The cultural imagination surrounding expert system is not worn down by design discourse; it also activates doctrinal motifs, and most importantly, Gnostic ones. Reviewing AI through this lens does not need declaring that engineers are secret mystics. It implies observing just how seasonal frameworks of spiritual desire: redemption, concealed expertise and retreat from a flawed world, come back whenever we talk about “intelligence” disembedded from human bodies.
Gnosticism names a family members of late-antique motions that mounted the universes as an inferior building by a demiurge, populated by archons that police climb. Redemption got here through gnÅsis : a liberating, frequently secret understanding that remembers the soul to a greater pleroma. This grammar: autumn, prison, revelation, climb, maps uncannily onto modern fantasies concerning AI and post-human futures.
Think about the demiurgic ambition of AI engineering. Version training constructs a second world whose characteristics, loss landscapes, unexposed spaces and simulacral representatives, are formed by curators, data pipelines and calculate thresholds. Within this globe, the “laws” are not found but set up. Disputes regarding “placement” then look like a technological theodicy: if we style an artificial mind, by what principles can an acquired developer make sure that its production does …