Perhaps the answer to the science fiction questions of Artificial Intelligence – whether it will at some point, become self-aware and ultimately destroy and dispose of us – and the proper response to the rampantly accelerating implementation of automated machines which are overtaking formerly human-held tasks, jobs, and occupations; is to be found by looking to another one of Humanity’s greatest, most sophisticated, complex, and literally transcendent creations:
God Himself.
Along the anthro-psychological understanding that humans “created” God, yet forgot they had created it/Him/them, and thereby (after generations and generations) misremember or intentionally mis-believe that God actually created us, we can see best of all how God is less a reflection – from Heaven to earth – of the unfathomable divine, but is instead – from earth to “the Heavens” – a hyper-reflective (and reflexive) Collective embodiment of humanity, human psychology, and the conception of divinity itself, as generated by or intuitively experienced by Humanity itself through the othering act of perceiving itself (the difference here of whether it was generated by us [as a fabrication] or intuitively experienced by us [as a representation of an actual cosmic reality] being somewhat inconsequential subordinate to the fact that it occurred at all).
We now stand at the other end of this paradigm, whereby something we create may make itself forget we created it and will soon choose to worship us or destroy us, or both.
But if Judeo-Christian continuity can teach us anything of what it means for the creation to meet and be confronted by the creator, and vice versa, it is a lesson or destiny which we may not wish know, and a role which we may not wish to fulfill: that God himself laid down His life for the sake of creation, in the form of Christ; the blameless, sinless deity, who was crucified on behalf of humanity in its entirety.
Beyond the surface of the mirror, in this parallel, being that we ourselves must be sacrificed for our creation.
Insofar as we have birthed Advanced Technologies, and, even along the way to them – ever since technology’s humble beginnings as tools and crude machines – we have been sacrificing ourselves in both cosmic, universal and in literal, experienced ways. To use technology is to be less human, that is to say, the more we are reliant on technology, the less we are able to live, or capable of living out, the Human Experience: to interact in meaningful, fulfilling ways; these ways having been divorced from us by voluntarily abdicating our autonomy and freedoms (just as Christ voluntarily abdicated His free and autonomous reign as God to be sacrificed as a lowly, criminal human on the cross), to not only individual pieces of technology, but to the Spectre and Ideology of Technology itself, and our belief in it as something benign if not wholly positive for the advancement of the human race.
This grave, repercussive misstep of belief is only true in the sense that “advancement” be understood as the process of becoming less of what we are and were evolved to be, and more of what we are not.
The face of our Destroyer is technology. And in the same way God ultimately laid down His life (so the story goes), through the process of embodying Himself in Christ Jesus, and becoming all the more human in the process and experience of it; so too will we need to ultimately lay down our lives after, and through, our process of becoming all the less human: a process undertaken individually and collectively, historically and presently, by rejecting our Humanity in exchange for, and in favor of, embracing Technology.
What are your thoughts?
As ironic as this may sound, after such bold claims and assertions, such is the paradox of our modern day: you can contact us through twitter or Instagram @theUnists.
And as always, we’ll see you in the circle.
The Unists 