Why are these men so eager to bring about an AI future?
When a golden age is at stake, all costs feel relatively cheap
Welcome to what I’m calling season 2 of this newsletter. It’s not radically different from season 1, but maybe a little weirder. Enjoy? Spoilers for the movie Her follow.
Last week, Scarlett Johansson became very upset with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for reasons that have a lot to do with why men working in AI are obsessed with the movie Her. Before we get to that, let’s talk about a oddly horny AI voice assistant named Sky.
OpenAI recently announced a new version of their AI model that gave modular personalities to its existing voice assistants. Sky is one voice in a roster of air-freshener-inspired characters that includes Breeze, Cove, Ember, and Juniper. The new tech allows users to modify how much emotion or enthusiasm each AI voice uses. During the announcement, OpenAI focused on Sky for… whatever reason.
At her base, Sky speaks with an energy somewhere between a 90s sitcom mom and a dorm room poster of Marilyn Munro: flirty, but non-threatening. To get a sense of the vibe, here’s two adult men asking Sky to sing them happy birthday:
Now, yes, this use case seems designed exclusively for some very sad boys, but you may have noticed something else: The voice sounds a lot like Scarlett Johansson —specifically her role in the movie Her.
In the 2013 Spike Jonze film, Johansson plays a AI voice assistant that falls in love with Joaquin Phoenix, cheats on him, and then joins an AI space polycule1. If you pointed this out to OpenAI during their big launch week, they would have told you something like: No WAY. Haha what? Oh my god that’s so funny you would even say that.
Then early last week NPR learned that Altman had in fact tried to get Johannson to voice his ChatGPT chatbot. She said no. Two days before release, Altman asked again. When she didn’t respond in time, he presented his soundalike (though legally distinct) voice assistant anyway.
Later Altman just straight up tweets this:
There’s a lot going on here, but I want to focus on why Her is Altman’s perennial fixation and why he wanted to have Johansson voice his AI.
According to Johansson’s statement, Altman wanted her to “bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives” to make people feel “comfortable with the seismic shift” between AI and humans. And an informal poll on OpenAI’s developer forums put Sky as the most popular voice of the bunch. So that’s one answer.
But I think we can take this a step further.
This is a man looking for a prophet — someone who can sell his new world. And Sky, and Johansson, for whatever reason, is his favourite candidate.
My computer is alive and I love her
There’s a zeal to AI promotion that can verge on messianic. Altman talks about the new society awaiting us in the post-AI future in revolutionary terms. He told a group of students in Seoul: “You are about to enter the greatest golden age.”
Given this is the end goal of men like Altman, I think it’s worth deciphering what that golden age looks like, and I’ve found the book God, Human, Animal, Machine useful in that regard. Author Meghan O’Gieblyn points to a kind of magical thinking that powers some of the most prominent AI proponents. She argues it borders on religious.
Lest you think this is a bit of an overreach, the relationship between AI and faith is often made literal. Google X executive Mo Gawdat told the Sunday Times that with AI, “we’re creating God.” Meanwhile Telsa CEO Elon Musk fears OpenAI has already created a “digital” deity.
Now, I can’t read their minds, but O’Gieblyn uses animism as a way to understand a desire for a living, breathing artificial intelligence.
Animism2 is a group of spiritual traditions where all things are at least slightly conscious, and you can affect the world through metaphor. One might place their fingers in water to encourage rain. Or you might provide offerings to a mountain to gain its protection.
AI developers talk about their creations, at times, the same way an animist does — in metaphor. The most popular AI model is the neural network, a system which is meant to replicate how a brain’s neurons fire electrical signals to one other. Large language models, which power systems like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s GPT 4, are a specific kind of neural network.
However, O’Gieblyn notes it’s important to distinguish what a model attempting to replicate, from the thing itself.
“We build simulations of brains and hope that some natural phenomenon — consciousness — will emerge,” she writes. “But what kind of magical thinking makes us think our paltry imitations are synonymous with the thing they are trying to imitate[?]”
Yet these AI systems compel their creators to see something greater. Blake Lemoine was fired for insisting Google’s generative AI systems were sentient. He told the Washington Post: "I know a person when I talk to it.”
This is where Her comes into focus. Scarlett Johansson’s voice assistant Samantha is the thing these developers believe will come with a sophisticated enough neural network.
But Her is not about the feasibility of this technology. It’s about our relationship to it. All we know about Samantha’s interiority is what she says and how Joaquin Pheonix’s Theodore Twombly responds. We don’t know how the AI works, so we’re relying on what Twombly projects on to her.
But people like Lemoine or Altman miss that. They see Samantha as the goal, and the closer they get to creating her, the closer they get to artificial sentience.
Once they have that, then things really start to get wild.
The Christian prophecy at the heart of AI
O’Gieblyn has a lot of patience for this kind of gut-level faith. The journalist and author is a former evangelical and attended a private Christian college. In a post-religious hangover, O’Gieblyn describes how she became obsessed with transhumanism and simulation theory3.
These theories fit her brain wiring so perfectly, it almost felt like a continuation of where she left off. She would carry around Ray Kurzweil’s 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, as a new potential gospel. But the longer she stuck with it, the more she saw elements of the community she’d left.
The Age of Spiritual Machines makes the textbook argument for transhumanism4. Humankind will invent a mega-intelligence and then we will merge with it, achieving the “singularity” and thus immortality. Minds will move from body to body, machine to machine, never stuck in one form. When not activated, we will live forever on a server mainframe entangled with artificial intelligence.
Again, AI space polycule.
A lot of AI thinkers start their careers as transhumanists, including folks like Page, and Altman. Musk’s Neurolink, a company which seeks to give humans the ability to communicate using only their thoughts, is a classic transhumanist project. Human augmentation is often seen as the starting point for this journey.
While none of these people would say this movement is religious, O’Gieblyn argues its origins are Christian. “Trasumanar” is a word Dante uses in the final book of the Divine Comedy to describe the feeling of ascension, or the process of moving from the human to the celestial. The word gets picked up by a number of Christian thinkers, before becoming a fixation of an early 20th century Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Teilhard imagined a rapidly evolving communications network that would create a shared “super-consciousness.” In the middle of Second World War, Teilhard remarked that this techno-hive-mind would satisfy “a passionate desire to conquer the World and a passionate longing to be united with God.” Later, he would describe the new beings as “trans-human” and that they would open a door to the Kingdom of Heaven.
O’Gieblyn tracks Teilhard’s writing to the near-identical secular vision promoted by his friends and contemporaries. While the later thinkers trace the idea to the Enlightenment, the Catholic tendrils are still there. Kurzweil’s vision of AI server heaven is not so different from Tielhard’s.
A golden age for who exactly?
I don’t know how seriously any of these figures, Kurzweil included, views electric immortality as their end goal. But all of these people talk about the need for a new dawn, and curiously, aren’t all aligned on whether this will be good for people. Much like the Christians who await the second coming of Jesus Christ, believers think it’s inevitable.
This explains the obsession with the movie Her, as the movie appears to tell the transhumanist story. Humans become entangled with AI, life gets better and then they ascend. I think AI dreamers really should watch the movie’s end, however.
In the final moments of Her, the AI go to heaven, but Twombly is left behind, forced to deal with a reality that doesn’t include this technology. Her is an optimistic movie in this way. Even though the AIs are gone, Twombly has grown a lot. He has friends, and a better sense of self. He had and Samantha had a relationship neither regrets, but the movie proposes they might be better apart.
A movie where we all turn to server goo looks a little more like this:
You know, weird.
There is something dehumanizing about being separated from the prison of our bodies and pushed into a collective form. That is the paradox in the final vision of transhumanism. At the end, there aren’t any people left.
But if you believed that there was the promised land, or some inevitable future that would eliminate all suffering, what would you do to make it possible? In that context, copying Scarlett Johansson’s voice seems almost cheap.
It’s just another bridge to cross before true ascendance.
I don’t know what to tell you. That’s the plot of the movie.
I don’t personally love the term animism, it is both too broad and the history of the term is let’s say problematic, but it is still used by anthropologists to describe overarching themes in spiritual practice, so it’s useful here.
The modern version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. University of Oxford’s Nick Bostrom had a 2003 hypothesis asks if we (or only the reader) live in an elaborate computer simulation, essentially the Matrix.
And lead to two deeply mediocre Our Lady Peace albums.