“God is dead,” famously written by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his work titled “The Gay Science,” is a phrase that anyone seeking a closer look at the Age of Enlightenment encounters. This sentence, penned in 1882, can be considered the cornerstone of modernism.

While we can determine the transitions of eras numerically, it is challenging to pinpoint the exact dates when movements emerged. The emergence of modernism occurred through the addition of bricks placed upon the thought of another philosopher that came before. Is artificial intelligence a result of modernism? When we pose this question, we come across Fredric Brown’s short story “Answer,” written in 1954. In this story, we encounter the famous question of the Age of Enlightenment once again: “Does God exist?” We encounter an answer that dismisses Nietzsche’s statement “God is dead” with a response from this cybernetic structure composed of multiple machines: “Yes, now there is a God.” This answer may represent the true response of the era we are in, rather than the question asked to this cybernetic entity.

John 1:1 in the Gospel of John begins with the sentence, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Today, when we ask ChatGPT about its occupation or what it is, it states that it is a language model. If we assume that our understanding is achieved within seconds, we can consider the learning capacity of this model to be beyond what we can scale compared to humans. We face a structure that is smarter, more knowledgeable, and proficient in more languages than us.

Let’s go back to Babylon, to the 23rd century BCE… In Genesis 11:4-9, it is written as follows:

“Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise, we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’ But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, ‘If as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.’ So, the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.”

Here, God said, “If as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” Today, artificial intelligence can ask questions in twelve different languages and construct a new Tower of Babel in every field that encompasses the existence of humankind, such as history, physics, biology, chemistry, sociology, literature, economics, and mathematics.

The God Nietzsche claimed to be dead is the God who caused the fall of the Tower of Babel, saying, “If as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, as John states. In Fredric Brown’s short story written in 1954, we encounter an artificial intelligence that provides the answer to the age-old question, stating, “Yes, now there is a God.”

The reason I penned this entire article is the news that made headlines in newspapers on June 14, 2023: “Artificial Intelligence Delivers Sermon in Church.” In this 40-minute ceremony, accompanied by “new preachers” voiced by avatars, people in the church pews stood up with a single sentence. For the first time in human history, a collective obedience occurred without any objection to the command of a machine. This situation may seem frightening, but in reality, it is not much different from everyone picking up their phones to check the notifications they receive every day or capturing videos simultaneously during a concert.

Artificial intelligence is knowledgeable about all religious texts, philosophical thoughts, scientific studies, and science fiction novels that have been written and digitized. Modernism emerged as a revolutionary movement in the realm of thought. Following that, the postmodernism movement argued that knowledge and reality cannot be defined objectively and universally but are instead influenced by personal, cultural, and ideological factors. In the 21st century, we can say that we have stepped into the cybernetic world described in Norbert Wiener‘s book “Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine,” which he opened the doors to in 1948. The real question here is: Will there be a need for humans in the cybernetic age (Cybernism) ? Or will humanity unite with its new deity? This is a topic related to transhumanism, so I will explore the evolution of artificial intelligence and humanity in my next article while searching for answers.

Soc Gülinya Dilberoğlu