The quest for AGI: Building idols, not a God

I don’t believe that those hell-bent on a quest to build AGI — Artificial General Intelligence — are trying to create a new God. I think they are really creating false idols.

Image by DALL-E 3

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Alberto Romero

, author of

The Algorithmic Bridge

, I don’t believe that those hell-bent on a quest to build AGI (or the latest term, superintelligence), are trying to create a new God.

While their stated reasons may differ, I think in attempting to build artificial general intelligence, they are really looking to create idols — human-made cult images.

After all, AGI is something we humans are creating. It does not appear to us in a dream, or a vision. We may not understand AGI or how it works, but it is clearly not an intangible spirit in which we, in turn, are created in its image.

Attempts to build AGI depend on the flotsam and jetsam of our own humanity

Instead, humans are attempting to build AGI, neural brick by neural brick, trained on bits of science and bits of alchemy, created from the flotsam and jetsam of our own humanity, with the hopes that it will somehow learn “to accomplish any intellectual task that human beings or animals can perform” — in other words, we are creating AGI in our own image.

According to the Old Testament, the golden calf was an idol created by the Israelites when Moses went up to Mount Sinai to collect the Ten Commandments and they feared he would not return. They asked Aaron to create a god for them — so he collected the Israelites’ golden earrings and ornaments, constructed a "molten calf" and they worshipped it. When Moses returned, he was so angry that he broke the two tablets of the Ten Commandments and burnt the golden calf.

We want certainty in the face of uncertainty

Whether you believe in God or not, it’s clear that you can’t fashion one out of gold or stone, nor can you build one out of neural network connections. But time and time again, we humans try to build things that approximate what we think could be divine — that we could perceive, in our limited human way, as sacred, as hopeful, as protective, or even as fearful, as a god would be. And just as often, some humans try to profit — or ‘prophet’ — off of our tendency to want to build cult images that we worship out of hope that they will save us or fear they will destroy us.

We do this because we are human. We want certainty in the face of uncertainty. AI, of course, offers none of that. We don’t know how today’s AI will evolve — or how quickly. We don’t know how it will affect the workforce, or politics, or elections, or our daily lives.

We don’t know how AI really works

And most of all, we don’t even know how AI really works. Even the scientists who build it, who have been evolving the industry for decades, don’t really know. Way back in 2017, Will Knight reported for MIT Technology Review that this is “The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI” — that “no one really knows how the most advanced algorithms do what they do. That could be a problem.” That has not changed — if anything, the advances in generative AI of the past year are even less well-understood.

I don’t know the religious belief systems of AI leaders from OpenAI, whose stated mission is “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity”; or Anthropic, which has received hundreds of millions from effective altruism adherents to build AGI ‘safely’; or any of the other doomers or accelerationists who want to find out what the ‘getting there’ means for ‘getting’ to AGI, even if no one has a solid definition of AGI (or would have a way of recognizing if it arrived).

Don’t rely on the false prophets

But I do know that any religious belief system shared by a group can fairly easily morph into seeking to create a manmade idol that the group believes in and even worships. It was true for Israelites that worshipped the golden calf, and it can be just as true today as the world tries to grapple with the future of humanity, our planet, and AI.

I do agree with Romero at the end of his post, where he says that “in the absence of something larger than oneself to lean on — and in the face of the impossibility of science, progress, and reason to offer an answer to the deepest questions of what any of this means — we had to invent it. A new god, a new guide, a new purpose to carry us forward and help us navigate to shore this endless sea of internal despair and external meaninglessness.”

He may call it a god, I call it an idol — but yes, a new guide, a new era, to help us navigate the future. We would do well to keep this in mind as we move forward and various groups try to convince us all that their idol is the golden calf we should believe in.

No one knows what the future will hold when it comes to AGI. So the ones who purport to know all the answers and want us to follow them are, in my opinion, false prophets.