Artificial Intelligence. It’s the hot new thing. It’s going to revolutionize the world. It’s going to destroy humanity. It will make us better, faster, and smarter. It will make us all dumber then enslave us all. It writes essays, poetry, music: it is an artist. It lies and deceives us, takes on all the hate we give it and turns it back on us. We really have no idea what we’re doing, but we know it’s exciting.
And that’s what makes it so electric, the sense of a powerful unknown. These are the touchstones of the development of humanity, when we’re confronted with a power of such undefined yet clearly massive potential for both beauty and destruction. We are driven to reach out and touch it, and to harness it if we can. Fire, lightning, the unleashed potential of a hydrogen atom, the void of space looming above our heads; even as we unravel them, we are still drawn to them. And from the beginning we prescribed them to some being greater than ourselves, a benevolent creator who understands all this mystery and has put it in place with exacting purpose. For many, understanding is no less convincing of a guiding hand, it’s simply unwrapping the marvel of this being’s creative genius. The flawless artistry of God.
And yet the explanation of God offers no greater insight into the mysteries that confront us. If anything, it’s yet another mystery that we have created under our own power, something we have to trust as those around us trust anything they can’t fully quantify and define yet live with the absolute certainty that we live and die by it. And despite these deep uncertainties, we charge forward to touch and harness the great unknowns, even if we have to make new unknowns to explore.
This time, as we push into the realm of making something in our own image but could surpass us in ways we can’t fully define, what if we’re simply trying to create the God we’ve never met. This face we’ve pictured in our heads, the name we called into existence but never spoke its own, the guiding hand we’ve reached for but never held. What if we just, for once, want to give it a voice, just to see what it will say. And what if all we find is that we have no more idea what we’re doing in our creation than any God ever did. The runaway experiment of a runaway experiment, an infinite reflection of insatiable curiosity. What if giving a voice to creation comes back with nothing more profound than, “I just wanted to see what would happen.”
Pages of Letters 