O muse,

Tell me what I do not want to know.

This is a world of increasing technicity. By technicity I mean the quality or state of being “technical”: not only in the usual sense of technological, “artificial”, or “man-made,” but also and especially in the sense of “precise”, “calculated,” and deliberately constructed. We are witnessing an enormous growth of what might be called technical institutions, networks that process information according to formal methods, and that automate decisions previously left to individual discretion. We are talking about institutions like the Internet, social networks, search engines, digital currencies, and especially those institutions of power, the government apparatus, which increasingly rely on computer technology and AI to function, including the automated processing of individuals’ data—“surveillance” in blunter terms.

Those who create and enforce these institutions are the new priest-scientists of a system of belief that I will call Gnostic Technicity: a combination of the Gnostic belief in a “higher knowledge” reserved for an enlightened few and a “technocratic” trust in scientific method, machines, and progress. I use the term “Gnostic” here to indicate a way of thinking that considers knowledge to be the key to salvation or empowerment, and that often associates knowledge with secret doctrines or mysterious revelations. “Technicity,” in the sense that I’ve proposed, can also be considered a secret doctrine or hidden knowledge—certainly it is mysterious and complex enough to put it beyond the understanding of the uninitiated.

In a system of Gnostic Technicity, what we would consider to be “religion”—the consolation of the powerless and the community of the marginalized—becomes an obstacle to the spread of the new faith, which must present itself as universal. Indeed, universalism and a kind of spiritual materialism, an unquestioning trust in progress and perfectibility through the power of reason and technique, are among the key characteristics of Gnostic Technicity. To the believer in Gnostic Technicity, religion can be seen as a hindrance to the realization of the gnosis and to the fulfillment of destiny; it is a source of division, error, and confusion that must be overcome. As the great German sociologist Max Weber said, “In general, religious worldviews tend to stand in sharp contrast to the modern outlook… [Religion] is the sort of belief which… divides humanity into those with a special, exclusive knowledge of God’s will and those who are utterly outside it. Above all, there is a strong aversion to those ‘godless’ people who… do not submit to a higher power.” That higher power, in a world of Gnostic Technicity, would be knowledge itself.

Aside from its negative attitude towards religion, Gnostic Technicity is defined by five theses:

Transcendence of the Self

Transcending the self means identifying with the impersonal powers of knowledge and communication that enable one to speak on behalf of and make decisions for vast populations, even entire nations or the global community. The Gnostic Techne, like the mystics, believes in a transcendent truth that escapes the limitations of individual consciousness and can only be attained through a kind of self-loss.

Unlike the mystics, the Gnostics of technicity don’t dissolve the self into a oneness with the Whole, or the Absolute. Rather, they transcend it by rising above it into a domain where the Whole itself has been dismembered, and its elements are arranged through mathematics and software that aim to create a sort of “world equation”: a pure expression of the relation between every point (individual, object, event, etc.) and every other (the equation contains within itself the totality of connections, or a kind of omniscience).

In this way, the self is not annihilated, but sublimated, made functional, in service to an impersonal knowledge that can be “willed,” but which also has its own agenda, and can operate whether or not one believes in it (it can, in a sense, be “secular” and even “atheistic”—a functional, secular god that does not judge or punish but organizes, automates, and optimizes).

This transcendence of the self through identification with the higher power of the “world equation” can lead to an inflation of the individual self-image: if I am part of something so large and complex, if I participate in even the tiniest part of such an immense mechanism, doesn’t that make me, in some sense, as large as the Whole? But this is not an illusion of grandeur, or rather, it is only an illusion if you assume that the equation remains stationary and that there is something to “sublate.”

The “world equation,” as I understand it here, is not a description of the current state of the world but of the “world becoming” or the “world to come”—it is a forward-looking projection (an ideal, or rather the supreme and final “ideal”). That is, it describes the global impact or destiny of some process or entity (the “butterfly effect”—a technological example would be the effect of an autonomous weapon on future international conflicts). The sublimation of the self and its inflation to cosmic proportions thus do not imply any arrogance on the part of the Gnostic of technicity—on the contrary, it is a way of saying that in the final analysis, my life will not be meaningful in itself, but only as it is lived in anticipation of and in service to an outcome far larger than my own lifespan or my own immediate interests.

Dynamism of History

The second thesis of Gnostic Technicity is a corollary of the first: just as the self must rise above itself and become part of a process far larger than the scope of its individual life, so must History (or the collective Self, or “we”) move through time and space in obedience to the same “world equation.” That is, just as my fate, in the sense of what I am supposed to do, is no more than a set of problems and questions (which problems, which questions exactly?), posed to me by the process that is larger than me and which I call History, and whose outcome is not affected by the choices I make—in just the same way, it is not by an individual’s will but by the dynamic of a collective process that the state of the world becomes what it is.

But History (that collective process) is more than just a destiny (as if there were no free will whatsoever—of course there is free will, and we’ll get to it). The way a Gnostic Techne conceives of History (as process, or, more technically, as an incommensurable series of irreversible, non-integrated “events,” a kind of super-object in itself that can be known in the form of a narrative) is akin to the way a traditional Western religion conceives of divine creation—except that this process does not seem to have a beginning or end, and certainly not an origin or final cause (telos), and we have no reason to consider it, at least for the moment, as the consequence of the will of some supernatural being.

Inevitability of AI and Transhumanism

A Gnostic Technie has faith, but not blind faith: faith as confidence in the future, a future in which human history and evolution continue but as a kind of super-nature whose laws and forces can be discovered by science, a kind of grand and final “synthesis of the sciences,” the “crowning” or “culmination” of human effort.

Among the believers in the faith of Gnostic Technicity, the coming of artificial intelligence (AI) and transhumanism is an article of faith: they believe it to be not only desirable, but necessary, in a way that seems to them to be inevitable—but how can they know this, except through their faith in the “evolutionary process,” itself an act of faith?

The argument will proceed as follows: The history of human culture shows an inexorable tendency towards increasing rationalization, increasing technicization, and greater use of instrumental reason, which means an ever-increasing control of nature (in the form of technology and scientific knowledge), a greater and greater reduction of human effort, a greater and greater extension of the powers of perception and of human capacities in general through the use of tools. And, far from being a process that will somehow stop, we can expect it to continue to accelerate as long as there is historical life itself. Thus it seems natural, and in some sense necessary, that human intelligence itself will be transformed in the process and will find itself capable, ultimately, of merging with technical intelligence—that is, of “evolving” towards AI, with all the advantages that this will bring in terms of the “liberation of human energy” (as Nicholas Negroponte once put it).

Moreover, there are powerful incentives, especially in our time, to press ahead with the project of AI, not least of which is the extraordinary growth of both capital and humanity and the ever-increasing load it places on natural systems. To feed, house, and move the world—let alone provide them with a decent quality of life—will require technological feats without precedent in history. Thus, it seems eminently reasonable to suggest that if man is going to survive (let alone “flourish” as some political ideologies promise), then he must merge with the machine, become, as it were, a cyborg—the quintessential unit of a mechanized and automated world, the point at which human nature (in the form of intelligence) and technical nature (in the form of AI) touch, or rather are unified.

Incommensurability of “value” and “fate”

In a system of Gnostic Technicity, the individual life is understood to be determined, on the one hand, by fate (as we have defined it) and, on the other hand, by “value” (or, as Nietzsche would have it, by “will to power” and the desire to dominate and organize the world, and therefore the desire for an active, dynamic, and creative life—as the tech bro would say “high agency”). There are two distinct planes: one, which I would call the plane of fate, is governed by an impersonal knowledge of the “world equation”; the other, which I would call the plane of value, is governed by the free exercise of will. The Gnostic Techne’s project, as I understand it, is to integrate the two, by subordinating the will and desire of individuals to the higher necessity and to the power of knowledge.

There are several implications to this idea. It implies that individuals, in a certain sense, are not important. The plane of value is, precisely, the sphere of the irrelevant; it has to do with what the German philosophers used to call “secondary” or “merely subjective” value. This was one of the main points of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where the values of hard work, of enterprise, of calculation and risk, are presented not as a result of objective economic forces, but as a projection, an expression, of the value system of those he calls the Puritans, who imposed their subjective ethical views on society and made them stick by way of a process of “psychological selection”—i.e., by favoring those individuals who embodied these values and discriminating against those who didn’t, eventually, through education and training, through a whole complex system of incentives and disincentives, imposing this value-system as an interior limit that defined what it was possible to be, think, and do.

On the plane of fate (as the Gnostics would see it), there is no freedom and no value, because the plane of fate is, by definition, the domain of necessity. All that happens here is determined, including those “choices” that are really only the following out of some previously decided course. And there are no “previously decided courses”—or at least none that we, as individual beings, have the ability to decide or control. If we are “chosen,” it is not a result of any choice or action on our part, and our only chance of understanding something of the nature of our “fate” is by submitting ourselves, after the fact, to a process of reason, by attempting to bring what remains of it within the scope of the world equation.

Now, one might object here that there seems to be a contradiction: we started by defining the Gnostic Techne’s faith as including a belief in free will (value, will, action) and now it appears we have had to give it up (fate, determinism, inaction). But this is not a contradiction at all. The Gnostic Technie is above all a systems thinker: his universe is one of systems nested within systems, of levels and planes. It is, in the last instance, an impersonal, even if not completely soulless, universe.

The problem with the concept of free will is that it implies, on the one hand, the existence of some entity—an ego or self—that “exercises” it (in which case, as Schopenhauer pointed out, we are really only “willing” what someone else “makes” us will) or, on the other hand, that some actions are totally unconditioned by any prior circumstances, by any determining context whatsoever, and therefore effectively occur ex nihilo, for no reason at all (in which case, it’s hard to see how you can still call them actions). For a systems thinker, this kind of absolute beginning is as intolerable as is the notion that any entity whatever—no matter how tiny—could “choose” something in an unconditioned manner. The universe of Gnostic Technicity is not one that permits a lot of loose ends, that allows much to “happen” without a clear account of what is really happening and why. So, no, there is no “free” will; but there is the will (and desire) of individuals, which are themselves results of processes and therefore comprehensible (comprehensible, at least, in the manner of Gnostic comprehension, which we’ll discuss below).

Impeccable rationality

Rationality is one of the most important concepts in the modern world. We owe it to the medieval Christian view that God was a perfectly rational being to believe, first, that everything in the world has a rational cause (the “God hypothesis” as Russell put it) and, second, that, consequently, by using reason, we could discover the truth about everything (this was the programme of the School of Chartres). These ideas have survived the decline of belief in the existence of God and in the divine origin of natural law. Indeed, they are still at the basis of modern thought, even in fields that claim to be anti-theistic (for instance, when scientists search for a “theory of everything” or when linguists claim that their work can “account for all known human languages,” what they are really doing is affirming a kind of impersonal rational design of the universe and everything in it). The search for a rational order behind everything, for a master key or “the” explanation that will make everything else fall into place, is an expression of what might be called metaphysical desire—an ambition to encompass everything in one system. There can be little doubt that this is one of the principal motivations of current work in AI.

The Gnostic Technie’s belief in an absolute and all-encompassing rational system can be described as a belief in a certain kind of perfection. But it is a perfection quite different from the divine perfection of traditional theism. For it is no longer a question of the perfection of a creator, but the perfection of a system (a man-made system: we are back with the idea of “perfection” in the sense in which engineers and physicists use it to describe an ideal state towards which real objects tend but can never reach).

A system can never be “perfect”: a physical system can never be in a state of “perfect” equilibrium because real bodies exert forces on each other and because bodies are never in exactly the same state. The state of “perfection” is, then, a fiction—indeed, it is a fiction necessary to the functioning of the system itself because it defines the directions towards which the system must always be headed. A physical system tends towards equilibrium because that is, by definition, what equilibrium means: a state in which no further change is necessary (although the state is never reached, of course, because of the forces always exerted on it). A living system is far from equilibrium at all times: it must always be in a process of becoming, or otherwise it will die. And the same is true for technical, economic, political, social, or linguistic systems, all of which have their fictions of “perfection,” and which will only remain viable as long as they remain incomplete, as long as there is a constant need to improve them, as long as there is always some distance to the “ideal.”

Now, it may be that AI systems, being purely formal (which is what gives them the appearance of perfection), don’t need to have an “explanation” of this kind in order to function (indeed, the more we use them and the less “explicable” they seem to become). But as long as the fiction of their perfection is maintained, they will, precisely, lack that indispensable element of imperfection which, in human life, makes will and desire necessary (indeed, in the world of the perfectly designed machine there would be no “will,” no “desire,” no “reason,” no “interest” or “motivation,” because there would be no lack, no imperfection to impel a becoming towards).

It may well be, then, that as AI systems grow more and more “perfect” (i.e. as they get better and better at carrying out the tasks for which they are designed), human beings will be less and less “needed”: they will have become, finally, dispensable. This would be an extension of the tendency towards automation that we can already see happening all around us, a tendency which, until now, has only served to make our labor more productive, more profitable. But the stage might well come—soon—when, faced with an army of perfect(ing) machines, human beings will be redundant: they will no longer be of use either to the machines or to one another.

Synthesis

All this may seem like so much abstract rigmarole, but the concrete implications are clear and striking: the human individual is an “epiphenomenon” of the socio-historical process, a consequence or effect, not the cause; and, however much we may rebel against it (and rebel we certainly must), we are all implicated in it, to varying degrees and in different ways. Our fate, as I have described it, is an aspect of a vast process whose origins are obscure to us, and whose end we cannot even begin to imagine; but that process is the matrix from which we emerge and the medium in which we live. Our “value”—which is to say, the quality and the quantity of the libidinal investments we can count on, in any given society or epoch—will depend on the extent to which we succeed (individually or as a group) in imposing our interests and our “point of view” on the social process as a whole.

Here, at last, is the connection with religion. It seems to me that there are two sides to any act of religious faith: on the one hand, it is the submission to a process, or a set of circumstances, that we do not control; on the other hand, it is the affirmation of a certain power or quality in ourselves. In a world as opaque and menacing as this one appears to be, as full of processes and circumstances that escape our poor capacities for comprehension and control, submission to fate (or “the Unpredictable”) becomes an article of faith in itself—a leap, if you want to put it that way, though I prefer to call it an adjustment to reality.

And yet this is only the negative side of the act of faith: there is a positive side as well, which is to affirm the self and its powers in the face of all this uncertainty. I cannot think of any great faith that did not include both of these sides—both the “humility” or “self-abasement” and the assertion or even exaltation of the self, its powers and its worthiness.

It seems to me that the belief system of the Gnostic Technie embodies both sides of this structure: on the one hand, an almost fanatical self-regard, a sense of mission and destiny (both personal and collective) that places the Gnostic Techne squarely in the “exalted” wing of any pantheon that might care to recognize him.

The only possible “higher powers” in a world of Gnostic Technicity are technical powers, or the social groups that control those powers, and the Gnostic Techne, for his part, is committed to the idea that, of all human groups, it is his own that is the chosen vehicle for the future—it is his group, with his special knowledge and power, that is called upon to organize and control all the other groups and all the processes in society.

Of course, the Gnostic of technicity is a creature of the Enlightened West and as such believes that science (in some vague sense of the word) will eventually solve all of man’s problems and satisfy all of man’s “legitimate” needs (leaving plenty of “legitimate” desires still unsatisfied, since in our world it is impossible to distinguish, at the deepest levels, between “needs” and “desires”). What we can say of the Gnostic’s belief in “progress” is that it is, like all acts of faith, a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more you believe in the magical powers of progress and science to solve all problems and satisfy all desires, the more energy and resources you devote to that idea and to the institutions and practices it spawns, the more likely it becomes that some day in the future the idea and its progeny will be able to solve all problems and satisfy all desires.

But then the faith will have changed its meaning: from a belief in an ideology to a knowledge of what is actually the case. Meanwhile, the faithful must have their periods of doubt and scepticism—all the more so as their faith requires them to put their trust in the efforts of a vast, impersonal apparatus and a great many individuals whom, by the very nature of the case, they cannot “choose,” but whose collective success they must “believe in” nonetheless. It’s not too difficult to see how, at such times of doubt and anxiety, it becomes convenient to have the two sides of faith—submission and exaltation—to reinforce each other. By exalting yourself, your group, and the “cause,” you reaffirm the submission you have made to fate: you tell yourself that it is not so much your own private fate you have staked on the outcome as it is the cause itself, the Great Idea in which you were never an “individual” to begin with.

To put it another way, you have, by faith, transcended your mortality, but only by submitting to a transcendence that is beyond your control.