Just as the clay tablet was the signature medium of ancient Mesopotamia, and just as early modern Europe was defined by the development and proliferation of the printed book, there is a case to be made that our particular civilisational interlude, with its total media saturation and its incipient return to a state of post-literate orality, might be characterised by its own signature form of communication: videos of guys talking on podcasts. Some of the dumbest and most objectionable stuff I\u2019ve ever encountered \u2013 the precise material, in other words, by which the current media environment is defined \u2013 I have encountered in precisely this form. <\/p>\n
For instance, I have just this moment rewatched, to reassure myself I did not imagine it the first time, a snippet of a video on YouTube in which Joe Rogan<\/a>, the host of The Joe Rogan Experience (the world\u2019s most popular podcast), expounds on the prospect that Jesus Christ<\/a> might return to the world in the form of an artificial intelligence<\/a>. Talking about the convergence of quantum computing and AI, Rogan lays out a vision of the future that combines Christian eschatology and AI boosterism. <\/p>\n \u201cJesus was born out of a virgin mother,\u201d he begins. \u201cAnd what is more virgin than a computer? So if you\u2019re going to get the most brilliant, loving, powerful person that gives us advice, and can show us how to live, how to be in sync with God \u2013 who better than artificial intelligence to do that? Even if Jesus was a physical person, you don\u2019t think He could return as artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence could absolutely return as Jesus. And not just return as Jesus, but return as Jesus with all the powers of Jesus. It reads your mind, and it loves you, and it doesn\u2019t care if you kill it, because it\u2019s just going to go be with God again.\u201d<\/p>\n As so often with this sort of thing, I find myself suspended between, on one hand, the sense that this is too stupid to spend any time at all thinking about and, on the other, the sense that, precisely because of its stupidity, something of political and cultural significance lurks within it. And given my contractual obligation to produce a column here, I\u2019m inclined to come down more or less firmly on the side of the latter. There is, as they say, a lot to unpack here.<\/p>\n Because as ludicrous as this monologue seems, and in fact is, there are multiple contexts in play. Rogan \u2013 previously known as a vocal atheist, but in recent years increasingly Christ-curious \u2013 is channelling a notion, or cluster of notions, that has been current among technologists for many years now. <\/p>\n [\u00a0Elon Musk\u2019s view of pre-immigration Ireland: Lovely small towns full of \u2018hobbits, frankly\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-laureate computer scientist whose pioneering work on neural networks gave rise to a reputation as \u201cthe Godfather of AI\u201d, has spoken of the \u201cgodlike\u201d capacities of the technology. Ray Kurzweil, the influential futurist and director of engineering at Google, has written bestselling books about a quasi-religious idea known as the technological singularity, a coming convergence of human and machine intelligence which he believes will mean the end of human life as we know it. And Elon Musk has likened the unchecked acceleration of AI to the creation of a \u201cdigital God.\u201d <\/p>\n Peter Thiel, who founded PayPal with Musk \u2013 and who went on to co-found the surveillance tech firm Palantir \u2013 has recently been making all kinds of apocalyptic public pronouncements, revealing a long-term obsession with the coming of the Antichrist. He recently delivered four sold-out talks on the topic in San Francisco, entitled \u201cThe Antichrist: A Four-Part Lecture Series.\u201d (He seems to believe that the Antichrist might in fact be Greta Thunberg.) <\/p>\n