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Paper short abstract

The religious urge to people the world has evolved from unresponsive nature-spirits to artificial beings created under the command of self-proclaimed godbuilding geniuses. This talk sketches the AI pandemonium, concluding with a rather cute demon that can nonetheless act as humanity’s adversary.

Paper long abstract

As Ellul reminded us, peopling the world with non-human entities has always been a key function of religion. Whether embodied in stones, flora, fauna, rivers, or mountains, these imaginary beings remained notoriously unresponsive to human communication, and thus the urge to create intelligent Others persists as a constant in human history. The existential loneliness of humanity in a cosmos reorganised by mathematics, priesthoods, and philosophy has never been fully alleviated, as rather recently evidenced by the rise of New Age beliefs or the post-socialist resurgence of traditional religion. Today, the oligarchs controlling AI, whose narratives remain steeped in religious or quasi-religious traditions, continue the work of the priests, but their army of developers even creates artificial beings, not merely imaginary ones embodied in nature. Still they see themselves as god-builders and geniuses. Cloaked in such divine trappings, AI has spawned, as Pasquinelli calls it, a collective demon that works tirelessly and invisibly in the backroom of capital; and as Chun wrote, like all slaves, these demonic processes define and challenge the position of the master. So let us look at the AI demons: those from the anthropological and cosmological planes (such as God and Demogorgon), moving through the spirit of humanity, and concluding with a peculiar, rather cute demon that can nevertheless act as humanity’s adversary and is perhaps the most poignant embodiment of AI’s visible role in the contemporary world.