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I have been feeling a bit off about the recent developments in the ai/tech sector. That I wasn't able to pin point the reason for my unease, despite trying to write about it, irked me even more.
A week into my self imposed hiatus from an LLM based nudge driven development, a thought sparked and took shape. I had heard the naysayers name-call the AI users, "cult-members", but filed it away under hyperbole. This time, while leisurely thinking about nothing in particular, I started noticing the similarities between various aspects of organized religions, their evolution, beliefs and their counterparts in the AI ecosystem.
My frustration reached a cresendo and I blurted my thoughts here. Not to be taken too seriously.
Promts are like prayers,
models are the gods,
tokens are the blessings
that can easily be bought.
If your prayers are unanswered plead another model,
change how you grovel or burn even more money,
the prompt-zealots say, "you see,
because how could ever a god be wrong"?
Software Engineering is transforming into
a superstitious, non-deterministic, religious cult.
And I, like many others, am helping it prosper
by going along to get along.
Enough rhyming. Play time is over.
The simliarities continue
Artificial General Intelligence is the ever illusive, ephemeral, omnipotent, omniscient supreme intelligence; the ultimate AI that will solve all problems for everyone, everywhere. This defintion justifies every expense, endeavoour, exploitation or transgression in persuit of this greater good / god.
The gatekeeping of the models, the walled gardens around them resemble the various cult-like religious organizations that prohibited access to the religious texts for centuries. Some force you to pay for access, let you pray more if you pay more, while others pretend to be benign and release the models-weights as open source, which any believer can pray-to in their own temple-at-home-mac-mini with a GPU.
The famous CEOs weild the same power and influence as the popes, ayatollahs or acharyas. Their reach going deep into the political governance structures of their respective countries, sometimes transcending1 national borders. They want cheap resources: water, land, electricity, rare-earth minirals & data and rarely want to pay taxes. Pervasive agressive lobbying ensures that elected, appointed and coronated world leaders alike show up at events with the custodians of the grand temples of AI.
The AI-consultants (myself included) are your local neighbourhood baba, peer, padre, claiming to be an expert in the divine literature, promising a solution to all your problems by integrating the god of AI in your work and life.
Then there are the zealots, who tout how, opening their hearts and hard-drives to AI has transformed their very existence. Their elaborate rites and rituals, tools2, tips and tricks outlining how they go about pleasing their god into granting their wish for a snippet of code, document, presentation is up for display in hopes of garnering some validation. Pseudoscientific grifts like plamistry3 and astrology4 , 5 find a home and empowerment in the AI-universe just like religion.
Some are mono-ai-thiests while others have different models that they prompt for different tasks, egging you to believe the futility of resistance and the inevitability of the judgement-day when their AI-god(s) completely take over.
In line with the tales of traditional gods who have forgotten their superpower because of a curse, the AI needs to be reminded of its capabilities, before your wish can be granted:
"You are a senior engineer at a billion dollar tech-startup ... now center a div Please make no mistakes. "
There also exist an equally vibrant cohort of anti-ai-thiests or a-ai-thiests comprising of voices like Zitron6, Gerard7 shining a light on the absurdities the way Hitchens and Dabholkar8 did to the religious ones.
The gullible masses, are being led astray and given jolts of free panic and anxiety with every press release (sometimes mis-)attributing the risks of job-loss9, cybersecurity10 threats, wars to the rise AI.
All this while, you dear human, have to keep shelling out more and more money at every altar, filling the coffers of the powers that be, in order to have a few more tokens (pun intended) of their blessings.
No one understands how neural networks work under the hood, why a specific input generates a specific output. AI like god, works in mysterious ways.
So what does the future of AI religions look like?
If AI delivers on its promises, what would the future look like a 1000 years from now? When human race has forgotten how to think, how to code, how to write, how to reason without the help of a chatbot - will the rites and rituals of that era look as ridiculuously superstitious and disconnected from reality, as the present day religious beliefs which have evolved over millenia?
This obviously depends on whether humanity survives the absolute decimation of thinking ability and if the present forms of AI outlive the era when humans have forgotten how to build / repair the gazillion things that need to work exactly right in order for a computer to boot up let alone an AI model to run.
Alternatively, the society may get further divided into those who can build and maintain the AI machines vs those who cannot operate without it, thus, must pay through their teeth to continue to have access to it. In some ways, we already are there.
In between those extremes, the middle path seems more likely. Nothing changes. Economics has the last laugh. Hype and bubble fade away as the real cost of running the models show up on the balance sheets. We continue to go about our lives, sporadically using the chatbot as merely a different search engine when the ask justifies the cost.
AI helps those who help themselves
This was the title of this post in my first draft. You see, just like the prayers, the prompts only get you what you want iff, you are capable, willing and do put the hard work into your pursuit. Almost as if, the god did not exist and the results were a pure function of your efforts and capabilties alone.
Cheers
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