“God is dead” Nietzsche famously proclaimed. Humanity’s desire to be ruled by god, by contrast appears very much alive. Our latest hope for salvation rests with Artificial Intelligence. Climate crisis? AI will cool the planet. Death and disease? AI will make us immortal. War? AI will bring about peace. Machina deus ut deus ex machina (with apologies to my Latin teacher and asking for help from anyone who can come up with the right idiom; update: "Deus machinae ut deus ex machina" has been proposed).

Consider Dario Amodei’s essay Machines of Loving Grace. The essay is full of numbers and footnotes and could be read as an objective attempt to show how AI can contribute to making the world a better place. But underneath all this veneer of rational argument appears a deep longing for a submission to gods. The title, which is taken from a poem, strongly suggests a divine appeal. For fun I decided to ask Claude what person or entity it most associates with the words “loving grace.” Unsurprisingly it replied with Jesus Christ. Now one might dismiss this as simply an extravagant title choice but the essay concludes with two paragraphs about the Culture series by Ian M. Banks. If you are not familiar with the series you could read these paragraphs as simply being about values.

Amodei references what he calls a “well-known post” by Scott Alexander which is in fact a story titled “The Goddess of Everything Else.” Now Alexander is a central figure of the rationalist community and so this too could simply be seen as an allegory but it is worth noting that Amodei chose not to include the title of that post. Amodei also points to MLK’s “arc of the moral universe.” Here too it’s possible to view this as a kind of moral determinism but of course MLK was a preacher and in turn picked up this idea from other religious men including a sermon by Theodore Parker.

So yes Amodei at some level wants to believe in a rational concept of a moral determinism that leads us to a better future. But even in his most explicit statement in the concluding paragraph there is some doubt:

These simple intuitions, if taken to their logical conclusion, lead eventually to rule of law, democracy, and Enlightenment values. If not inevitably, then at least as a statistical tendency, this is where humanity was already headed. AI simply offers an opportunity to get us there more quickly—to make the logic starker and the destination clearer.

Moral progress is not inevitable, just a statistical tendency. And then comes the final sentence of the essay:

Nevertheless, it is a thing of transcendent beauty. We have the opportunity to play some small role in making it real.

Again the choice of words here is unlikely to be entirely accidental. “Transcendent beauty” has strong religious or spiritual connotations. And what is our “small” role? Nothing short of the creation of AI gods.

Our problems are wicked. We can no longer appeal to the old gods to help us solve them. So we must create new ones in their stead. Machines of loving grace as our salvation. Machina deus ut deus ex machina.

And now back to the Culture series. It describes exactly such a civilization. Benevolent machine gods called “minds” rule allowing humans and other species to flourish. The series is well worth reading exactly because it is quite subtle about what such a world feels like to humans. A paradise at some level but also a vague sense of being played with by an opaque layer of higher intelligence. As an aside, there are also some quite fun moments where that higher intelligence is revealed to have many of the same foibles as humanity itself.

I empathize with the desire behind all of this. At times I feel overwhelmed by the immensity of the forces of both nature and culture. Huge systems which we can not fully comprehend and for which any one human is insignificant. Even someone as brilliant as Dario Amodei cannot single-handedly bend the physics of the climate crises, or solve the intricate puzzle of infectious disease, or pull us back from the descent into tribal politics. If anything, better understanding deepens the sense of individual impotence. It is in those moments of despair that we most desire divine intervention. And yet I continue to believe that we should not rush to abdicate our responsibility. Gods, once called, may be impossible to get rid of.