We have learned to read the quest for a superintelligent Artificial General Intelligence “successor species” through the old myths. Ones of overreach, the Tower of Babel, the Jewish myth of the Golem, Frankenstein and his monster, and to see it as an act of pride. This is surely right, as far as it goes. But what if something deeper lies beneath the hubris?
The project is no longer fringe, and its advocates do not hide their aims. In 2019, Elon Musk, uneasily and infamously, once described humans as “the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence”. Richard Sutton, one of the pioneers of modern machine learning, says the quiet part out loud and without flinching: “I don’t think we should fear succession by AIs… we should not resist it; we should embrace it, prepare for it”. For Sutton, as for other transhumanists, or “successionists”, as Sigal Samuel calls them in a recent article, the journey humans ought to embark on is to start from ordinary humans, through enhanced humans, to AIs. In the same vein, Jürgen Schmidhuber bids us see human civilisation as “an important step (but not the last one)” toward higher complexity.
And consider how that same culture speaks about the body. Ray Kurzweil is famous for calling our bodies defective hardware: “Our version 1.0 biological bodies are likewise frail and subject to a myriad of failure modes… much human thought is derivative, petty, and circumscribed.” Case, the protagonist of William Gibson’s highly influential 1984 sci-fi novel Neuromancer, a product of the cyberpunk imagination, believes that having a body is “the Fall,” noting that in the places he frequents the “elite stance” involved “a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat.”
My contention, therefore, is that the deepest driver of the successionist project is not hubris but shame: a quiet despair about being human, and about embodiment in particular.
But what exactly is shame, and how does it work? Shame is a fundamental and complex emotion, seldom overt and visible. It would be a mistake to collapse shame into embarrassment or shyness, which is how shame often appears in social relations. Brené Brown is close to the mark when she defines it as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging”; Silvan Tomkins, more starkly, calls it “an inner torment, a sickness of the soul,” in which one “feels himself naked, defeated, alienated, lacking in dignity or worth.” Precisely because it is so intolerable an affect, shame is often buried deep, surfacing instead as other, more familiar emotions like pride or anger. The ego inflates because the self is not secure. On this reading, hubris is the compensatory bravado of a person who feels ontologically inadequate and unlovable.
So, is it not contempt for the embodied human, rather than shame, that drives the successionists? The two are not mutually exclusive. Contempt is downstream of shame, which runs deeper and fuels it. When the torment of shame becomes intolerable, it curdles into contempt, because contempt restores a sense of agency. Like anger, it hands back a measure of control, or at least the illusion of it, while concealing the swirl of helplessness beneath. It is a coping mechanism. Add to that a belief in perpetual technological progress, and the coping mechanism turns into an exit strategy: the gnostic flight from the body via technology, engineering a disembodied, illusory perfection.
Sutton and Schmidhuber do not hate themselves in any sense they would recognise. Theirs is the voice of a culture that has lost the capacity to receive its own embodied humanness as good, and has dressed the loss as evolutionary destiny. Shame is therefore the affect; the “abolition of [embodied] man” is its tragic consummation.
Better than attempting a definition, it’s stories that best help us understand the movements and layers of shame. And the oldest of them take it seriously from the start. The Christian Scriptures describe the first effect and felt affect (sorry for the pun) of the Fall as shame: the man and the woman realise they are naked, and they hide.
Before any verdict is pronounced there is an acute sense of exposure, quickly followed by the frantic stitching of fig leaves. The Hebraic imagination, and the Mediterranean world after it, knew shame as the social and bodily exposure of a self-found wanting. Guilt says, “I did wrong”; whereas shame whispers, “I am fundamentally wrong in myself.” Recalling the effects of the Fall, Augustine speaks of how the flesh has become unruly, no longer wholly one’s own, and giving rise to a disquiet in the person. He goes on to note how the Cross gathers this all up, with Christ “despising its shame,” entering the very condition contemporary successionists are seeking to flee.
It was the Dietrich Bonhoeffer, almost alone among modern theologians, who took shame seriously and identified its deep structure. Shame, he wrote, “is man’s ineffaceable recollection of his estrangement from the origin; it is grief for this estrangement, and the powerless longing to return to unity with the origin.”1 Shame is not first a feeling about failure, but the felt, acute memory of a lost belonging and “wholeness of life”. Estranged from God, the human is estranged from others and from the self. And the body, the tangible expression of creatureliness and dependence becomes the first thing the “Fallen”, alienated person cannot bear.
If this is the diagnosis, the answer cannot be a better technology of escape. Bonhoeffer saw this too when he wrote that shame “can be overcome only when… man is once again clothed by God”. The heart of the Christian faith is the claim that God took on human flesh. The Incarnation is therefore God’s response to shame and to the alienation and self-rejection it breeds.
Against the anti-human, ultimately suicidal dream of an AI successor species that is freed from the fragility and vicissitudes of flesh stands Christianity’s claim that human beings are, unconditionally, loved and accepted, clothed in a righteousness or purity that is not our own. Indeed, for those in Christ – and no one is excluded – there is no shame in being human.