With AI, the genie is out of the bottle, and there’s no turning back. That’s the overriding viewpoint across science and in Silicon Valley, where execs are increasingly building powerful systems. Beyond just building smarter machines, many among them have actually invoked quasi-religious imagery to describe the future.
“With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like – yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out”
Science and magic
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk previously echoed science-fiction author Arthur C Clark when he likened scientific progress to magic.
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In comments he made to students during an interview at the AeroAstro Centennial Symposium at MIT, Musk once again used colorful language to explain how he saw the progress we were making on AI.
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In pursuing the goal of building advanced machine intelligence, beginning with AGI, he suggested there would be limited ways of controlling such an entity, and that any attempts to do so would be futile.
The following year after making these comments, alongside Sam Altman and other tech executives, Musk co-founded OpenAI, which spearheaded the release of ChatGPT and thrust modern AI systems into the mainstream.
The machine god
Musk’s likening of AI to a demon has inherent connotations of danger or doom – which is appropriate, considering he and others have previously said AI is the biggest existential threat that humanity faces in the years to come.
For example, AI researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, published a book in 2025 called ‘If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies’ in which they laid out the case against building a superintelligent AI that could wipe us out.
These comparisons, however, are rejected by many others who see AI as unlikely to instigate science-fiction-type (or even supernatural-esque) doomsday scenarios. Chief among these voices is Jensen Huang, while just 3% of researchers say they were most worried about a scenario in which an out-of-contorl AI poses a threat to humanity.
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