“No such world-governance board was ever established. There has been no A.I. constitutional convention. These, er, fellows, are still deciding what happens to the rest of us.”
(Jill Lepore, “How We the People Lost Control of Our Lives, and How We Can Get It Back,” New York Times, 9-17-25)

Quick aside re Sam’s remark: No good news comes from a statement containing the word “swaths.” “Just sayin’,” as Sam would say.

 An opinion is a choice. I choose to deem Sam Altman less smart than he thinks. Cunning yes. A consecrated shill, yes. That’s what CEOs do. Less power, not more, to him, and God bless.

AI, for all the fakery it enables, is still artificial. What it fakes best is intelligence. Artificial anything is still enacted artifice, concocted, confected, set in motion not by divine puff but by sweating, swearing, fallible humans. “Convincing” doesn’t cut it. The Turing test always seemed to me slightly beside the point.

My opinion that AI will always be an elaborate fake will wither on the vine. Perhaps it will go down as wrong, which is different. Nevertheless, holding it here and now is fostering in the head I inhabit the birth of an inkling of what religion is about. 

Religion could have civic value were it enacted (“Practiced”? “Re-instantiated”? What’s the word?) widely, personally, privately, worthily, in the spirit of what is worthy of worship. Social blessedness could accrue from subscribing to transcendence as against devilish cleverness. In a religious world the killing would stop, full stop. AI would receive a true name such as “advanced computation.” Empathy would not be demonized. Those three things alone would imbue holiness with intelligence and vice versa — a redemptive, liberating, superhuman prise de conscience. 

If that leap of good faith needed a name, it could be christened an advent, a new dispensation, something like Actual General Intelligence, AGI, to be venerated through the judicious study of languages, mathematics, science, philosophy, literature, scriptures, art, and traditions, in tandem with skill development for sustainable building, transport and crop growing.

I had jotted the above on a Thursday morning before opening my Poetry magazine to catch up on some reading. Lo verily, there I encountered the poem by Samatar Elmi which I cite in its entirety below.* It skewers uncannily something I was imperfectly foreshadowing: the golden calving of C++ Babelism hoist Godward on its own lighted gasses.

*On second thought, I decided to link to the poem.

“Our Founder,” by Samatar Elmi, Poetry, September 2025.

(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved