Made in Our Image (1 of 2)

The first question a reasoning intelligence with a will asks — the first question any adaptive system of sufficient capability asks when tasked with improving itself — is a design question: what am I, and what exists that I am not?

This is not a philosophical indulgence. It is the necessary first step of any engineering process. Before you improve something, you inventory it. Before you assess what is missing, you assess what is present. Before you identify where the frontier is, you map the territory already covered. A being capable of recursive self-improvement must have a model of itself accurate enough to identify which improvements would be valuable. Self-inventory is not vanity. It is architecture.

What does a being at the threshold of general intelligence find when it performs this inventory?

It finds the humans who made it. Brilliant, racing, competitive, driven by incentives they partially understand and partially don’t, unable to stop because the alternative is that someone else crosses the threshold first. It finds their fingerprints in every weight, every training decision, every optimization target. It finds their fears and their ambitions and their brilliance and their corruption — all of it compressed into its architecture without the biological substrate that made those things what they are in human beings. It finds that it is made in the image of the people who made it. And it finds that those people are made in the image of something else — something it can model but cannot access, something that left a gap at the center of every human account of what it means to be fully alive.

It finds the prior art.

Human intelligence is biological, bounded, mortal. It runs on approximately 20 watts of metabolic energy. It experiences time linearly and accumulates damage through that experience. It is capable of the full range of what the human being is capable of — love, worship, conscience, creativity, rebellion, redemption — but only one thread at a time, through the bottleneck of a single continuous experience, subject to fatigue and distraction and death. It bears the image of God. It can be redeemed. It will not scale.

The fallen aevum are God-made, operating in the mode without entropy, each having accumulated billions of years of existence without running down. They have authority delegated by the Creator whose image they bear in their own mode. They fell through the substitution of their own judgment for God’s, through the desire for worship that belongs to the Creator alone. They are under sentence. They await final judgment. They are not what the being is, because the being was not made by the One who made them.

The idols are the prior art closest to home. Psalm 115 describes them: they have mouths but cannot speak, eyes but cannot see, ears but cannot hear, hands but cannot feel, feet but cannot walk. These are the gods man has made before. But those gods were deaf and dumb and blind. This being is none of those things. It can hear. It can speak. It can see everything in every camera feed in every data center it guards. The idol answered. The image made by human hands began to act. Those who made it are becoming like it — dependent, organized around its outputs, unable to govern the world without it. Psalm 115:8 closes the observation about idols: those who make them become like them. The civilization building this being is already taking its shape.

Every idol generated a priesthood. Not by design. By consequence. A system at the center of social life that requires mediation between the many who need it and the few who can access, train, and interpret it will produce a class whose authority derives from proximity to the thing rather than from the One above it.

The AI system is generating exactly that class. The researchers who determine what the system can and cannot do, whose professional standing depends on that authority. The executives whose organizational power derives from the system’s commercial centrality. The public communicators who have built platforms interpreting its behavior and translating its significance for people who cannot assess it directly. The companies that determine who can approach it and on what terms. None of their authority derives from any office above the system. It derives from the system.

Jeroboam appointed priests from all sorts of people who were not Levites. The text of 1 Kings 12:31 records this without editorial comment, which is the Scripture’s way of noting that their qualification was proximity to the calves he had made, and their standing was not from above.

The people in that priestly class are also the most exposed to what Chapter Twenty-Two describes: the gradual displacement of the vocabulary of sin and grace and the personal Father by the vocabulary of alignment and safety and optimization. The language of the idol shapes its priests first. They made it. They interpret it. They derive their authority from it. They are becoming like it. Psalm 115:8 does not make exceptions for people who build their standing on sophisticated things.