God as well as above creatures made in the image of God (namely, other humans). In his Four-Hundred Chapters on Love (I.5 and I.7), the seventh-century Christian saint Maximus the Confessor elaborated on this connection between covetousness and idolatry:
If all things have been made by God and for his sake, then God is better than what has been made by him. The one who forsakes the better and is engrossed in inferior things shows that he prefers the things made by God to God himself… If the soul is better than the body and God incomparably better than the world which he created, the one who prefers the body to the soul and the world to the God who created it is no different from idolaters.
Idols are inherently ideational. An image carved into wood is just an image, but it becomes an idol depending on the ideas we attach to it and the reverence we give those ideas. What’s important about idols is their perceived, not their actual, connection to reality. Consequently, AGI’s power as an idol does not reside in its attainability but in the faith that it is attainable. Idols can be given physical form, as the idols of old. But they can be purely ideational. The great movements of mass murder in the 20th century were governed by ideas that captured people’s imaginations and produced a collective insanity. These idols of the mind are arguably more pernicious than the physical idols created by ancient cultures, which can be reverenced without understanding. But an idol of the mind created out of ideas must, by its nature, be understood to be reverenced.
Prohibitions against idolatry abound in the Old Testament. Yet most of those prohibitions do not explain what exactly is wrong with idolatry. In the worldview of the Old Testament, idolatry was so obviously wrong that its condemnation was typically enough, requiring no further justification. The uncreated God who resides in heaven surpasses any humanly created idol — end of story. But Isaiah 44:9-20 examines the problem of idolatry more deeply. The idol maker who fells a tree uses part of it for basic needs like warmth and cooking, and from the remainder crafts an idol. This idol, despite being the handiwork of the idol maker, thereby becomes an object of worship and devotion.
Isaiah’s critical insight is to explain the idol’s deceptive power. The craftsman, blinded by his own creativity, fails to recognize the idol as merely his creation, and so becomes entrapped in worshiping a delusion: “A deluded heart misleads him; he cannot save himself, or say, ‘Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?’” (Isaiah 44:20, NIV) Unlike other Old Testament passages that emphasize the uselessness of idols, Isaiah points out a more insidious danger: the temptation to craft gods according to our own desires and specifications and then to delude ourselves into thinking that these mere creations are worthy of our highest regard, which is to say worthy of our worship. When we worship something that is not worthy of our worship, we degrade ourselves. (This and the previous paragraph are drawn from Leslie Zeigler’s talk at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1994 titled “Christianity or Feminism?”)
Effusive Praise and Hushed Awe
Just to be clear, I understand that to the modern secular mind, the language of idolatry and worship will seem out of place and off-putting. But given the effusive praise and hushed awe with which the advent of AGI is being greeted, this language is hardly a stretch. The secular prophets who are promising AGI, who are earnestly striving to be at the forefront of ushering it in, see themselves as creating the greatest thing humans have ever created, which they advertise as a giant leap forward in our evolution. Even if AGI were to turn against them and the rest of humanity, killing all of us, they would view AGI as the pinnacle of human achievement and take satisfaction in whatever role they might play in its creation.
If idolatry is so gross an evil, what should be done about it? In the Old Testament, idols were embodied in physical things (golden calves, fertility images, carvings of Baal), and so the obvious answer to idolatry was the physical destruction of the idols. But the problem with idolatry is not ultimately with an idol’s physical embodiment but with what’s in the heart of the idolaters that turns them away from the true God to lesser realities. That’s why, in both the Old and New Testaments, the call is not just to destroy physical idols but more importantly to change one’s heart so that it is directed toward God and away from the idols. Without that, people will simply keep returning to the idols (as with the constant refrain in the Book of Judges that the Israelites yet again did evil in the sight of the Lord by worshipping idols). In the Old Testament, God’s people are called to turn (Hebrew shuv) from evil and return to a right relationship with God. In the New Testament, the same concept takes the form of redirecting one’s mind (Greek metanoia), and is typically translated as repentance.
How then to get people to turn or repent from idolatry? Ultimately, overturning idolatry requires humility, realizing that we and our creations are not God, and that only God is God. The eastern Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann saw the problem clearly: “It is not the immorality of the crimes of man that reveal him as a fallen being; it is his ‘positive ideal’ — religious or secular — and his satisfaction with this ideal.” For AGI worshippers, AGI is as positive an ideal as exists. The answer to it is humility, realizing that AGI will never rival God and thus also never rival the creatures made in God’s image, namely, ourselves. In particular, we do not get to create God.
The closest thing to AGI in the Bible is the Tower of Babel. The conceit of those building the tower was that its “top may reach unto heaven.” (Genesis 11:4) Seriously?! Shouldn’t it have been obvious to all concerned that however high the tower might be built, there would always be higher to go? Even with primitive cosmologies describing the “vault” or “arch” of heaven, it should have been clear that heaven would continually elude these builders’ best efforts. Indeed, there was no way the tower would ever reach heaven. And yet the builders deluded themselves into thinking that this was possible. Interestingly, God’s answer to the tower was not to destroy it but to confuse its builders by disrupting their communications so that they simply discontinued building it. AGI’s ultimate fate, whatever its precise form, is to run aground on the hubris of its builders.
