When I was young, I married a man who was raised among animists in the middle of Borneo. When I was older, I worked among artificial intelligence-ists in the USA and Europe. As one discovers, when one lives among various beliefs, the animists and tech bros have more in common that they could imagine. The modern tech bro may consider himself far advanced from the tribal animist, since he has access to more knowledge and agency in this modern world. While I am grateful that we are no longer headhunting, as the tribes among whom my ex-husband grew up did not too long ago, I think we are now as barbaric for believing that everything has value only when it becomes a data point that is manipulable. We have adopted a strange belief that everything is harvest- able and manipulable in the world of data. It is not.
And I wonder why we are so afraid of death. I’ve often thought, once you’re dead, you won’t know the difference—so what is there to fear? But I think the fear of death is much deeper than that. It has to do with identity and the life we live today.
In fact, they know that humans are not mere machines.
Something very interesting to me is that in the West, we moved away from monarchy to legislatures and now to courts, which are meant to empower. But we’ve gone so far that we no longer have the rule of law to protect us—we have laws ruling us. Similarly, I think we’ve moved from backbreaking labor and disease to greater knowledge, and now with that knowledge, we have increased our tools —and simultaneously have increased our fears. Thanks to those fears, we have pursued more technologies to control ourselves, insufficient as we are. In this regard, we now want a greater system to rule us, and as history shows, every system ends up failing or becoming tyrannical.
The difference with AI is that we’ve come upon something we don’t fully understand. To me, it’s not much different than the animism I grew up with in Southeast Asia, except now it’s not spiritual; it’s mechanical. We are creating machines using the best of our resources—our ideas and energy. We encourage people to turn off their lights, take shorter showers, travel less to save the planet, but at the same time, we are feeding every last kilowatt to serve our machines.
Let us not pretend this isn’t hypocritical. The fact that the World Wildlife Fund posts messages across Europe encouraging young people to take public transport to save the planet, while never criticizing the vast amounts of energy being consumed by the machines, is heinous. Our best resources—land, water, energy, and time—are being consumed by these machines, and we even admire them for chewing up and regurgitating versions of our own creativity, versions of ourselves.
A certain fear of death is appropriate, because death is anti-life. But death can come in many forms. It comes in a physical, bodily form; and it comes in a spiritual form. We fear things that can kill the body: disease, traffic accidents, viral outbreaks, human error. But we should collectively fear even more those things that can kill both the body and the soul of humanity. I am in no way being melodramatic. I want us to be honest and realistic.
We are here. We have abandoned what C.S. Lewis called *the Tao*, the universal good, and now we are frantically worrying about the environment and human rights. We are so frustrated and disillusioned that we are abdicating our very own roles. All our progress and conquests reduce the world and ourselves to data points for measuring, managing, and manipulating. It is quite easy to think of ourselves as wise and clever when everything we touch is just a data point, neatly explained in superficial terms. We imagine we are conquering, but we find ourselves insufficient.
Rather than returning to a humble posture of respect and accepting our limitations, we are convinced that the solution is to give up on ourselves entirely. C.S. Lewis said, “The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed.” That is a succinct way of describing what is happening now. Humanity is losing its value and divinity as technique develops.
God’s view is the view of mind as such, for it corresponds to the real structure of existence. The tendency of any mind, in proportion as it overcomes its creaturely limitations, must be to gravitate towards the divine centre, and share the divine view of things. That is the goal; it cannot be the starting-point. (Farrar, A. A Rebirth of Images. Dacre Press. 1949)
