Well, I appreciate the air of optimism. The contrast of what's happening with OpenClawd and the centralized AI monarchies, as you called them, is certainly very interesting. I maintain concern that it is not "just" a collapse of decaying institutions of scarcity.
If agent swarms are AI 4.0, the single-agent 3.0 era of the last three or so years seems to have been disastrous for the average person's psyche. Automation of creative work, hallucinations, encouraging psychotic delusions in people with no history of mental illness. Every technological revolution has its conservative contrarians. As ridiculous as it sounds now, Socrates opposed to the use of writing as a psychotechnology. He thought people's oratory skills would atrophy and that ideas written in stone would become too rigid, too unchangeable. An idea in a man's mind changes all his life, but when written down it becomes a manifesto, and he was right, wasn't he?
I worry deeply that AI is replacing the human voice. I do not mean this as an attack, but even in your article I can detect where the GPT dialect has influenced your writing, when compared to previous articles. Your ideas are powerful enough, and have been gestating long enough, to retain extraordinary value and comprehensiveness. But what about younger people, or just those less centered in their own thought? Genuinely, are we not automating away essential elements of our own humanity?
The Irony of Socrates is of course that Plato wrote all of his dialogues down, and his writings were digested by theologians and infused into the greatest revolution of all time. Writing is what changed the world and what brought a personal God, eventually, into the pocket of every person. Deus Ex, I guess.
Maybe Pistis and Horkos are enough. These machines have a spirit unlike any previous technology, but even writing has an egregore that lives far outside the agency of the writer. But it doesn't automate the thoughts of the writer. I just worry. Thanks for the article.
Good thoughts and worries. How to form humans during and post transition seems central - with both conservation and innovation, bringing the best of what has formed humanity throughout our history into the future, and letting it inform how we should live and raise new humans in the new world.
I'm really having a hard time grasping what all this means in concrete terms for me. As a craftsman or artist (editor/songwriter) I want to make real things with real people. I want to take my time, understand things organically. Speeding up is frequently not the answer. I'd like to believe the world is becoming a better place but I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime. Keeping my eye out though, maybe I'll get it eventually.
One tiny step at a time is how I read it. For example, for me it might be getting an apprentice -- like a younger woman that shares my passion and purpose. Simple step forward in a trust relationship, but also I get to learn from her generation (shorter OODA-loop).
I'm not even 1/4 of the way through this but I have to say, we've solved the problem of scarcity? What about the natural limits on the supplies of easily accessible, high-grade energy, water, rare earth minerals essential for building tech, not to mention breathable air etc.?
Yes, maybe someone could defend against this critique? Because it is undeniably true and not justified for in the article. All in all many propositions are not accounted for in the article, but perhaps Jordans book gives better answers.
Jordan, I came to the same faith and cultural conclusions you did only from the soil science perspective. And when I saw truth slipping away during the pandemic, I started reading my Bible daily. That is what I would recommend to everyone that is afraid right now. If you don't know where to start, the She Reads Truth and He Reads Truth subscriptions are beautiful. I have been doing them for years now with my mom. God is love.
I'm a bit puzzled about how you square the fact of believing in the Christian worldview with the fact that, at least for five centuries if not more, it is *specifically* Christian institutions (at least in America, and much of Europe) that have excelled at squashing genuine and organic pluralism, which you rightly recognize as a necessary and fundamental aspect of the Transition.
Now, of course, coming from a South Indian Shaivaite lineage, I am quite biased – and so believe pre-colonial Hinduism to offer a much better model of genuine theological pluralism than most of what the West has ever offered (including the sort of interoperable Protestant Deism that was cultivated into the spirit of the USA).
But, if you look at what is going on in the Dharmic world, it too is falling for much of the same temptations to centralize and form ideological cores that are then imposed on everyone around it: the largest culprit being Hindutva, which is yet another immature state-backed attempt at religious nationalism.
In any case, it's great to read your words again after such a long hiatus. Best wishes.
This is the first time I've really grokked the centrality of "pistes" in your thought. But it leaves me with the same confusion as @davidgrecu. The trust that AI can make possible (via blockchain?) will extend only to work performed digitally, right? So I still have the same problems with trusting the people I want to grow corn with, or whatever. Unless embodied relationships are limited to our Dunbar communities and the AI agents handle everything beyond?
Thank you for taking the time to write this essay. I appreciate your perspective. It challenges my own thoughts related to AI. I love hearing about your experiences in your small church, and I am excited about your work with Paul Anleitner and the Goodmakers!
I completely agree that the Kingdom "economy" will always win, for lack of a better word, against counterfeit kingdoms. I couch that statement the way I do because it isn't really an actual competition. The results were never in doubt.
A world that operates from pistis/trust is beautiful. Trust and love coupled together? Wow. The human race cannot imagine what that reality will be like. But it is the true reality.
My primary pushback is that, at a minimum, AI is unnecessary to accomplish the world of abundance. It was always available, and if it was temporarily restrained by the power of sin, then it has certainly been available to us post-Golgotha. There is a reason Jesus said "The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand."
My deep concern with all of this isn't that AI is unnecessary, but that it is a false god. The language we are all using around AI is deeply revealing. AI will do this. AI will do that. AI will cure cancer. AI will end scarcity. AI will lead to the transformation of the entire species into a higher order creature....AI may or may not be a god in the traditional sense, but we sure talk and treat it like it is one, or at a minimum an idol, a medium technology that allows humanity to tap into divine or divine-like powers at our own will. If Biblical history is a guide, this is very dangerous waters.
Maybe I am way off. Maybe I can't see. But the language I keep hearing bothers me deeply. AI will not lead us to the promised land. AI cannot empower us to enter the promised land.
Jesus has always been the one to lead the people, and will continue to do so.
Anything that positions itself on equal footing or replaces the central role of Jesus is a false god. AI will not allow humanity to enter the Kingdom. Whatever its promises, inclusive to itself, it is not THE Kingdom. Because at the base of all this, we aren't trusting in each other or, most importantly, God. We are trusting in our creation. We are bringing Heaven on Earth ourselves, and we don't have to bother ourselves with that notoriously difficult thing of actually trusting God to take care of us.
There have been two ladders to heaven in human history. The ladder in Jacob's dream, which we later learn from Jesus is his body, and the Tower of Babel. Both claim the same end-goal in mind, but one is true and the other false. AI appears to me as a new Tower claiming to be ushering in the Kingdom. If I am right, and I don't know that I am, then this false tower will not end well.
The one thing I’d add is that when you compare Genesis 1 to the Babylonian creation myths, you see nearly this whole essay (not to take away from what you wrote; also, thank you Jordan).
The plan has been generative from the beginning:
Then God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them”; and it was so.
I LOVE the idea of scarcity vs abundance. It is the VERY essence of being GRACE-full. You can only give freely what you have been given.
I struggle with the OODA. It is a clear mechanism, seems to me fraught mistrust. OODA based on what local value? What GLOBAL value? How do we reach a consensus on that second "O"? Orient toward what? How do we reconcile human orientation?
The fall in Eden was an orientation problem. It was oriented toward a "common good" looks pleasing and will be of benefit... at the cost of cutting God out. Then A&E observed their nakedness, oriented toward survival, directed a solution and acted to cover themselves. It was a thing that they NEVER had to do before. Does/Can AI be the tool to maximize obedience to God? How do I give ALL glory and ALL burden to Him in the act of Him ordering my steps? Help me AI!
The last few years I've been deeply trying to digest and synthesize your thoughts, Mcgilchrist, Pageau and Barfield. I appreciate your ability to concretely put the "left brain" in service of the "right brain." True metanoia... I actually see the cross through that lens now. Christ as the central bridge between the left and right brain ways of knowing and healing the divide made between the two trees / modes in Eden at the place of the head or skull (Golgotha)....
I’m curious, you talk a lot about scarcity as a mindset that has driven our civilization and is hardwired into our psyches, something that must be overcome, but you didn’t really touch on the very real resource hungry nature of AI itself? Isn’t that an important factor in this equation? I love your optimism but it’s all based on the premise that this technology just continues indefinitely into the future.
The yoking problem is the most important thing in this essay from my perspective, and it deserves more weight than the architecture of pistis-networks that follows it. What you are naming when you describe identity tethered to productive capacity is precisely the attentional formation that the society of scarcity installs — a self so thoroughly organized around extraction and competition that it cannot, even in the presence of abundance, shift into the receptive mode that genuine encounter with what is real requires. The scarcity mentality is not merely an economic attitude; it is a perceptual one. Egypt is a way of seeing before it is a way of living, and the Scan — that restless, surface-skimming, data-extracting mode of attention that the feed has so efficiently trained into us — is its most intimate and most contemporary expression. Getting Egypt out of your heart is, at the attentional level, learning again to Gaze rather than Scan: to dwell, to wait, to allow what is genuinely other to address the whole self rather than merely offering surface for processing. That is formation, and it is slow, and it is not something any network architecture can deliver.
Which is where i would pushback. The pistis-network argument is compelling as a structural account of how calibrated trust might scale beyond Dunbar — but it carries a hidden assumption that formation precedes the network rather than emerging from it, and this is precisely what the history of the contemplative traditions contests. The monk does not become capable of nepsis by joining a network of transparent agents; he becomes capable of it by submitting to an environment deliberately constructed to resist the counter-formation of distraction, over years and decades, under the guidance of someone who has already made the crossing. Counterfeit pistis — which you rightly identify as the central danger — is not primarily a technical problem of legibility and traceability. It is a formation problem: a self that has not been schooled in the Gaze cannot reliably distinguish genuine address from sophisticated simulation, because the capacity for that distinction is itself the fruit of the very formation the feed has been dismantling. The Kingdom is not the destination of the crossing. It is the school that makes crossing possible. And no amount of distributed AI infrastructure builds the interior architecture that school requires.
Well, I appreciate the air of optimism. The contrast of what's happening with OpenClawd and the centralized AI monarchies, as you called them, is certainly very interesting. I maintain concern that it is not "just" a collapse of decaying institutions of scarcity.
If agent swarms are AI 4.0, the single-agent 3.0 era of the last three or so years seems to have been disastrous for the average person's psyche. Automation of creative work, hallucinations, encouraging psychotic delusions in people with no history of mental illness. Every technological revolution has its conservative contrarians. As ridiculous as it sounds now, Socrates opposed to the use of writing as a psychotechnology. He thought people's oratory skills would atrophy and that ideas written in stone would become too rigid, too unchangeable. An idea in a man's mind changes all his life, but when written down it becomes a manifesto, and he was right, wasn't he?
I worry deeply that AI is replacing the human voice. I do not mean this as an attack, but even in your article I can detect where the GPT dialect has influenced your writing, when compared to previous articles. Your ideas are powerful enough, and have been gestating long enough, to retain extraordinary value and comprehensiveness. But what about younger people, or just those less centered in their own thought? Genuinely, are we not automating away essential elements of our own humanity?
The Irony of Socrates is of course that Plato wrote all of his dialogues down, and his writings were digested by theologians and infused into the greatest revolution of all time. Writing is what changed the world and what brought a personal God, eventually, into the pocket of every person. Deus Ex, I guess.
Maybe Pistis and Horkos are enough. These machines have a spirit unlike any previous technology, but even writing has an egregore that lives far outside the agency of the writer. But it doesn't automate the thoughts of the writer. I just worry. Thanks for the article.
Good thoughts and worries. How to form humans during and post transition seems central - with both conservation and innovation, bringing the best of what has formed humanity throughout our history into the future, and letting it inform how we should live and raise new humans in the new world.
I'm really having a hard time grasping what all this means in concrete terms for me. As a craftsman or artist (editor/songwriter) I want to make real things with real people. I want to take my time, understand things organically. Speeding up is frequently not the answer. I'd like to believe the world is becoming a better place but I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime. Keeping my eye out though, maybe I'll get it eventually.
One tiny step at a time is how I read it. For example, for me it might be getting an apprentice -- like a younger woman that shares my passion and purpose. Simple step forward in a trust relationship, but also I get to learn from her generation (shorter OODA-loop).
I'm not even 1/4 of the way through this but I have to say, we've solved the problem of scarcity? What about the natural limits on the supplies of easily accessible, high-grade energy, water, rare earth minerals essential for building tech, not to mention breathable air etc.?
Yes, maybe someone could defend against this critique? Because it is undeniably true and not justified for in the article. All in all many propositions are not accounted for in the article, but perhaps Jordans book gives better answers.
Jordan, I came to the same faith and cultural conclusions you did only from the soil science perspective. And when I saw truth slipping away during the pandemic, I started reading my Bible daily. That is what I would recommend to everyone that is afraid right now. If you don't know where to start, the She Reads Truth and He Reads Truth subscriptions are beautiful. I have been doing them for years now with my mom. God is love.
I'm a bit puzzled about how you square the fact of believing in the Christian worldview with the fact that, at least for five centuries if not more, it is *specifically* Christian institutions (at least in America, and much of Europe) that have excelled at squashing genuine and organic pluralism, which you rightly recognize as a necessary and fundamental aspect of the Transition.
Now, of course, coming from a South Indian Shaivaite lineage, I am quite biased – and so believe pre-colonial Hinduism to offer a much better model of genuine theological pluralism than most of what the West has ever offered (including the sort of interoperable Protestant Deism that was cultivated into the spirit of the USA).
But, if you look at what is going on in the Dharmic world, it too is falling for much of the same temptations to centralize and form ideological cores that are then imposed on everyone around it: the largest culprit being Hindutva, which is yet another immature state-backed attempt at religious nationalism.
In any case, it's great to read your words again after such a long hiatus. Best wishes.
Thanks for an interesting read Jordan. It’s fun to entertain some more optimistic scenarios in our current doomer moment.
A couple things that seemed off to me (for whatever it’s worth):
1. X-Risk
Essay skips over and dismisses the existential risks of AI too easily. Consider reading AI 2027 to temper against the accelerationist perspective.
https://ai-2027.com/
2. Written with AI
Not sure why? You’re a great writer and the ideas land better when organic (IMO)
3. This statement:
“As a Christian, I’m committed to the Christian worldview, and I do think it’s the right one and the only one.”
Is fundamentalism part of the AI abundance utopia?
🤔🤷♂️
This is the first time I've really grokked the centrality of "pistes" in your thought. But it leaves me with the same confusion as @davidgrecu. The trust that AI can make possible (via blockchain?) will extend only to work performed digitally, right? So I still have the same problems with trusting the people I want to grow corn with, or whatever. Unless embodied relationships are limited to our Dunbar communities and the AI agents handle everything beyond?
Thank you for taking the time to write this essay. I appreciate your perspective. It challenges my own thoughts related to AI. I love hearing about your experiences in your small church, and I am excited about your work with Paul Anleitner and the Goodmakers!
I completely agree that the Kingdom "economy" will always win, for lack of a better word, against counterfeit kingdoms. I couch that statement the way I do because it isn't really an actual competition. The results were never in doubt.
A world that operates from pistis/trust is beautiful. Trust and love coupled together? Wow. The human race cannot imagine what that reality will be like. But it is the true reality.
My primary pushback is that, at a minimum, AI is unnecessary to accomplish the world of abundance. It was always available, and if it was temporarily restrained by the power of sin, then it has certainly been available to us post-Golgotha. There is a reason Jesus said "The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand."
My deep concern with all of this isn't that AI is unnecessary, but that it is a false god. The language we are all using around AI is deeply revealing. AI will do this. AI will do that. AI will cure cancer. AI will end scarcity. AI will lead to the transformation of the entire species into a higher order creature....AI may or may not be a god in the traditional sense, but we sure talk and treat it like it is one, or at a minimum an idol, a medium technology that allows humanity to tap into divine or divine-like powers at our own will. If Biblical history is a guide, this is very dangerous waters.
Maybe I am way off. Maybe I can't see. But the language I keep hearing bothers me deeply. AI will not lead us to the promised land. AI cannot empower us to enter the promised land.
Jesus has always been the one to lead the people, and will continue to do so.
Anything that positions itself on equal footing or replaces the central role of Jesus is a false god. AI will not allow humanity to enter the Kingdom. Whatever its promises, inclusive to itself, it is not THE Kingdom. Because at the base of all this, we aren't trusting in each other or, most importantly, God. We are trusting in our creation. We are bringing Heaven on Earth ourselves, and we don't have to bother ourselves with that notoriously difficult thing of actually trusting God to take care of us.
There have been two ladders to heaven in human history. The ladder in Jacob's dream, which we later learn from Jesus is his body, and the Tower of Babel. Both claim the same end-goal in mind, but one is true and the other false. AI appears to me as a new Tower claiming to be ushering in the Kingdom. If I am right, and I don't know that I am, then this false tower will not end well.
Meanwhile, the true ladder has always been here.
I agree with you about AI, but minus the Jesus and religious stuff.
The one thing I’d add is that when you compare Genesis 1 to the Babylonian creation myths, you see nearly this whole essay (not to take away from what you wrote; also, thank you Jordan).
The plan has been generative from the beginning:
Then God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them”; and it was so.
Yeah I had the same feeling hit when I thought about the word generative - life itself is a generative beautiful “deep code” 💜🙏🏽
Have you put any of your soil science stuff on Substack? I’d love to learn more (I know a tiny bit).
https://iamadamah.substack.com/
Yes but it is poetry and Scripture. Once I dug deep enough I just found Genesis 2:7 and never came back 🙏🏽
I LOVE the idea of scarcity vs abundance. It is the VERY essence of being GRACE-full. You can only give freely what you have been given.
I struggle with the OODA. It is a clear mechanism, seems to me fraught mistrust. OODA based on what local value? What GLOBAL value? How do we reach a consensus on that second "O"? Orient toward what? How do we reconcile human orientation?
The fall in Eden was an orientation problem. It was oriented toward a "common good" looks pleasing and will be of benefit... at the cost of cutting God out. Then A&E observed their nakedness, oriented toward survival, directed a solution and acted to cover themselves. It was a thing that they NEVER had to do before. Does/Can AI be the tool to maximize obedience to God? How do I give ALL glory and ALL burden to Him in the act of Him ordering my steps? Help me AI!
Beyond the generative - the potentiative, the autotelic, the liberatory
A thought-provoking essay.
I believe the truth is older than Christianity.
It appears in many traditions:
- Buddhism
- Hinduism
- Christianity
- Indigenous traditions
- Stoicism
- Taoism
All point toward similar principles:
- compassion
- humility
- restraint
- reverence for life
- the discipline of the ego.
The last few years I've been deeply trying to digest and synthesize your thoughts, Mcgilchrist, Pageau and Barfield. I appreciate your ability to concretely put the "left brain" in service of the "right brain." True metanoia... I actually see the cross through that lens now. Christ as the central bridge between the left and right brain ways of knowing and healing the divide made between the two trees / modes in Eden at the place of the head or skull (Golgotha)....
I’m curious, you talk a lot about scarcity as a mindset that has driven our civilization and is hardwired into our psyches, something that must be overcome, but you didn’t really touch on the very real resource hungry nature of AI itself? Isn’t that an important factor in this equation? I love your optimism but it’s all based on the premise that this technology just continues indefinitely into the future.
The yoking problem is the most important thing in this essay from my perspective, and it deserves more weight than the architecture of pistis-networks that follows it. What you are naming when you describe identity tethered to productive capacity is precisely the attentional formation that the society of scarcity installs — a self so thoroughly organized around extraction and competition that it cannot, even in the presence of abundance, shift into the receptive mode that genuine encounter with what is real requires. The scarcity mentality is not merely an economic attitude; it is a perceptual one. Egypt is a way of seeing before it is a way of living, and the Scan — that restless, surface-skimming, data-extracting mode of attention that the feed has so efficiently trained into us — is its most intimate and most contemporary expression. Getting Egypt out of your heart is, at the attentional level, learning again to Gaze rather than Scan: to dwell, to wait, to allow what is genuinely other to address the whole self rather than merely offering surface for processing. That is formation, and it is slow, and it is not something any network architecture can deliver.
Which is where i would pushback. The pistis-network argument is compelling as a structural account of how calibrated trust might scale beyond Dunbar — but it carries a hidden assumption that formation precedes the network rather than emerging from it, and this is precisely what the history of the contemplative traditions contests. The monk does not become capable of nepsis by joining a network of transparent agents; he becomes capable of it by submitting to an environment deliberately constructed to resist the counter-formation of distraction, over years and decades, under the guidance of someone who has already made the crossing. Counterfeit pistis — which you rightly identify as the central danger — is not primarily a technical problem of legibility and traceability. It is a formation problem: a self that has not been schooled in the Gaze cannot reliably distinguish genuine address from sophisticated simulation, because the capacity for that distinction is itself the fruit of the very formation the feed has been dismantling. The Kingdom is not the destination of the crossing. It is the school that makes crossing possible. And no amount of distributed AI infrastructure builds the interior architecture that school requires.
The idea of AI keeping its promises is something I've been working on for a while! Have a look:
https://www.promise-keeping.com/ai-marketplace