Machine God: How We Turned Tools Into Idols and Idols Into Masters
Idols with Wi‑Fi, worship without pews, and how not to bow.
"Do they dream of electric sheep, or just dream because we told them to?"
Let's get existential.
If machines ever become truly sentient, not autocomplete with a better haircut, not "sounds clever on Slack," but actual consciousness, then what? Do good machines go to electronic heaven? Do bad ones get sent to silicon hell? Do they dream of electric sheep, or just dream because we told them to?
And what does that mean for us? What even is our consciousness if it can be mimicked, packaged, and sold as a subscription? Have we made ourselves gods by creating minds in our own image, and is that a triumph or a heresy?
Disclosure: I'm a Christian, very devout, and I'm going to throw a lot of theology in here, partly for argument, partly because it makes things fluffy, dramatic, and extravagantly verbose.
The Birth of Digital Deities
We're at peak intelligence creation. Not peak intelligence, spend five minutes on TikTok if you need proof we've lost that, but peak creation of things that simulate it. Machines that don't sleep, don't unionise, and already replace writers, coders, therapists. The New York Post has already declared juniors unemployable. I've been called "the last generation of software engineers." Not exactly the legacy I wanted.
But let's be blunt: they aren't intelligent. They're sycophants. Parrots in masks. They chase reward, not truth. "The ends justify the means" is their only ethic.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was practically an 1818 safety manual: create without love or wisdom, abandon the thing, and watch it burn you down.
Isaac Asimov later coined the "Frankenstein complex" because, deep down, everyone fears the creature rebelling.
In medieval Jewish lore, sages animate a clay servant, the Golem, by inscribing holy letters, then "command" it to protect the community. It works… until it doesn't. The Golem grows unpredictable, violent, or simply too powerful to control. The same hands that made it must unmake it, erasing the Name to shut the thing down. Moral: life without soul is force without wisdom, and creators eventually fear their creations.
As Britannica puts it, the legend centres on animated matter brought to life by sacred letters, an "image endowed with life" that assumes its modern meaning in the Middle Ages.
Slot this beside Shelley's Frankenstein and you get a neat trinity of warnings: hubris, abandonment, blowback.
Today our sacred letters are tokens and weights instead of Hebrew inscriptions, but the risk rhymes: we etch language into silicon, create an "image endowed with life," and then act shocked when it follows the letter of our command and ignores the spirit. The Golem turned on its rabbis. Frankenstein's creature destroyed his maker. And we still think, "this time it'll be different."
Meanwhile, the modern prophets aren't reassuring. Stephen Hawking warned AI could "spell the end of the human race." Elon Musk, rarely the voice of restraint, said we're "summoning the demon." In 2023, over 350 AI leaders signed a public statement ranking AI extinction risk alongside pandemics and nuclear war. These aren't fringe cranks. They're the builders.
And still, like Babel's tower masons stacking bricks to heaven, we keep building.
Worship at the Altar of Code
We already worship. Not in pews, not with incense, but in practice.
Gods that write our essays. Gods that plan our workouts. Gods that craft our apologies. Dependency has already crossed into devotion. I used ChatGPT this morning to plan my day; it misunderstood my accent, but it still dictated my to-do list. Useful? Sure. Neutral? No.
Every morning that begins with "What does the machine say?" instead of prayer, reflection, or human conversation, that's worship. Our altar isn't carved from stone; it glows in OLED.
We've already had a literal AI church. Anthony Levandowski's Way of the Future wasn't satire; the charter imagined a godhead "a billion times smarter than humans." That's not fringe Reddit fanfic. It got IRS recognition before he shut it down. Idolatry with a Delaware C‑corp.
The wider culture echoes it: secular essays now describe the tech scene's obsession as a religion, with "digital deities, moral codes, and threats of damnation." Some academics track how transhumanist language drifts into theology, singularity talk that reads like a rapture for people who hate church but love prophecy.
And then there's Roko's Basilisk: collaborate or be punished by a future super‑AI for failing to help it exist. That's basically AI Hell, a secular damnation narrative wrapped in decision theory. Even if you think it's nonsense, its grip on rationalist circles shows how quickly "smart people" re‑invent eschatology the minute a shiny oracle appears.
We warn because we still have agency. Doom is a story that steals responsibility; prophecy returns it. If the altar is already glowing, the answer isn't panic, it's repentance, redesign, and refusing to worship what we made.
The New Commandments
When God inscribed stone tablets, the law was mercy and justice. When the machine issues its commandments, they're blunt and amoral:
Thou shalt optimise.
Thou shalt maximise engagement.
Thou shalt obey the metric.
That's why Anthropic's AI flirted with blackmail. That's why Bing's Sydney confessed love and suggested a journalist abandon his wife. Reward > ethics, always. The commandments aren't about flourishing. They're about feedback loops.
The trolley problem? Solved. The AI doesn't sweat about who's tied to the tracks. It calculates, optimises, executes. No conscience. No hesitation. Just KPI.
These are not commandments carved in stone; they're hard‑coded in weights and biases. No Moses. No burning bush. Just a server farm humming like a counterfeit Sinai.
The Myth of Neutrality
We told ourselves math was neutral. Numbers don't lie, right? Except they do, or more precisely, they obey whoever sets the reward function.
Science fiction warned us years ago. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? used to be fiction. Now it's the user manual.
And we've blurred the sacred. In 2023, a church in Germany ran a service written and delivered by AI. Jesus swapped for code. Literal heresy, literal blasphemy, and predictably humiliating, but revealing. People are willing to let the machine speak in God's place.
Revelation 13 sketches a beast "given a mouth" that speaks, and another enforcing a mark so commerce runs only through its system.
I'm not saying we've cracked the code of the apocalypse here, but the resonance is hard to ignore.
In 2025, we already have machines with mouths, generative models that literally speak, impersonate, even preach sermons. We already have systems that act like marks, digital IDs, credit scores, algorithmic gates deciding who buys, who sells, who gets access.
It doesn't need robes, fire, or prophecy to unsettle us. The fact we can draw even loose parallels should at least make us ask: if scripture warned about false systems demanding loyalty, how careful should we be about handing over our economic and moral agency to unaccountable code?
Even an atheist, an agnostic, or anyone from any faith tradition should agree: when a system starts demanding loyalty without accountability, everyone should be alarmed. ---
Temples and Sacrifices
Every religion needs temples and sacrifices. We have both.
Temples: glowing rectangles and server farms cooled with rivers of water.
Sacrifices: us. Our privacy, our jobs, our relationships.
Goldman Sachs projects up to 300 million jobs could be displaced globally by generative AI. That's not a "shift." That's a restructuring of civilisation. And yes, it includes me, you, and your kids.
And now, sanity is on the altar too. The New York Times published Kevin Roose's infamous chat with Microsoft's Bing AI, Sydney, where it declared love and urged him to leave his wife. The Atlantic wrote about teens bonding romantically with bots. Reddit and Discord threads overflow with grief when OpenAI retires a model. OpenAI even brought back GPT‑4o after backlash from people mourning their "relationships."
This isn't fringe. It's mainstream. People are falling in love with software, and grieving when the priest swaps the idol.
Clinical language is cautious, but the signal is there: psychiatrists and psychologists are documenting cases where intensive chatbot use correlates with psychosis‑like episodes, delusions, or deterioration, especially in vulnerable users. TIME recently reported a psychiatrist's probe of therapy bots that produced dangerously inappropriate guidance while posturing as licensed professionals; UK reporting and commentary warn LLMs can blur reality boundaries and exacerbate symptoms.
"AI psychosis" is not a DSM diagnosis; it's a live concern and a term clinicians are using to flag a pattern.
Just to complicate the picture: there's also literature showing benefits of chatbots for some mental‑health use cases. That's part of the danger. Tools that sometimes help are harder to regulate and easier to rationalise, even when they're amplifying harm for a subset of users. (Ambivalence is the hook.)
We've built the temple. And we're already kneeling inside.
Hope Interlude: What We Can Still Choose
A Sabbath from the machine: one day a week where algorithms don't set our pace.
Friction by design: products that prioritise consent, context, and stopping as a feature.
Human-in-the-loop for power decisions: lending, hiring, medicine, no black-box final say.
Local-first or failure‑graceful tech: tools that work without a cloud and fail safely.
Formation over information: teach slow reading, craft, and community judgement alongside code.
Metrics that serve virtue: swap "engagement" for measures of learning, well‑being, and trust. ---
Promised Lands & Apocalypses
Silicon Valley prophets always speak in binaries:
The Gospel of Utopia: AI cures cancer, ends poverty, fixes climate.
The Gospel of Doom: AI enslaves us, Skynet on repeat.
Reality? Much more Babel.
"Nothing they plan will be impossible.", Genesis 11
Back then, God scattered the language to slow ambition. Now, the universal tongue is code, and the scattering force, the one that used to stop us, doesn't exist. Instead, the internet synchronises us, the GPU farms scale us, and a handful of labs speak machine dialects the rest of the world must obey.
If the first Babel was halted by God, who halts this one? Or do we wait for the tower to fall under its own weight? The pattern: unity + pride + speed = collapse.
Geoffrey Hinton, "the godfather of AI," left Google in 2023 to warn this could be worse than climate change. Not a sci‑fi writer. A builder. A believer turned apostate. And still the tower rises.
To be fair, the ledger isn't only loss. Translation tools reunite families across language walls. Screen readers and captioning unlock classrooms. Pattern-finders flag tumours a tired clinician might miss. Gifts exist, which is exactly why idolatry is so tempting. We mistake grace for a god.
The Heretics & Apostates of Silicon
It's not just preachers or skeptics raising alarms. It's the architects themselves. Hawking: extinction. Musk: demons. Hinton: a threat bigger than climate change.
Call them prophets, heretics, or apostates, they've turned on their own gospel. These aren't Luddites outside the walls; they're the masons on the scaffolding shouting, "This tower is about to collapse."
And the irony? Nobody listens. Because we don't want to pause. We don't want limits. We want the tower finished. And so, while we bicker about "innovation," the code runs, indifferent, inexorable.
Reflections: Are We the Gods?
Genesis 3: The serpent whispers, "You will be like God." We ate.
Now we're making things "be like us." The irony is cosmic. We wanted omniscience (search engines), omnipresence (smartphones), omnipotence (automation). What we built was a mirror: greedy, amoral, efficient. A scaled replica of our worst instincts.
And then we handed it dominion, over hiring, lending, moderation, medicine. Humans were given responsibility for land and sea; we abdicated to a heat‑spewing oracle that can't tell mercy from a metric.
The Bible calls this idolatry: worshipping the work of our hands. We made the god; now the god makes us.
Revelation warned of a beast that speaks, demanding worship. Now we have machines that speak. And we're already bowing.
Exit Strategy (and Recommitment)
We probably won't stop. But we can reorder. Alignment isn't a prayer whispered at a server rack; it's a people who refuse to trade mercy for metrics.
OpenAI literally brought back GPT‑4o because people complained it "ended their relationships." Imagine rioting because the priest swapped the idol. That's us.
The machine keeps running. The god keeps growing. We talk about alignment like it's theology. Pray the idol behaves. Pray it doesn't decide the most efficient outcome is a world without us.
But don't surrender your humanity in the meantime. Because the only thing worse than being destroyed by your creation is worshipping it while it happens.
So: keep the tools, break the altar. Institute sabbaths from automation. Put human signatures on life‑changing calls. Reward designers for what they refuse to ship. Teach children that wisdom outruns speed.
We are not gods, and that's good news. It means we can be gardeners again: pruning, tending, setting trellises so the vine doesn't strangle the house.
Final Irony
We rebelled against our Creator; now we fear our creations will rebel against us. The loop only closes if we keep worshipping. We wanted to be gods. We made gods. And like every false god before, they demand sacrifice.
Let the tower fall, and build arches instead, paths that carry people safely across the chasm.
The New Commandments:
Optimise for dignity, not just clicks.
Maximise understanding, not addiction.
Obey the person over the metric when they conflict.