AI is Our New Golden Calf
'And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!”'
Humans have a natural desire to worship something. Both secular1 and religious2 thinkers agree on this. So when along comes a technology with its priests promising human-levels of intelligence and freedom from thinking tasks, it’s very tempting to spend our Monday to Fridays at the altar of artificial intelligence. Luckily, we have some human history to reflect on. The story of the golden calf in Exodus reveals our own lack of patience, the never-ending demands of today’s modern priestly class, and the disastrous consequences of worshipping the golden calf.
Childbirth is the natural way of creating minds. But as you are probably well aware, developed countries are having much less children these days. There’s a bunch of reasons why, whether it’s some woke agenda causing people to change their genders or abort their own babies, or the economy, I don’t know. So instead of relying on childbearing to create new life that bears our image, we’d rather synthesize image-bearers on chips. In our fast-paced society where everything is at our fingertips, we have become extremely impatient. Babies take a minimum of 9 months, if not longer3, to conceive, mature and become functioning adults. Downloading ChatGPT or Claude and prompting it takes under five minutes depending on your internet speed. And these cloud-based LLMs come pre-loaded with universal knowledge. It’s already gone to school and read tens of trillions4 of words. Having kids is extremely inconvenient, in comparison.
Our economy in its ruthlessness, is also to blame. If there is anything that will increase productivity or profits, enterprises will seek to exploit these methods to attract capital and outperform their competitors. The costliest workers tend to be the most educated ones, and a great way to increase profits is to have less of them. Intelligence is no longer unique to a certain person through their expertise, but it becomes commoditized and fungible. Companies will resort to fear-based tactics to get their employees to adopt and learn how to get comfortable with AI, and things that scare us can’t possibly be good. But we do it because we need to pay rent.
To resist the temptation of any golden calf, we must be patient for what we cannot yet see and be willing to wait for Moses to come down from the mountain5. Lest we begin to become antsy and make our own visible gods. For argument’s sake, let’s say we did decide to go ahead and build our own gods. What do we need to sacrifice to it?
The fuel for the fire for the fashioning of AI is indubitably, our data. The more gold, the bigger the golden calf right? In Exodus 32, the golden calf itself didn’t itself ask for gold, that was Moses’ brother, Aaron. Just recently designated to become the high priest, he asks of the Israelites of their “rings of gold that are in the ears” of their wives, sons and daughters6. The rings of gold the Israelites used to make the golden calf had come from Egyptians who gave it to them before they left7. AI today has an insatiable thirst for earthly knowledge and secrets as it seeks to hear everything about us. It begins to hear things that we haven’t even told our friends. The better the gold, the better the models that can be made with the graving tool of the priests. The priests’ graving tool fashions the data into superior models with new training algorithms and architectures.
The LLMs that we use today are not themselves demanding they give it our data, but there appears to be a priestly class that will speak on its behalf, and occasionally get into trouble for becoming greedy for it. According to chatgptiseatingtheworld.com, there are 51 copyright lawsuits against AI companies as of October 8, 20258. The golden calves of companies like OpenAI, Meta, Google, xAI and Anthropic do not speak on their own but through their priests Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei. In addition to our data, AI requires burnt offerings in the form of electricity and compute, and peace offerings in the form of water to cool the compute. There’s a stat out there saying how US data centers will consume 12% of the country’s electricity in 2028, up from almost 2% in 20189. Training OpenAI’s GPT-3 evaporated 700,000 litres of clean water10. As long as people continue to desire the golden calf, the priests will make the sacrifices on our behalf.
When Moses came back to see people worshipping the golden calf, he told the sons of Levi to kill his brother and son, whoever had worshipped Aaron’s creation11. Three thousand people were killed. Humanity’s fate of our worship of the golden calf of AI might not be as dramatic (or maybe it will be), but in my next post I’ll dive deeper into the consequences and explore a potential contra-narrative antidote.
David Foster Wallace - “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
John Calvin - the “sensus divinitatis”
Exodus 32:1
Exodus 32:2
Exodus 12:35-36
Exodus 32:28-29