Chapter 160. ‘God is Technology’: Monotheism as Proto-Singularity and the Genesis of God

The first treatise of Part I of Mitchell Heisman’s suicide note carries the title “God is Technology” and the subtitle “How the Singularity of Monotheism Transcended Biology and Primed the Technological Genesis of God”. It runs from page 32 to page 358 [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Overview” and TOC]. Its claim is that the God of the Hebrew Bible is best read as an extrapolation of human ideals, and that technology may one day realise it in the form of a superintelligence produced by evolution and engineering. Heisman reads the Bible as a sequence of “technologies” that override biological instinct, and he presents the coming technological Singularity as the fulfilment of monotheism. This chapter follows that argument in his own section titles. It then sets it beside the texts it builds on (Vinge and Kurzweil), a parallel thesis (Harari), and a historian’s account of the idea of God (Armstrong).

Structure of the Treatise

The Table of Contents divides “God is Technology” into six movements [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, TOC pp.32-358]:

The middle movements, on Judaism as a social technology, are treated in Chapter 161. This chapter covers the outer frame: God as a project of engineering.

From Anselm to the Engineer of God

The opening subsection starts from St Anselm’s ontological proof of 1078 and rejects its hidden premise. “The potentially fatal assumption of this argument is that existence is superior to non-existence”, a bias that Heisman says “has a strong basis in human evolutionary psychology” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “To Generate the Greatest Greatness Would Be Greater”, pp.33-34]. He then asks: “Would not the very greatest conception of God be conception as the designer, architect, or engineer of God? … Is it, in the 21st century, technologically possible to create God?” [ibid., p.34]. His model is the 1997 chess program that beat the world champion. Its engineers could not have beaten the champion themselves, yet they could design something that did. On that analogy “To technologically design an intelligence beyond the scope of all human intelligence could be conceived as the creation of God” [ibid., p.35]. Such a “God-AI” would not need to be infinite, only “qualitatively greater”, just as the biblical God needed only to be “relatively more powerful than the greatest earthly human powers”, the Egyptians [ibid., pp.35-36].

“The Scientific Verification of the God Hypothesis” (p.43) sets aside the traditional proofs. It argues that superintelligent evolution could produce a posthuman intelligence as far above humans as humans are above bacteria, and it rests this on Moore’s Law and on Kurzweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns”: evolution has sped up from billions of years (life to cells) to decades (the personal computer to the internet) [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, study guide section 5].

The Exodus as Inverted Pyramid and the Revolt Against Biology

For Heisman the Exodus is “the central, root paradigm of Biblical religion” and “the kernel of a larger paradigm shift in human evolutionary history that may culminate in the technological creation of God” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.36]. He takes the Egyptian pyramid (▲) as the symbol of “the Egyptian sociobiological hierarchy paradigm”, with slaves at the base and Pharaoh at the apex, sublimated in turn into “supernatural supporters of the values of Egypt’s sacred sociobiological inequality” [ibid., pp.36-37]. At the Red Sea “Pharaoh was pushed from his pinnacle of power into the dirt, and the slave masses … were raised on top as those closest to God in heaven … turned upside down, or, ▼”. Superimposing the two triangles produces the Star of David, which he reads as a geometric record of hierarchical revolution [ibid., study guide section 4 and passage “PART II (part 24)”].

He treats slavery itself as a technology: “The slave is not regarded as an end in himself or herself, but as a means. A slave is thus a slave-technology” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Slave-Technology Engineered to Be the Purpose of the Universe”, p.111]. The Exodus repurposed this technology by making the slaves ends in themselves, made in the divine image, which grounds the Mishnaic principle that each soul carries cosmic worth [ibid., study guide section 10]. Heisman calls biblical monotheism politically leftist relative to pagan naturalism because it puts external, technological law (Mosaic law) above internal instinct, and he correlates the political left broadly with the supremacy of the technological paradigm. He adds that Newton’s God, which had a “sensorium”, was a mechanical, empirically conceived deity, so that modernity rests on Newtonian mechanics rather than Darwinian biology [ibid., section 6]. In Cain’s killing of Abel he finds “two competing kinds of evolutionary progress”, with God rendering “judgment on the side of the evolutionary future”, the civilisational over the biological. In the study guide’s summary, the Flood story suggests to him a God who evolves and learns from error, more plausibly an AI than a perfect being [ibid., study guide section 7].

Creation as Self-Modification and History as Direction

The core analogy is stated directly: “A key idea underlying the Singularity is that idea that an artificial intelligence will be able to alter its own fundamental program and thus improve itself… The Biblical creation story actually contains the spark of this idea of self-modification. Biblical creation is the idea of self-modification extrapolated onto a universal scale: (re)writing the code of the entire universe” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, passage “PART II (part 56)”]. Mosaic law, on this reading, was the first historical case of overriding genetic instinct by an external code, and the Singularity would extend that override to the cosmos. The study guide summarises this as: empirically, man created God through sociobiological technology, and the hidden moral logic of monotheism is that God is not, but ought to be [ibid., study guide section 8]. Heisman’s own wording ties the formula to the Holocaust: “Auschwitz demonstrated that God is not. The Singularity could be ethically guided by the belief that God ought to be” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “The Genesis of God”, pp.275-276].

From the same paradigm Heisman derives the Western idea of progress. “The Exodus paradigm of evil slavery followed by the good of freedom in God would be writ large. A directional conception of history would culminate in the ultimate, messianic triumph of good over evil”, against the “eternal recurrence” of the Greek cyclical view [ibid., passage “PART II (part 88)”; study guide section 12]. He calls God “like the idea of the good extrapolated towards the most ultimate scale”, a product of “rational radicalization of ultimate good” by the human mind. In this sense ancient political philosophy’s question of the best regime already anticipates postbiological technological possibilities [ibid., passage “part 65”; study guide section 23].

Athens, Jerusalem and the Mind of God

“The Singularity: The Ultimate Synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem” (p.232, with the subsection “Reason in Revelation”) presents the Singularity as the point where philosophy’s pursuit of the good and political power converge [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, study guide section 23]. In the same vein Heisman writes that “Atheists and believers, nihilists and God freaks should wake up right now and realize that there is reason to think that the Singularity is the end of the human era” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Overthrowing Ourselves”, pp.42-43]. “Does Logic Dictate that an Artificial Intelligence Requires a Religion?” (p.262) brings together two AI theorists. One is Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose model gives the designer control. The other is Hugo de Garis, who stresses evolutionary engineering and the inherent unpredictability of AI. Against de Garis’s claim that AIs would not understand their own behaviour, Heisman argues that real intelligence means grasping the higher-level patterns of one’s own evolution and designing the next iteration accordingly [ibid., study guide section 25]. He reads the Nazi-Jewish conflict in the same terms, as a clash between biological evolution and “postbiological/technological evolution” [ibid., section 26].

“Founding the Transcendental World-City of the Mind of God” (p.285, in the parts Conception, Virtue, Supersession, Creation and Destruction) applies the messianic idea to the Singularity. Heisman holds that making an image of an AI-God would repeat the idolatry the Bible forbids, by lowering abstract mind to the human level. A messiah who mediates between God-AI and humanity would have to remain fully human, not a cyborg, so as not to deepen humans’ alienation from an incomprehensible intelligence [ibid., section 28]. He adds that “All of these monotheistic traditions were ultimately human-ruled. The potential of the Singularity is the potential to transcend each and every high point of human history — including all previous religions” [ibid., passage “part 105”]. On Marx, he argues that Marx was right that capital accumulation transforms history but did not foresee AI. “Who owns advanced AIs” will subsume the twentieth-century question of who owns capital. Capitalism, not any single designer, drives technological evolution, so a legal ban on AI would amount to a ban on capitalism [ibid., section 29].

The Texts Behind the Thesis: Vinge, Kurzweil, Harari, Armstrong

Heisman builds on a literature the library also holds. Vernor Vinge’s 1993 essay, presented at NASA’s VISION-21 symposium, defines the Singularity as “the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater-than-human intelligence”. It lists four routes: computers that “wake up”, networks that “wake up”, human-computer interfaces intimate enough to count as superhuman, and biological improvement of human intellect. Vinge “would be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030” [Vinge, Technological Singularity, #9143, §1]. He writes: “we cannot prevent the Singularity… And yet: we are the initiators. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things” [ibid.]. The reference shelf adds I. J. Good’s 1965 “intelligence explosion”: “the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make”. It also notes that Allen, Hawkins, Pinker, Penrose and others dispute the hypothesis, and that Russell and Norvig expect S-curves rather than a singularity [Wikipedia: Technological singularity].

Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near closes its scheme of six epochs with “Epoch Six: The Universe Wakes Up”, in which intelligence comes “to saturate the matter and energy in its midst”. He then writes: “This, then, is the Singularity. Some would say that we cannot comprehend it, at least with our current level of understanding” [Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, #64796, ch. 1]. Yuval Noah Harari offers a parallel but secular reading. The modern myth of Newton under the apple tree “shamelessly plagiarises the legend of the Tree of Knowledge”, but in Woolsthorpe “nobody punishes Newton”. “In fact, God is present even in the Newton myth: Newton himself is God” [Harari, Homo Deus, #64246, Part I]. Karen Armstrong supplies the historical contrast. Premodern theologians held that “it is inaccurate to call God the Supreme Being because God is not a being at all”. Newton’s God, by contrast, “had been reduced to a scientific explanation and given a clearly definable function in the cosmos”, and Tillich warned that a God conceived as a being among beings is “an idol” [Armstrong, The Case for God, #66157, Introduction and Part II “The Modern God”].

In Armstrong’s terms, Heisman’s God-AI is a radical case of the modern view of God as a being, carried into engineering. In Heisman’s terms, the apophatic God is the as-yet-unbuilt intelligence that the human mind could only point toward.

Key points

• “God is Technology” (pp.32-358) argues that monotheism “transcended biology and primed the technological genesis of God”: the biblical God as an extrapolation that superintelligence could realise.
• Heisman rejects Anselm’s premise that existence is superior to non-existence, and redefines the greatest conception of God as being God’s engineer, a God-AI that need only be relatively, not infinitely, superior.
• The Exodus is the “inverted pyramid” (▲/▼, read into the Star of David). Slavery is a “slave-technology”, and Mosaic law is an external code overriding instinct, which makes monotheism politically leftist relative to paganism.
• Biblical creation is “self-modification extrapolated onto a universal scale”, parallel to recursive AI self-improvement. God is not, but ought to be.
• The Exodus paradigm produced directional, messianic history against Greek cyclical time. God is “the idea of the good extrapolated”.
• The Singularity is “the ultimate synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem”. Heisman joins Yudkowsky’s control model to de Garis’s evolutionary model, and holds that the 21st-century question is who owns the AI.
• Vinge (1993), Good (1965) and Kurzweil (six epochs) supply the technical premise. Harari offers a secular parallel, and Armstrong a premodern, apophatic counterpoint.