Suppose I told you that in 10 years, the world as you know it will be over. You will live in a sort of paradise. You won’t get sick, or age, or die. Eternal life will be yours! Even better, your mind will be blissfully free of uncertainty — you’ll have access to perfect knowledge. Oh, and you’ll no longer be stuck on Earth. Instead, you can live up in the heavens.
If I told you all this, would you assume that I was a religious preacher or an AI researcher?
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Mostly, though, the figures spouting a vision of AGI as a kind of techno-eschatology — from Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, to Elon Musk, who wants to link your brain to computers — express their ideas in secular language. They’re either unaware or unwilling to admit that the vision they’re selling derives much of its power from the fact that it’s plugging into age-old religious ideas.
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The influential ninth-century philosopher John Scotus Eriugena, for example, insisted that part of what it meant for Adam to be formed in God’s image was that he was a creator, a maker. So if we wanted to restore humanity to the God-like perfection of Adam prior to his fall, we’d have to lean into that aspect of ourselves. Eriugena wrote that the “mechanical arts” (a.k.a. technology) were “man’s links with the Divine, their cultivation a means to salvation.”
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This wasn’t tech for tech’s sake, or for profit’s sake. Instead, tech progress was synonymous with moral progress. By recovering humanity’s original perfection, we could usher in the kingdom of God. As Noble writes, “Technology had come to be identified with transcendence, implicated as never before in the Christian idea of redemption.”
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Transhumanists, effective altruists, and longtermists have inherited the view that the end times are nigh and that technological progress is our best shot at moral progress. For people operating within this logic, it seems natural to pursue AGI. Even though they view AGI as a top existential risk, they believe we can’t afford not to build it given its potential to catapult humanity out of its precarious earthbound adolescence (which will surely end any minute!) and into a flourishing interstellar adulthood (so many happy people, so much moral value!). Of course we ought to march forward technologically because that means marching forward morally!
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I recommend reading the whole thing instead of just these excerpts.
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