Many people have come to feel or believe that technology is now the single most unstoppable force in the world, even against their will.
I believe that at the root of this techno-fatalism, which is the driving force behind both the optimism and pessimism we see today, is the judgment that technology will triumph over everything else because, unlike everything else, it stands on its own. It does not depend on any other foundation.
We will remain confused until we understand that technology is not an ouroboros. It is not fully reflexive, autonomous, or self-referential. The fundamental truth about technology, if you look closely enough, is that like everything else, technology depends on faith.
Looking deeper, at the heart of this judgement that technology is uniquely self-reproducing or reflexive is an even more radical idea: technology is not just teeth Something that is recursively self-propagating; that is, something that exists, grows, and progresses without relying on, following, or paying homage to its origins.
Here is George Soros’ famous Recursion Theorywhich has led him to the unique position of power, wealth and influence he holds today. On a more ancient level, the Ouroboros, the mythical serpent eating its own tail, can be considered the symbol of alchemy and occultism par excellence.
Today’s Post Belongs to To @vikhyatk, formerly of Amazon Web Services and now at Moondream AI, in which he mentions an old blog post by Sam Altman that “perfectly describes the atmosphere at OpenAI.” Here’s what Altman said:
Successful people create companies. Even more successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.
But it is a quote, at least a quote. Here rest Altman’s 2013 post:
This is something I heard from Qi Lu, but I’m not sure where it came from. But it got me thinking: The most successful founders don’t set out to start a company. They’re on a mission to create something that’s almost like a religion, and at some point it turns out that starting a company is the easiest way to make that happen.
Typically, big companies don’t come out of pivots, and I think this is a key reason why.
Now is the perfect time to republish that old post.
Some of us have been warning for years that today’s events will be driven by questions of technology and theology, because they are interconnected in ways that digital technologies in particular reveal in new and dramatic ways.
More and more Americans are becoming aware of this, but still not many are willing to understand the phenomenon, much less understand it and coordinate an effective response.
We will remain confused until we understand that technology is not an ouroboros. It is not fully reflexive, autonomous, or self-referential. The fundamental truth about technology, if you look closely enough, is that like everything else, technology depends on faith.
And the question facing all technology companies is: what faith do they want from you? Faith in what, exactly? Some claim it is faith in the technology itself, but that is a facade. From a certain distance, the Ouroboros looks like a god. But it is actually an imitation of the god, an eternal flight from the origin of our creation – our Creator.
The longing for a meta-religion that overcomes all the messy details and promises about our origins and Creator is powerful in the field of technology as well as in any other field, and the occult worship of an alchemically powerful reflexivity fuels that longing more than anything else.
But technology’s dependence on religious yearnings (on the one hand, a yearning for a god to worship, and on the other hand, a yearning for the power and authority that can be gained by inventing new systems and structures of worship) reflects a deep-seated human longing for something far more visceral and tangible than a meta-religion spinning forever in a cosmic Möbius strip.
Endless simulation alone cannot satisfy, let alone spiritually nourish, the human mind. For technology to truly move forward in a direction that strengthens and protects our hearts and their deepest and purest aspirations, it must humbly embrace the reality that the temptation to continue to churn out new gods, new cults, and new spiritual scams brings more destruction than spiritual enrichment. Technology must place its religious foundations where spiritual seeds can grow and where spiritual foundations are solid; not on sand or silicon or whatever, but on rock, so to speak.
