26/01/2026
'These people in Silicon Valley and the people in the generative AI world consider it to be a spiritual project. They talk about ushering something in. They talk about making God and building God. The thing that they're ushering in sounds very much like the thing that was talked about in the in the Garden of Eden when eating the fruit from the tree of good and evil made us as gods.’
Paul Kingsnorth's compelling analysis of the birth of AI and its cultural and psychological Implications, drawing on the work of everyone from Iain McGilchrist and Lewis Mumford to Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, to try and provide a framework within which to understand the latest, shocking, extension of what he calls 'the Machine' (it could also be called the left hemisphere, he notes, or the matrix, or the myth of 'Progress').
It reminded me, for example, of McGilchrist's persuasive argument in 'The Master and his Emissary' that the Industrial Revolution, the previous iteration of this extension, could be viewed as the left hemisphere’s 'most daring assault' to date: 'this movement was obviously, colossally, man’s most brazen bid for power over the natural world, the grasping left hemisphere’s long-term agenda'. Indeed, in a fascinating passage he suggests 'that the innate structures of the left hemisphere are, through technology, being incarnated in the world it has come to dominate'. This program of expansion he regards as the 'aim' of the left hemisphere, replacing the experienced world of being (formerly enjoyed and apprehended as 'other') with versions of itself, a vast virtual matrix of self-reflective laws and programs
A recent interview with Kingsnorth outlines many of his key points, which are found explored at more length in his book 'Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity.' As he writes there, 'all we know is that some force has been unleashed in our world which we are struggling to contend with. A huge change is birthing itself. Something is being ushered in through our efforts and our absent-minded passions. Something is crawling towards the throne. The ruction that is shaping and reshaping everything now. The earthquake born through the wires and towers of the web through the electric pulses and touchscreens on the headsets. These are the birth pangs. The internet is its nervous system. Its body is coalescing in the cobalt and the silicon and in the great glass towers of the creeping yellow cities. Its mind is being built through the steady 24-hour pouring forth of your mind and mine and your children's minds and your countrymen's. Nobody has to consent. Nobody has to even know. It happens anyway. The great mind is being built. The world is being prepared.’
In the interview itself he explains what he means by something being 'birthed' through AI: 'Well, the simplest answer to that is that what I'm describing there is what people are calling AI and particularly this quest for a super intelligence which is going on now very openly. And if you listen to the people who are either warning against that quest from a position of expertise or indeed who are involved in in putting it together - and interestingly those are often the same people these days - the people creating AI are often the ones warning us against what it could do. You will hear a couple of different claims.
You'll hear firstly the claim that within 5 to 10 years maximum the entirety of the world is going to be transformed by the creation of a superhuman intelligence of some kind. And this is what has been openly worked towards since at least the 1950s.
And the second claim is that once that happens, the potential for disaster is very high. Indeed, there's a good deal of research and writing in the book in 'Against the Machine' about these people in Silicon Valley, and the people in the generative AI world especially, and what they're actually doing and what they think they're doing. And if you listen to what they say about it, they're often very open about the fact that they consider it to be a spiritual project. They talk about ushering something in. They talk about making God and building God. They talk about uploading minds into cloud files so that we can live forever.
There's an actually curiously Christian-inflected story about creating a paradise and building God, most famously maybe Ray Kurzweil, who's the head of engineering at Google, and who's the great prophet of the singularity. He was asked if he thought God existed and his answer was ‘not yet’. So what's going on here is very open, very conscious project to build something that is greater than our intelligence, which will in in many cases supplant us. And many of these people think it's inevitable that it will. This is the the next stage of evolution.
So that's what's going on. I think that a lot of these people don't really know what they're doing. And it feels to me like there's a kind of spiritual darkness at the heart of this. There's a lot of people out there talking about ushering things in and they don't know what they're ushering in. And if you wanted to sound like a biblical prophet, then the thing that they're ushering in sounds very much like the thing that was talked about in the in the Garden of Eden when eating the fruit from the tree of good and evil made us as gods. So, you know, these people are doing something that I don't think even they quite understand.
But there's no doubt at all that we're going into the age of superhuman intelligence, whatever that quite means and whatever the implications of it are. Everything is moving so fast that even the people creating it don't know what's happening within the systems that they're building. So that's a simple answer to the question. As I say, there's a kind of, it seems to me, there's a kind of strange spiritual picture of what's happening that I even I don't really understand, but but it's a dark one.
The really interesting question is how far back this goes. One of the writers I talk about in the book is Lewis Mumford who wrote a two volume book in the late 60s called 'The Myth of the Machine'. And Mumford traces this right back at least to ancient Egypt. He sees the pyramids as the first manifestation of a machine society. He sees ancient Egypt as what he calls a machine made of human parts. The parts in that time being slaves and we don't need slaves anymore, at least not slaves in the countries we live in. The slaves are nicely hidden away in Africa or Asia. But we also have digital slaves to do the work for us. But the mentality is the same.
I wrote a whole book years ago called ‘Savage Gods’, which was a kind of writer's interrogation of writing. And I wondered aloud in that book whether writing is something that gets you to the heart of things or whether it can also disguise them. Because of course, writing is almost the original technology of being able to distance yourself from the world. Once you can describe things in words and put it down on paper and have other people read it, people are reading your concepts rather than experiencing the world. And we've gone so far down that path now that not only can we look at a tree and see the concept of a tree rather than the being that's there. But over the last 10 or 20 years, we've gone into this digital universe where we can all create fictional representations of trees. And over the last couple of years, we've now been able to get AIs to do it for us.
It's an interesting to talk about early early technologies and industrialization because if you look at some of the narratives - I mean say you read William Blake, the great sort of English mystic who's living in London during the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s when London's a much smaller place, and the part of London he lives in is almost a village on the outskirts, he's writing in great depth about how this machine is coming to consume everybody and yet he's still walking on the common you know, he's still living in a family and community and the basic things of life are still there.
Broadly speaking we've been very very much uprooted psychologically often geographically economically culturally. It's very very hard for anyone to find any footing that will last very long at all, whether it's having a job for life or even living in the same place, or if you do live in the same place not seeing that place so radically transformed that you don't recognize it. This is kind of the story of modernity.
Our culture is not in danger of dying. It is already dead and we are in denial. In the context of talking about this culture war, both sides are scrabbling over something that's already gone. It's like two bald men fighting over a comb. I mean, if you want to be a conservative, what are you conserving? What is there that already hasn't actually been ripped up? And again, if you're a progressive, what exactly are you progressing towards? What exactly are you fighting?
There is no old-fashioned culture which you can stand on now and say well we've got it back again because it's like modernity has eaten itself. The project we've been on for the last 300 years or so - scientific rationalism, liberalism in a political sense, individualism, the death of religion - all of those things have actually undermined what makes a real culture. That's how it seems to me.'
You can listen to the full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n775ngw-UG4
