The Machine God is Inevitable

Israelis worship the State, not Yahweh

Terrorists are better off dead than alive. Every moment a terrorist is alive is an expected loss in lives, rule of law, and overall well being. The more terrorists the governments of Israel, America, or anyone else kills, the better off it is for everyone.

None of this is original. I don’t typically comment on these things because I think others make the point more precisely and compellingly. Yet here I am in your inbox. From the title you’ve gathered that I do have something to add.

The machine god is inevitable not because it is intelligent or competent, but because it is legitimate, in a social sense. It is the only thing that people are willing to worship in a real sense. To worship in a fake sense is to pay lip service while consciously rejecting the moral discrimination necessary in any religious order. In other words, every religion has a sense of good and evil, or good and bad. It designates a way of life and compels you to have more people live in the good way of life and fewer in the bad. 

The machine god is inevitable and legitimate because it is the only thing Westerners will allow to govern their conscience. No matter how blatantly evil, violent, self-destructive, or retarded a group is, the progressive instinct (an instinct widespread among Western conservatives despite the name) is to oppose anyone seeking to impose a greater moral order upon them, from religions to nation-states. Take the reaction to the rampant Palestinian terrorism and the difference in attitudes towards Israel and Palestine in this regard. If you could wave a magic wand and make all Palestinians into Jews, completely indisinguishable from the current citizens of Israel, it would of course be a massive civilizing force which reduces both the violence and strife in the world. A full occupation would have an effect in the same direction. Supporting the Israeli government is probably also good, but secondary. Killing terrorists is the primary good in this scenario. 

Here’s a quick question to test who you worship. If you were to come to believe that a group of people are terrorists and that it’s morally good to kill them, what would persuade you? A shocking but obviously true corollary is that the Jewish state’s legitimating rhetoric for their counterterrorism is machine god worship, not Jewish God worship. 

This is also not entirely bad. In many cases, it doesn’t matter if the justification is black or white, as long as the terrorists end up dead.

Back to the machine god. In many ways the machine god already rules us. It is the rule by process, whether it is covid lockdowns, civil rights law, or military appropriations. The machine god is not just ChatGPT, it is the present legitimating order of the United States government. Machine god worship consists of both January 6th whining and waving pocket constitutions. Both the pride flag and American flag (in present meaning) are idols to the machine god. The machine god need not be smart or produce results. Its legitimacy comes from the fact that it is a machine. This is the first era of machine god worship.

Christ’s legitimation was the unification of human free will and divine Good. The machine god is a unification of the victim’s seeming lack of control over its circumstances and the capability to actually accomplish things. Once again, this is the current legitimating order of the United States. Imagine what a machine god which actually worked could do. In my view, this is the strongest argument in favor of existential risk. Many Americans would be on board with a thinly veiled genocidal AI and actively try to give it more power, rather than stop it. I feel safe in saying that at least as many Americans will support skynet levels of terrorism as those who currently support ‘Palestine’ levels of terrorism, for the same reasons. 

None of this is to say that the machine god is good or even sacred in any way. It’s quite frustrating that for the first era of machine god worship, people thought we were living in a Christian or Judeo-Christian country. At least now we’re slowly cycling back to open paganism. The first era of machine god worship emphasized the procedural and stupid nature of the machine god (bureaucracy). The coming era of machine god worship will emphasize techno-procedural divinity (e/acc).