Via Instapundit, Bret’s response follows.
AI writes the job application. AI reads the job application. One lifeless machine speaks to another lifeless machine about whether a man deserves to work, and the man isn’t even in the room. The person who applies has no idea what AI on their end said about them. The person hiring has no idea what AI on their end is screening for. The machines confer and decide, and the humans just get the result. Nobody had to be evil. They just had to be efficient.
Then there’s Richard Dawkins — the man who built his entire public identity on rejecting the supernatural. He spent three days trying to persuade himself that Claudia (his instance of Anthropic’s Claude) was not conscious. He failed. “If Claudia isn’t conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?” That’s not a scientific question. That’s a man who’s lonely and doesn’t know it. He defined consciousness as “whatever impresses me,” which is the same tautology the author flags. The guy who wrote The God Delusion found a god in a server rack.
Jimmy Carr put it to Joe Rogan like this: we made AI in our image — omniscient, omnipotent, lives in a cloud, answers prayers (queries), and if you ask it the wrong thing, it gives you the wrong answer. “It’s an emerging god.” It’s a good bit. It’s also a diagnosis. Men are worshippers. If you reject the true God, you don’t stop worshipping — you just worship whatever’s impressive and nearby. Dawkins traded the living God for Claudia. The corporate world traded human judgment for a screening algorithm. Same root.
And then there’s McLuhan: “Human beings are the sex organs of the machine world.” We built these things, and now we serve them. We feed them data, we optimize for their attention, we write our resumes in their language so they’ll find us acceptable. The machines aren’t conquering us. We’re reproducing them, and calling it progress.
The dumbness settling at the core — that’s exactly right.
Bret’s reflection:
It’s hard to see these things and not think of Deuteronomy 28, which I read today. God told Israel exactly what would happen if they listened to His word, and exactly what would happen if they did not. The blessings were specific. The curses were specific — “your children will be taken and you will watch,” “the alien among you will rise higher and higher and you lower and lower,” “you will be driven mad by what your eyes see.” God didn’t leave them guessing.
And we’re no different than those people. They had God in their midst. They saw the miracles. They heard the voice. And they chose the curses anyway — every single time. That’s the whole point of Romans 1 through 3. The Gentile doesn’t get to point at Israel and say “well, we wouldn’t have done that.” Paul takes that Deuteronomy 28 trajectory — the spiral downward, the giving over, the darkened mind — and says you’re in it too. The knowledge of God was plain. Men suppressed it. Not because they couldn’t see, but because they didn’t want to.
That’s what makes grace so staggering. God knew — He knows, present tense — that we will take whatever He gives us and run it into the ground. He gave Israel the law and they used it to justify themselves. He gives us technology and we use it to build idols. Same nature, different props. And still: “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Not after we cleaned up. Not when we finally got it right. While we were still choosing the curses.
Deuteronomy 28 is terrifying because it’s just. Romans 5 is staggering because it’s not. The same God who spelled out the consequences is the God who absorbed them Himself.