Sam Altman's fantasies of theurgy
They think they’re playing with the elemental stuff of gods and angels and demons. And it is tempting to think that way.
“Mad?” Baldanders rumbled. “You are mad. You with your fantasies of theurgy. How they must be laughing at us. They think all of us barbarians…”
From the Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe
I was reading Empire of AI by Karen Hao, and a couple of things stood out. First was that Sam Altman is a little weasel. Actually, I don’t want to denigrate weasels — beautiful and crafty creatures — by comparing them with Altman, who on a moral level resembles a bubonic plague pustule more than anything else, if we must compare him to some kind of biological entity. Second, I was reminded of how much the rollout of AI mirrored the rollout of the internet itself: huge claims about openness and utopian progress and personal empowerment…followed by a gluttonous money grab and the use of this technology for the massive centralization of economic power, war, and political and social control. This pattern is older than the internet and has followed the introduction of every new mass communication technology — from radio to cable news. Claims of utopian progress, followed by integration into America’s corporate-military state. That’s how tech gets rolled out here.
As imagined by Grok
With AI, though, the quickness of the turnaround and the scale of the centralization that’s coming down the road is likely going to be faster and bigger than anything that came before, hitting many sectors of society all at the same time. Although who knows anything about any of this. Seems like the AI bubble could pop at anytime. Still, the technology isn’t going anywhere — Wall Street seems to want to push this tech on us until the last drop of energy is dug out from the ground and the whole earth is covered with nuclear reactors, turned uninhabitable, while a privileged elite lives in underground bunkers drinking recycled urine and eating energy bars made from their grandmas…
One funny part of the book is when Hao writes about how OpenAI’s original mission statement was that the company was being run for the benefit of humanity — to protect the world from malicious developers of AI. That, of course, didn’t last very long. As soon as big money was on the horizon, Sam Altman turned OpenAI into a project of self-enrichment and integrated it with America’s corporate-military-industrial complex. OpenAI’s tech is not just killing people at home through psychosis. Its technology is also helping Israel kill people in Gaza — making genocide more efficient. If you want just one example…
Hao also does a nice job talking about the core political problem with AI: that it centralizes power. She also gets into the details of just how destructive it is to our world, looking at its demand for water, energy, and precious metals. So yeah, the Empire of AI is a very good book. It gets into the politics of this technology that I’ve rarely seen in journalistic work and was pleasantly surprised by it.
But there was something else I was thinking about while reading the book. Sam Altman and the other dark priests of AI are trying to do theurgy. To them the LLMs they are building are complex incantations — they are magic spells. They think that if these LLMs are built just right and if they give them all the data and all electrical energy humanity can produce, then these spells will manifest into the world a god…or a series of gods. This is their AGI deity…their Artificial General Intelligence. This isn’t really a secret. The tycoons and engineers working on these LLMs talk about what they’re doing in these terms — that they’re making gods. And they believe it, too. They think they’re playing with the elemental stuff of gods and angels and demons. And it is tempting to think that way along with them, too. Because these technologies seem magical — magical in the way that the technology appears in Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun series.
But I don’t think they’re creating gods, even if they think they do. The technology that their code-incantations are bringing into being are not gods but energy clunkers — algorithms sadly shackled to earthly server farms, plastic and metal parts whirring away at high speeds, chips heating up, forever doomed to flip 1s and 0s, doing bidding of their creators, devouring energy and killing the world. These machines are not gods but enslaved bits of tortured earth — reconfigured to kill the earth from which they were made.
These machines are centralizers of power, though. The Sam Altman types aren’t making gods, they’re setting themselves up as kings over all of us. And reading this book, you get the sense that the true god of Sam Altman is not a new god or even a very interesting one. It’s a god that is as old as man…it’s Mammon. Sam Altman just wants power — power and money and adulation. That’s what his AI fanaticism is all about, and he’s willing to destroy the planet to get his dreams. And the full weight of society so far is lining up right behind him and his brethren.
—Yasha
Kevin kelly's book, What Technology Wants, I found was pretty insightful. He tries to make the case that tech is an evolving life-form and its deep want is to expand human choice and potential. yet it feels more like a cosmic parasite gorging itself on us. Kelly's brain has succumb to the parasite's will, like the zombie ant fungus that prioritizes the parasites desires over its own well being till death.
Well, any article with a Gene Wolfe epigraph is going to get some credit from me. But I do wonder if you are underestimating the making a god thing. After all, I think that the standard secular materialistic conclusion makes all this activity rather more mysterious rather than less so. If there were, in fact, supernatural (or advanced technological beings), then all the time spent describing and serving them would be very directly rational.
"I have to do this to avoid the laser or the thunderbolt", or "they make the crops grow" is a solid cause of action.
But if there aren't such beings, then the countless thousands of years of repeated efforts, in all the various directions and versions, is wildly odd. And recent evidence shows that this is quite so even in non hierarchical or egalitarian type societies.
You don't always find an afterlife and gods, but spirits and something binding stuff ritually is universal. I think it has a lot to do with institution building, in the very direct sense that spirits and gods are the same type of thing as, well, states and companies.
And mechanism and religion aren't necessarily opposed: See literally the Greek text Mechanica attributed to Heron of Alexandria. He built neat devices for Greek Theaters and Temples. It wasn't seen to undermine the gods or belief.