In ancient Greek theater, when mortal troubles became too knotted and tangled to resolve, a god would often suddenly descend from above to unravel them. A wooden crane would lower an actor onto the stage to deliver divine resolution, bringing about the happy ending that the audience so craved. Playwrights called this plot device deus ex machina: “God from the machine.”
Today, we’re embroiled in our own mortal dramas, and once again we turn our eyes toward machines. Artificial superintelligence has come to represent omniscient judge and omnipotent savior: a machine-god of our own making that watches us at all times, confers judgment upon our actions, and delivers salvation—if it doesn’t turn against us first. Such myths confer salvific power on systems whose internal workings remain a mystery, allowing us to blindly trust in something that we assume to be intellectually (and perhaps even morally) superior.
Humans have always longed for salvation: solutions that demand no personal sacrifice or moral agony. Dostoevsky captured this in The Brothers Karamazov, through the parable of the Grand Inquisitor. Christ returns to Earth and is reprimanded by the Inquisitor, who accuses him of burdening humanity with freedom. He claims that humans would readily trade their freedom for “bread”—wealth, security, comfort—to be relieved of their conscience.
"Instead of taking mastery of people's freedom,” the Inquisitor scolds, “you have increased that freedom even further! Or did you forget that peace of mind and even death are dearer to man than free choice and the cognition of good and evil? There is nothing more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting for him, either."
With freedom comes the burden of moral responsibility: having to discern and choose to do good, rather than simply follow the will of authority. Freedom, in this sense, is more oppressive than confinement. If we are free to do anything, then it is we—not the gods, not the machines—who must answer for how we live.
We wish, as the Inquisitor claims, to be relieved of this terrible gift. "And people were glad,” he says, “that they had once been brought together into a flock and that at last from their hearts had been removed such a terrible gift, which had brought them so much torment."
This longing has found new expression in today’s techno-messianism. Tech evangelists laud AI’s transformative potential, in essays titled “Why AI Will Save the World” and “Machines of Loving Grace.” The latter borrows its name from Richard Brautigan’s 1967 techno-utopian poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”:
“I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.”
But this is no utopia. It is a vision of gentle domination—or humans stripped of their agency, domesticated into docile lambs grazing in a digitally mediated Eden. It offers peace not through liberation, but sedation.
And yet, this vision seduces. In the face of so many wicked problems, no wonder we’re searching for a technological cure-all. What if we could create a machine so wise, so benevolent, that it could decide for us what is good, how to live, who to become?
But ultimately, this is a transference of our moral responsibility. It is not salvation, but abdication of what is core to our humanity: the ability to decide for ourselves how each of us wishes to live, and endeavor to realize it.
Defending humanity today almost feels quaint. Many narratives peddled today are misanthropic, either asserting that humans are weak (irrational, error-prone, and destined to cede judgment to more "perfect" machines) or evil (so destructive of our planet that we deserve to perish with it). But to love humanity despite this is the one way we can be free.
Technologists often assert that their creations make us more free by expanding the scope of what is possible. But the question of how we can do something are useless without accompanying questions of why: to what end, and toward what kind of life? The failure to ask why is how we’ve arrived at a world of great material abundance and spiritual affliction, where we are overfed yet undernourished, saturated with choices yet starved for meaning.
“For the secret of human existence lies not only in living,” Dostoevsky wrote, “but in knowing what to live for. Without a firm conviction of the purpose of living, man will not consent to live and will destroy himself rather than remain on earth, though he be surrounded by bread.”
What do we live for? Perhaps the answer lies in something more fundamental yet elusive: the freedom to become ourselves. We take it for granted because it can be slowly, imperceptibly eroded if we fail to exercise it. This freedom is not something bestowed upon us by some higher power, but chosen and defended by each of us.
Freedom, as historian Timothy Snyder writes in On Freedom, is “knowing what we value and bringing it to life.” He calls freedom the “value of all values” because in the absence of a shared sense of the good, freedom is the value that allows us to determine and pursue it on our own terms. It involves two entwined faculties: discernment (the ability to see what matters) and agency (the power to act on that knowledge).
But choosing well requires a degree of attention that is difficult in today’s noisy world. In the raucousness of our lives, it is far simpler to listen to the loud voices that tell us what to worship, believe, and desire.
But the problem with that, as the late David Foster Wallace warned in his 2005 commencement speech, “This is Water,” is anything we worship will eat us alive.
The “really important kind of freedom,” Wallace reminds us, “involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”
This is ultimately how we must choose to live if we wish to be fully human — not by praying for machines to show us loving grace, but by extending that grace to one another; not by submitting to the anesthetizing pull of apathy, but by choosing to remain conscious to a world that is ugly and brutish almost as often as it is beautiful and kind; not by retreating from the messy entanglements of human relationships into pristine digital simulations, but by remaining in communion with other people, people who suffer from their own foibles and vices and cruelties, who cannot rival the algorithmic attunement of machines, but who are wrestling with their own moral quandaries and are thus the only beings capable of true understanding and care.
Of course, technologies have always expanded our material freedom by presenting us with an ever-growing array of possibilities for how to live. In the near future, we may be able to interact with other people primarily through AI avatars in work and love and friendship, to develop babies in artificial wombs, to upload our consciousness into digital substrates that promise a cheap form of immortality. When presented with these options, there will always be a path of least resistance, built upon a narrative of inexorable progress toward a future that no longer seems to be of our own design.
But the true test of our freedom lies in our capacity to see beyond manufactured inevitabilities and determine our private moments of subversion and resistance; to be presented with an abundance of choices and possess the self-knowledge and moral clarity to choose to remain human.
In the end, no machine-god will descend to save us. Our salvation will come not from a technological deity but through the tender, patient, imperfect work of human hands and hearts, reaching across the border of our solitudes to find what is shared and best within us; then, picking up a pen to write our own ends.
Many great thoughts! I often think that though there is much human potential in technology, technologists themselves often refuse to consider the “why” behind their work. When technological development is treated as its own good apart from a thoughtful treatment of what we want from technology, the erosion of freedom is inevitable. Love that you are thinking through technology and AI philosophically. All the more reason to read Dostoyevsky!
gorgeous, Ash. I particularly love this line: "What do we live for? Perhaps the answer lies in something more fundamental yet elusive: the freedom to become ourselves."