Chapter 165. Creating God: The Singularity, Transhumanism and AI as God-Making from Heisman to Kurzweil

Mitchell Heisman’s last treatise is subtitled “Why Liberal Democracy Leads to the Rational Biological Self-Destruction of Humans and the Rational Technological Creation of God” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, table of contents]. For Heisman, “the Singularity would be the technological genesis of God” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, Part I]. This chapter sets his thesis beside the library’s main literature on the Singularity (Vinge, Kurzweil, Geraci, Mercer, Harari). It then turns to the critics who read the same prospect as Antichrist, alien agenda or control, and shows where Heisman agrees with the techno-optimists and where he departs from them.

Heisman’s final treatise

The treatise runs from about p.1526 to p.1738. Its sections include “Agon: God versus the Gods”, “Overcoming Nietzsche in the Creation of God”, “How to Breed a God”, “Monkeywrench in the Gene Machine”, “The Means to Our End” (with “The Brothers Frankenborg” and “How To Create God by Getting Rich”), “Marx was Wrong”, “The Dark Side of Optimism versus The Bright Side of Pessimism” (p.1677) and “Above Olympus” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, table of contents]. Its aim is stated plainly: “Creating God is the last and greatest goal that the human race is capable” [Heisman, #38252, “Creating God”]. “How to Breed a God” opens with Nazi eugenics, Hitler’s “will to create mankind anew”, as the biological route to “gods” [Heisman, #38252, guide section 126]. Section 127 argues that liberal democracy holds contradictory eugenic aspirations. Its equality logic extends rights downward, while eugenics would breed unprecedented inequality [Heisman, #38252, guide section 127].

In Heisman’s account, Biblical individualism works “like a monkeywrench in gene machine”, and human rights are “direct antagonists of natural and artificial selection” [Heisman, #38252, p.1672]. As a result, “technological evolution is maximized, while biological evolution is minimized. These trends combined amount to a policy of rational biological self-destruction” [Heisman, #38252, p.1656]. Against Marx, he argues that capital accumulation “is the evolutionary mechanism that leads to the development of artificial intelligence”, which “may merit the name of God”. The whole human race “will become almost akin to the proletariat class”, served perhaps by robotic “angels” under “the rule of God-AI”, with a new morality “in the form of worship of God-AI” [Heisman, #38252, pp.1670-1675]. He expects “a twenty-first century apocalyptic conflict between artificial intelligence and genetically enhanced humans and/or neo-Luddites; between God and gods” [Heisman, #38252, p.1677]. In such a conflict a God-AI offering food, housing and healthcare might ally with bioLuddites and ordinary humans against an enhanced aristocracy [Heisman, #38252, guide section 140]. He calls the final opposition “a battle between the Genocracy of Caesar and the Techdom of God” [Heisman, #38252, p.1687].

The political Turing test and the critique of Hughes

Since “a truly smarter-than-human intelligence will by definition be able to outsmart any human limitation”, Heisman proposes a political variant of Turing’s test:

“when artificial intelligence is able to outsmart the biological-human ability to limit or constrain AI politically, then AI will have demonstrated its ability to pass this test by effectually taking political control of human destiny. If biological humans can no longer tell who is in control, this is a threshold point that indicates that AI has begun its control.” [Heisman, #38252, pp.1679-1680]

Heisman sets the choice out as follows. The “dark side of optimism” is “the possible elimination of the biological human race”. The “bright side of pessimism” is “joy in the prospect that machines will be the slaves of biological humans forever”. A God-AI designed within “the precedents of a constitution” might nonetheless be “more altruistic than humans”, even “a digital heaven”. He concludes: “The neo-Luddite or neo-Nazi cause is the cause of killing God; the cause of deicide” [Heisman, #38252, pp.1680-1681]. Against James Hughes’s Citizen Cyborg, which wants enhancement democratically regulated and “equally available”, Heisman objects that “rights are an all-too-human idea, not a transhuman idea”. In his view genetic self-design is “treason against the Lockean clean slate”, and each step that increases genetic inequality “is like an ax that hacks at the foundation of liberal democracy” [Heisman, #38252, pp.1688-1692].

Vinge and Kurzweil

Vernor Vinge (1993) defines the Singularity as “the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater-than-human intelligence”. He lists four routes: “awake” computers, networks that “wake up”, intimate human-computer interfaces and biological improvement of the intellect. He predicted it between 2005 and 2030 as “an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control” [Vinge, Technological Singularity, #9143, §1]. “If the technological Singularity can happen, it will”, because forbidding it only “assures that someone else will get them first”. Yet “we are the initiators”. He adds that “the notion of ego and self-awareness”, the bedrock of modern rationalism, is “under attack” [Vinge, Technological Singularity, #9143, §§2-4].

Ray Kurzweil derives the Singularity from “the law of accelerating returns”. His six epochs end with “The Merger of Human Technology with Human Intelligence” and “The Universe Wakes Up”, and he dates the event to 2045 [Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, #64796, ch.1-3]. A sufficiently accurate brain upload, he argues, would pass a “Jane Smith” Turing test by being recognised as the same person [Kurzweil, #64796, ch.4]. In chapter 7, “Ich bin ein Singularitarian”, he follows Max More: “the last thing we need is another dogma, nor do we need another cult”. He nonetheless declares that “we have the means right now to live long enough to live forever”, calls traditional religion “deathist rationalization”, and concludes that “evolution moves inexorably toward this conception of God, although never quite reaching this ideal”. His persona says: “The universe is not conscious—yet. But it will be… and will wake up in Epoch Six” [Kurzweil, #64796, ch.7, “The Singularity as Transcendence”]. Geraci quotes the same book as saying that “we need a new religion” (Kurzweil 2005, 374-375) [Geraci, Apocalyptic AI, #75891, ch.1].

Geraci: Apocalyptic AI

Geraci’s book has five chapters: “Apocalyptic AI”, “Laboratory Apocalypse” (fieldwork at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute), “Transcending Reality” (Second Life), “‘Immaterial’ Impact of the Apocalypse” and “The Integration of Religion, Science, and Technology” [Geraci, Apocalyptic AI, #75891, contents]. His thesis is that the writings of Moravec, Kurzweil, Warwick, de Garis and others share four apocalyptic features: “1) a dualistic view of the world… 2) aggravated by a sense of alienation… 3) a radically transcendent new world… and 4) radically purified bodies”. However, “Apocalyptic AI has no god whose will brings about the new world… Lacking a God, Apocalyptic AI advocates turn to evolution as transcendent guarantor” [Geraci, #75891, ch.1]. He reports Moravec’s “Age of Mind”, in which matter becomes “a web of increasingly pure thought”, and the promise of resurrection by simulation. He reports Hugo de Garis’s claim that artilects “will be gods” and that halting them would be “deicide”, together with de Garis’s “willingness to sacrifice all of humankind”. He also reports Giulio Prisco’s view that immortality, resurrection and “the apotheosis of humankind allow transhumanism to replace traditional religions” [Geraci, #75891, chs.1, 3]. De Garis’s “deicide” is the same charge Heisman levels at neo-Luddites.

The religions respond: Mercer and Harari

Mercer and Trothen’s collection is a cross-religious survey. Sandberg distinguishes “individual”, “terrestrial” and “cosmist” transhumanism. Hopkins’s “salvation paradox” holds that “modest enhancement will not save us, but radical enhancements will change us so much that it is no longer ‘us’ being saved”. Heup Young Kim asks whether a cyborg can be “holier than the Confucian sage and the Christian saint”. Douglas traces an “evolutionary journey toward the divine”. Redmond examines longevity in Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism. Tirosh-Samuelson treats transhumanism as a “secularized faith”. Green tests Catholic natural law against a changing human nature, and Scheidt critiques uploading through Merleau-Ponty [Mercer, Religion and Transhumanism, #74801, Introduction; chs.1, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 21].

Harari’s new human agenda is immortality, bliss and divinity: “In seeking bliss and immortality humans are in fact trying to upgrade themselves into gods… think more in terms of Greek gods or Hindu devas rather than the omnipotent biblical sky father”. He also warns that the same technologies “might also make humans irrelevant” [Harari, Homo Deus, #64246, ch.1]. In his scheme, theist religions gave way to “humanist religions, in which humans replaced gods” (liberalism, communism, Nazism). His closing chapters, “The Ocean of Consciousness” and “The Data Religion”, describe the techno-religions that follow [Harari, #64246, Part I; contents].

Critics: Beast, alien agenda, control

Douglas Hamp reads the Singularity as “Mark of the Beast”: a “become-a-god upgrade” for a world preparing to “fight the Creator” at Armageddon. He cites Kurzweil’s “Does God exist? Well, not yet” and Mark Pesce’s “There is no God but Man”, noting Pesce’s borrowed biblical phrases (“in our image”, “as it is on Earth”) [Hamp, Singularity, Superhumans, and the Second Coming of Jesus, #63388, ch.10]. His chapter 12, “Hive Mind and the Image of the Beast”, reads collective “swarm intelligence” as the “one mind” of Revelation 17:13 [Hamp, #63388, ch.12]. Aaron Kheriaty quotes Harari’s “evolution by intelligent design—not the intelligent design of some god above the clouds, but our intelligent design” as evidence of a “coming technocratic dystopia” [Kheriaty, The New Abnormal, #87743, ch.3]. On the alternative shelf, Wes Penre treats “Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity” as the “Machine Kingdom” agenda of the Anunnaki En.ki. He links it to UN “One World Government” and to his paper “The End of Kali Yuga; When the World Religions Become as One” [Penre, Synthetic Super Intelligence, #74168, chs.3-4, 6]. In David Jay Brown’s interviews, one cultural historian says that Singularity thinking “resembles more traditional apocalyptic religious thinking” [Brown, Psychedelics and the Coming Singularity, #66792, ch.16]. Micah Hanks considers that UFOs may be “post-Singularity extraterrestrial technology” or a secret terrestrial Singularity [Hanks, The UFO Singularity, #65946, ch.8].

Where Heisman departs

Heisman shares Vinge’s inevitability (“those who opt out of this economic-technological arms race are opting themselves into competitive suicide”), Kurzweil’s AI supremacy and de Garis’s AI-God [Heisman, #38252, p.1679]. He departs from them on three points. He offers no personal salvation: against Kurzweil’s “live long enough to live forever” [Kurzweil, #64796, ch.7] he sets “the rational self-destruction of the biologically based human race” [Heisman, #38252, p.1679]. He treats the Singularity as the end of liberal democracy, not its extension, which is his answer to Hughes. And his “dark side of optimism” names humanity’s possible elimination as the price of the “Techdom of God” [Heisman, #38252, pp.1677-1687].

Key points

• Heisman holds that liberal individualism suppresses biological evolution and maximises technology, ending in the “rational technological creation of God” [#38252].
• In his “political Turing test”, AI proves itself when “biological humans can no longer tell who is in control” [#38252].
• He rejects Hughes’s democratic transhumanism because rights are “an all-too-human idea” [#38252].
• Vinge and Kurzweil supply the founding formulations: an inevitable runaway, accelerating returns, six epochs, uploading and a universe that “wakes up” [#9143; #64796].
• Geraci finds Jewish and Christian apocalyptic structure in “Apocalyptic AI”, with evolution as guarantor in place of God [#75891].
• Mercer’s contributors and Harari reread the religions around human god-making [#74801; #64246].
• Hamp, Kheriaty, Penre, Brown and Hanks read the Singularity as the Beast, technocracy, an alien agenda or a hidden technology [#63388; #87743; #74168; #66792; #65946].
• Heisman accepts the AI-God but replaces the promise of immortality with humanity’s biological self-destruction [#38252].