“We’re planning a way to allow wide swaths of the world to elect representatives to a new governance board… Because if I weren’t in on this I’d be, like, ‘Why do these fuckers get to decide what happens to me?’”
(Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, speaking in 2016, quoted by Jill Lepore)
“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
EthicalDative 
A Song Is Worth a Thousand Explanations? Depends on the Singer.
I reproach myself by saying it’s a ludicrous form of callousness to feel personally aggrieved when famous people of the era I live in and whom I admire kill themselves. I mean feeling upset to the extent that I find myself unable (unwilling?) to view or read any work by or about such persons after their death. I didn’t know them personally, they weren’t loved ones, significant others, or the like. They didn’t sin against any God of mine. But I’m pissed that they coldheartedly took themselves out, that they were the architects of their own loss. And mine! Two instances are Robin Williams and Anthony Bourdain.
Cat Stevens didn’t kill himself, but he disappeared from music into Yusuf Islam. Certain of his songs had been high points in my development. They had melodic, rhythmic, lyrical staying power. Epic simplicity, like thunder. His retreat from that art stung me.
Books aren’t songs, but they can be a good vehicle for explaining things. Islam’s memoir, Cat on the Road to Findout,” is out in October. He published another book in 2014, Why I Still Carry a Guitar, described as “his direct explanation to the Muslim community”:
“There were some threats coming from the jurisprudence sections of the Muslim community — ‘It’s dangerous stuff to be out there, boasting of your talents and showing yourself off,’” he said, sighing. “But my art was something much deeper than that.”
I will read his memoir in due time because he’s not dead. Because I want to know more about his spiritual life. Because he’s alive. And he’s singing.
(Grayson Haver Currin, “Yusuf Islam Wants to Explain Himself,” New York Times, 9-15-25)
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved