The Messiah is an A.I.

And A.I. is a dominatrix

I recently interviewed Paul Schütze about the myths that made Artificial Intelligence, an overview of the societal regimes that keep us trapped in and perpetuate the very system causing the crisis by promising technological solutions to the crisis. The conversation was an excellent follow-up to my interview with artist John Wild on reimagining Artificial Intelligence, and I highly recommend both conversations. 

John described how the roots of AI are in Cosmism, a Russian ideology that mixed Christianity and Futurism with the goal of ending all death and resurrecting the dead. These beliefs can be found alive and kicking today in Silicon Valley. Paul described the technological inevitability of A.I as it is marketed as a necessary tool for mitigating against not only the system, but also the problems it exacerbates like fresh water shortages, resource rushes, and gross energy over-consumption. He gave the fascinating example of a desert in Chile which is being mined using algorithms and machine learning in order to optimise the finite resources being extracted at a greater rate. The promise of A.I is as artificial as its intelligence: hard limits can be overcome with digital code. 

Man cannot seem to grasp his finitude, the beauty of his biological limits; from this same tradition of thought are borne the men who cannot seem to grasp the finitude of the planet and her resources. In a bid to escape mortality, they build rockets and throw money at fertility research, seeing in declining birth rates the decline of their own biology. Women’s bodies become another resource limit to be overcome, just like the mines in Chile and the atmosphere choked with greenhouse gases.

The Judeo-Christian influence cannot be understated, but there’s another angle to such religiosity. In his paper, The Impacts of AI Futurism, Paul suggests there is an “unspoken hope” that A.I, a superior intelligence, will arrive and “mend all of our problems”, that it will save us from ourselves—that it will save us from our sins. Father is an A.I.. Silicon Valley has a long relationship with clawing after eternal life, convinced mechanical pumps or cloud-software will unlock access to the infinite, but the relationship to A.I as a possible saviour speaks more to the desperation of man to be relieved of his guilt and responsibility on the mortal plane, the desire to be absolved and held; the desire to submit.

Sado-masochism abounds in modernity: Politics has become a circus of Daddy-figures who make grand promises and deliver only chaos. Yet still, we vote them in, desperate to be told some version of the truth that makes sense of the pain we feel. And even when Daddy doesn’t deliver, even when he does us harm, we vote him in again and again because that’s what good lambs do and my god it’s not just the billionaires that want to reach heaven.

But sado-masochism is not always a true binary. How often have we heard those stories of the board members and CEOs and powerful men handing themselves over to the fetishised care of a dominatrix for a few hours of painful relief from their duties? Daddy needs saving from himself, too. Jesus is an A.I. and A.I. is a dominatrix.

Bound up in the hierarchies of domination, these sadists seek to submit to something greater than themselves, something infinite, something greater, something that can take the matter out of their hands, in both senses of the turn of phrase. Unable to pause—for pausing would require leadership skills and anyone who seeks absolution in a Daddy figure is nothing more than a child in a suit—they pray, instead, for a technological miracle, a superior intelligence to rescue the global system from its failures and its ungodly reliance on matter. 

A.I. provides a bountiful distraction to the material world, promulgating the myth of dematerialisation as a solution to the climate crisis, just as dematerialising a human—splitting soul from body—provides the solution of eternal life. These myths are everywhere, for the Daddies on podiums are often backed by extremist religious-nationalists who would exalt the burning of the world, and all its heathens. What matter is a planet when you have heaven to escape to? The only true crisis is a crisis of faith—our Lord and Saviour is coming, in 0s and 1s.

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