Man willing god may not survive science
Icarus flew too close to the sun and burnt more than just his fingers. Savitri Devi Mukherji, fascist, Nazi and Axis spy in India, worshipped Hitler as an avatar of Lord Vishnu. And good old Asaram Babu is back in jail after parole. Man’s desire to be god is as old as Adam and Eve. Elon Musk, the world’s most powerful man, wants to be the Universe’s most powerful man by conquering heaven with rockets and billions. To be god is to command absolute power, absolute obedience and absolute control—Chinese emperors, French kings and Narendra Modi have claimed divine origin. However, it has a nasty side effect. Hubris.
AI is the new god, a brahmasura born out of hubris. Not fully understood, it is a constantly evolving sentience which is no longer confined to writing prompts to create a badass meme. Or pen an electronic poem. Do homework. Make office presentations. Asking God to do mundane things is hardly new: people visit temples, churches and other places of worship to ask The Boss for a good match for a daughter, a promotion at work, a cure for an illness.
To cut out the middleman is human, hence the natural corollary is to be God rather than ask Him for favours. Modern science is bridging that gap with AI. There is a theory that the whole world is a computer simulation—which is another way of foreseeing AI can go where no man has gone before. Or already has. American tech company Nvidia is funding researchers to create neural networks that simulate a multiverse (multiple different realities) and the laws of real time physics, to create synthetic data that will train physical AI systems: a predictive visual representation would be Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam up above in the Sistine Chapel, which shows God creating man.
Consequently man created God, considering the Bible had more than 40 different authors. The day when ‘Artificial Intelligence’ becomes ‘Real Intelligence’ is already here. Man is yielding control to science, and there is little evangelistic indignation can do about it. Which is where man’s relationship with divinity becomes a syllogism. God is the ultimate energy. Science is data in God’s form. Ergo, Science is God.
Tim Brooks may not be a familiar name in the non-nerd world. He was a big deal in OpenAI video generator Sora. Last week he joined Google’s AI research lab, Google DeepMind. His mandate is to create humongous models that simulate the real world. The real world itself is no cakewalk. There are tyrants like Putin and Xi who rain down pain and misery on people. There is the evil of the Taliban, Hamas and Jaish-e-Mohammed. Nine million people die from hunger every year, including children aged below five. Women get gang-raped and set on fire.
So on and so forth. It may be a good idea after all to simulate different realities for man to escape a world of misery into a sublimely serene realm. All over the world, millionaires and billionaires are devising ways to live forever in such a realm. Immortality is the pot of gold at the end of the divine rainbow: man telling god that he has arrived. And that He has become Him.
Mythos creates mythology. The reverse is also true. Gods become men to save mankind. Christ did it. So did Krishna and Ram. Will AI do it, once its voracious appetite for data and self-innovation is satisfied? That’s an insatiable wendigo. Maybe mythology is repeating itself, for the first time as farce and the second as tragedy. Hold that thought.
Ravi Shankar
ravi@newindianexpress.com