Man and God: a profound relationship that has been intertwined in a thousand forms since the dawn of time. Forms that also correspond to images of divinity, made with the expressive techniques progressively introduced by man: engravings and cave paintings, totems and sculptures, paintings and cathedrals.
There is a key moment in the representation of divinity, which coincides with the advent of cognitive technology. Among the Semites at Sinai, the one and invisible God of the alphabet is established, and from this point on for the religions of the book (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) God speaks to man through Holy Scripture. In a sense, the God of Moses “is” the scripture itself, coinciding with the technology of alphabetic writing. In fact, the temple in Jerusalem held the scripture, not a statue of a god.
Are we about to assert that cognitive technology, thus also Artificial Intelligence, can generate new forms of gods?
Materialism and atheism, which are widespread today, dispute the existence of a divine entity: according to Feuerbach and Marx, religion can be seen as an alienation of man, who projects his own attributes and needs onto an external, wholly artificial God. The Marxist idea of religion as the “Opium of the Peoples”, thus it condemns the subjection of the masses to divine law, faith and religious organizations. Indeed in Sinai the Semitic people invented alphabetic technology, but immediately transformed it into a divine law (the biblical Torah) that would condition generations of worshippers for millennia.
Another Jewish atheist, Sigmund Freud, states, “One even suspects that the Israelites of the ancient period, that is, the scribes of Moses, were no strangers to the discovery of the first alphabet.” Referring again to the events of the Exodus at Sinai, Freud compares them to the introduction of a new form of divinity, interpreted by him as a psychological projection of man.
There is no doubt that not only writing but also other subsequent media, including the Internet and Artificial Intelligence, can produce forms of both psychological and moral “addiction”.
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