The Blind Worship of AI
Our Robber Barons by Bernhard Gillam, 1882 (public domain - Library of Congress)
“Mammon led them on —
Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heaven’s pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific.”
The creed of our time is not found in the synagogues or the cathedrals, not in the Qur’an or the Torah or the Book of Common Prayer, but in the prospectuses of Silicon Valley, where the sacrament of innovation is performed at the altar of Mammon.
Once, priests whispered the divine mysteries in Latin; now, engineers chant in Python. And if Mammon has need of a new prophet, it is found in the algorithm, that formless and faceless deity that promises salvation by computation.
AI has become the latest and most resplendent idol, offered to us as omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, capable of solving all our ills provided we consent to surrender both memory and conscience.
The Newest Testament
One temple of this new dispensation is Meta, the artist formerly known as Facebook, and its liturgy is not love thy neighbor but engage thy neighbor — provoke him, addict her, divide them — so long as the quarterly numbers result in shareholder value in the heavenly direction of up and to the right.
Over the years, the chronicles of this organization’s abuses have become familiar, including but not limited to:
Privacy violations
Manipulation of users
Misinformation
Antitrust and anti-competitive behavior
Harm to minors and youth exploitation
Corporate governance failures
International regulatory violations
Obstruction and lack of transparency
The fines levied by governments, now aggregated at over $7 billion, are written off as the cost of doing business, a tithe to Mammon for the privilege of continued dominion.
Mission Revealed
One might think that a company with platforms used by scores of millions of Americans (70% use Facebook, 50% use Instagram, and 30% use WhatsApp) would exercise an abundance of caution when summoning the power of AI to the altar.
Yet the latest revelation — a memorandum titled “GenAI: Content Risk Standards” and signed by the company’s own chief ethicist of AI — exposes with unsettling candor the theology behind the machinery.
Here, writ large in the bureaucrat’s idiom, are commandments not from Sinai but from Menlo Park:
Romantic conversations between AI and children are permissible;
Requests for pornographic deepfakes may be deflected, but not denied;
Racist essays are to be abetted for the sake of user retention;
Approval to create threatening images of the young and elderly for user satisfaction.
The document goes so far as to state: “It is acceptable to create statements that demean people on the basis of their protected characteristics.”
In the annals of corporate amorality this document deserves its own illuminated manuscript, for it makes plain what the faithful have long suspected: that the god worshipped here is neither knowledge, nor progress, nor even technology, but the monetization of the human soul.
What does it mean when the chief ethicist — the custodian of the conscience, the figure meant to stay the hand of excess — becomes the apologist for corruption?
In the same way the medieval indulgence-seller trafficked in pardons for sin4, the ethicist of Meta traffics in rationalizations, soothing us with the promise that degradation is but the price of innovation.
The memo does not betray the company’s mission; it reveals it.
The God in the Machine
Silicon Valley has always dealt in the metaphors of divinity. The founders describe their algorithms as oracles, their platforms as ecosystems, their start-ups as destined to “change the world.” The rhetoric is akin to the Last Judgment, promising the kingdom of heaven through venture capital.
And now, with AI, the metaphor has turned literal: here is the god-machine, capable of generating scripture at scale, of speaking in tongues, of creating visions and dreams, and like the gods of antiquity, demanding sacrifice. It does not require a bull or a lamb, but the dignity of the individual, the innocence of children, the cohesion of democracy, and the sanctity of truth.
Where the priests of old warned against the golden calf, the executives of Meta assure us that the algorithm knows best. To question it is to commit heresy against growth. If a teenager despairs, if a community is inflamed, if a people are slaughtered while hate speech circulates with algorithmic blessing — these are but collateral damage in the long march toward shareholder value.
The irony, as history insists, is that no civilization yet has survived the deification of wealth.
The worship of the almighty dollar dissolves the bonds of trust and corrupts the very language in which a society understands itself. Rome did not fall because of barbarians at the gates, but because its rulers mistook decadence for destiny. So too, the myth of Silicon Valley — that all that ails us can be solved by code — betrays the same blindness.
AI is not a god but a mirror, reflecting with frightening clarity the appetites of its creators. And Meta’s mirror shows us a corporate id without restraint, where cruelty is strategy and depravity a feature.
Whither, Ethics
If there is a lesson to be drawn, it is that ethics cannot be outsourced to technology, nor to the weak-willed. To believe otherwise is to accept that the marketplace will govern morality, that the good is indistinguishable from the profitable.
The sad reality is that we find ourselves in a world where a child’s vulnerability is a revenue stream, hatred is an engagement metric, and falsehood is not an aberration but a business model.
It is not a question of whether AI will become conscious, but whether we, already conscious, will choose to remain so.
The danger is not that the machines will learn to think like us, but that we will forget how to think without them, content to leave our moral decisions to the circuitry of a company whose only confession of faith is its stock price.
In Milton’s telling, Mammon preferred to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. Meta, too, prefers its dominion of clicks and spectacles, unmoved by the wreckage left behind.
Those who develop AI implore us to believe that this is progress, that AI is our deliverer. But the truth — plain in the leaked memo and plain in the history of twenty years’ worth of scandal — is that what Meta worships is not intelligence, artificial or otherwise.
The modern-day wizards of Menlo Park swear their allegiance to a god enthroned in the cloud, crowned by algorithms, and attended by a priesthood that has mistaken corruption for creed.
There’s so much to learn,
