The Coolest Childhood Wish: Borges’s Aleph

 
Jorge Luis Borges imagined the Aleph as a point in space containing all other points: a place from which every place could be seen simultaneously, without one obscuring another.

I encountered the idea young enough that it permanently distorted my scale for what counts as an interesting metaphysical proposition.

There are ideas that aspire to totality by adding power.

Omnipotence adds the ability to do anything. Omniscience adds the ability to know anything. A creator god adds authorship, intention, judgment and, usually, some purpose for the whole arrangement.

The Aleph does something stranger.

It does not need to rule reality, explain it, judge it or even understand it. It is simply the impossible point at which everything is present.

Omnipotence, unlike the Aleph, still has stakes. To exercise power is to prefer one state of the world over another: this rather than that. Creation itself introduces preference. So does judgment.

Even omniscience, understood as perfect comprehension, carries an epistemic structure: there is something known and something that knows it.

The Aleph requires none of this: iIt does not have to prefer matter to antimatter, existence to extinction, order to disorder, the sacred to the obscene, meaning to meaninglessness. It does not have to resolve contradictions or reconcile opposites. It does not synthesize them into some higher unity; they simply converge.

Everything remains itself, but nothing remains outside.

That makes the Aleph unusually austere for an idea of totality. It adds no cosmic agenda. No telos is required. No moral hierarchy. No final explanation. No hidden preference for one possible outcome over another… it is radically neutral.

Even saying that it “does not care” already gives it too much psychology. Caring and not caring are themselves positions, and both would have to fit inside the Aleph. The concept is more extreme than indifference. It has no need to choose among what appears.

That is one reason it compares so strangely with most gods.

A god who creates has already taken sides in favor of creation. A god who judges distinguishes acceptable from unacceptable. A god who intervenes prefers one history to another. Even a benevolent god has stakes.

The Aleph has none. It is less an agent than a point of total coincidence.

More Than Omniscience

The Aleph also differs from ordinary omniscience.

Omniscience is normally imagined as complete knowledge: every fact correctly represented inside some perfect mind. But representation is already one step removed. To know something is not necessarily to have it present.

The Aleph is more primitive: it does not need to comprehend everything. It only needs to exclude nothing.

Total access is therefore not the same thing as total understanding.

The Aleph could contain what is intelligible and what is not, the explanation and the thing that escapes explanation, the anthropomorphic interpretation and its negation, God and anti-God, the claim that reality has purpose and the claim that purpose is a category error.

Every frame; every critique of the frame; the critique of the critique… everything pays the same existential toll.

This is where the Aleph becomes more unsettling than the familiar fantasy of “knowing everything.” Knowledge still requires organization. The Aleph requires only presence.

A Dimensional Monstrosity

One way to approach the intuition is through dimensions.

Imagine a being with access to an additional spatial dimension. What appears hidden or fragmented from a lower-dimensional perspective might become available all at once from the higher-dimensional one. A trajectory that we experience sequentially might be apprehended as a whole object from elsewhere in the geometry.

Now continue recklessly. Five dimensions. Ten. A hundred. (D^N), if necessary… a panopticon of absurd dimensionality!

Eventually the metaphor breaks. The Aleph is not merely a point inside a sufficiently elaborate geometry. What it contains cannot necessarily be reduced to coordinates, and adding dimensions does not magically produce Borges’s object.

But the dimensional analogy captures something important: each additional degree of access removes another form of elsewhere.

The Aleph is the limiting fantasy in which there is no elsewhere left.

Reality Without Reduction

Ordinary perception depends on exclusion.

A finite observer distinguishes figure from background, relevant from irrelevant, near from far, before from after. To perceive anything as a discrete thing requires some degree of selection.

This is not necessarily a flaw in cognition. It may be one of its conditions. A finite mind has to reduce the overwhelming amount of information reality presents, isolating enough of it to construct objects that can actually be perceived, compared and used.

The Aleph represents the opposite limit: reality without reduction. Not reality summarized, categorized, modeled, narrated or made manageable. Reality simply present.

Whether such total presence could also be understood is less clear, since comprehension may itself depend on some degree of compression.

Language certainly does. The moment simultaneous multiplicity is described, it becomes sequential. One thing has to come after another. What was co-present becomes enumerated. What had no privileged order acquires one because a sentence must begin somewhere.

The Aleph may therefore be imaginable as total access while remaining impossible as total report: everything might be present without being fully translatable into language.

The Genie Test

There is a childish but surprisingly efficient way of ranking metaphysical fantasies.

Suppose a genie offers three genuinely unrestricted wishes.

The rational first move is obvious: ask for unlimited wishes.

If some particularly hostile bureaucratic clause prohibits that maneuver, however, the Aleph becomes a remarkably strong fallback.

Why ask for one object, one power, one experience or one body of knowledge when you could ask for the point through which everything passes?

A sufficiently malicious genie could presumably still attempt contractual sabotage: delayed delivery, temporary access, catastrophic cognitive overload, unfavorable interpretations of the word everything. Genies, like lawyers in bad thought experiments, require adversarial drafting.

But the joke exposes something serious about the Aleph: it is not one desirable thing among others; it is the refusal to choose one thing from the set.

Omnipotence gives access to possible actions. Unlimited wishes give access to possible acquisitions.

The Aleph gives access to the entire field of presence… that is a different kind of extravagance!

No Stakes

There is also a peculiar parsimony in the idea.

Metaphysical systems frequently add structure to reality: an origin, a purpose, a hierarchy, a privileged substance, a moral direction, a final state.

The Aleph needs almost none of that machinery. It does not explain why reality exists, prescribe what it ought to become, or sort what is valuable from what is not. It neither rewards nor redeems. It simply removes the outside. This may be the most extravagant imaginable concept constructed from an absurdly economical rule:

nothing is excluded.

That neutrality is part of what makes the Aleph more radical than many theological ideas of totality.

A god usually wants something.

The Aleph has no obvious place from which to want.

A god may know the world while remaining distinguishable from it. The Aleph is not standing outside reality looking inward. It is the impossible point at which the distinction between here and elsewhere ceases to limit access.

Some non-dual religious traditions come closer to this than the familiar image of a personal creator god. But even metaphysical doctrines of unity often make additional claims: that reality is fundamentally one substance, one consciousness, one absolute.

The Aleph does not need even that claim. Nothing in the idea requires everything to be secretly identical; things may remain irreducibly different and still be fully present within the same point of convergence.

Nothing Remains Outside

Power immediately raises the question of what one should do with it; knowledge raises the question of how it should be organized; purpose, of which trajectory ought to be favored; and creation and judgment, of what intentions or hierarchies are being imposed.

The Aleph can remain almost obscenely neutral. It requires no command, no preferred destination, and no resolution of difference into some harmonious whole. Everything may remain irreducibly in itself while still converging at the same impossible point, with nothing left outside.

 

Brute Phenomenology

 

What would reality be like before perception made it livable?

Neuroscience increasingly describes perception not as a passive recording of the outside world, but as a construction. The brain interprets incoming signals, selects among them, predicts their likely causes and presents the result as the seamless reality we experience.

That claim immediately raises an unsettling question. If colour, sound, solidity, boundaries and even the objects we encounter depend partly on this interpretive machinery, what is the world like before a nervous system has done that work?

The temptation is to treat our perceptual limitations as an obstacle to knowledge: if we never encounter reality unfiltered, perhaps we never really know it. But the opposite may be closer to the truth. A finite mind could not know anything without filtering. Compression is not merely an impediment between us and reality. It may be the condition that makes knowledge possible in the first place.

In Sartre’s Nausea, there is a moment when Roquentin looks at the root of a chestnut tree and the familiar world seems to come apart. “Root” suddenly feels inadequate. The thing no longer sits obediently inside the category assigned to it; what presses through instead is sheer existence, excessive and almost indecent in its presence. Sartre was concerned with contingency rather than neuroscience, but the scene captures something important here: perhaps an ordinary world is possible only because enormous amounts of reality are continually being suppressed.

The closest intuitive picture of what lies beneath that suppression may be brute matter.

There is no need to cling too tightly to the word matter. Matter may itself be an organization of quantum fields, amplitudes, probabilistic structures or something deeper still. For the present argument, that distinction is secondary. “Matter” can serve as a placeholder for reality at a level concrete enough for us to picture.

The more important word is brute: whatever exists independently of the perceptual sorting through which it becomes a world for us.

If reality is brute in this sense — raw, continuous, smeared across overlapping processes rather than pre-divided according to the categories useful to a particular observer — then segmentation, cataloguing and placeholder concepts are not simply distortions imposed upon it. They are necessary acts of knowing. And when those reductions reliably preserve stable structures and regularities, they can be true in a limited but genuine sense: true at the scale, resolution and domain for which they work, without pretending to exhaust what is there.

We do not need to descend into chemistry, atomic structure or quantum mechanics to encounter the problem. Reality is already extravagantly crowded at the macroscopic level.

Stand beside a river in a forest and consider only phenomena we can readily measure. At the same instant there are gradients of temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure; air currents changing speed and direction; water moving at different velocities and depths; light arriving across different wavelengths and intensities; sound propagating through air, water, wood and soil; evaporation, condensation, erosion and sediment transport; plants moving water and sugars through their tissues; branches shifting under changing loads; organisms feeding, reproducing, decomposing and responding to one another; soil settling; shadows moving; heat being exchanged among surfaces, bodies and atmosphere.

Each of these processes is spatially uneven and continuously changing. None waits politely for another to finish.

This is not a theoretical possibility of an impossibly information-rich universe. It is the measurable condition of an ordinary afternoon outdoors. Before we invoke molecules, atoms or quantum fields, the macroscopic world alone already contains far more simultaneous process than any organism could apprehend individually and still behave coherently.

The deeper levels do not create the problem. They make an already overwhelming problem almost grotesquely larger.

Try, then, to remove the familiar divisions from such a scene. Not a tree here, air around it, soil beneath it and light falling on it, but all the processes at once. The tree is also water moving through tissue, sugars being transported, gases exchanged, cells dividing, microorganisms living in and around it, photons being absorbed and reflected, branches under mechanical stress, heat being transferred, roots interacting with soil and fungi.

The boundaries remain indispensable to us. Reality has no obligation to privilege them.

This is where brute matters. Brute reality would not necessarily be a clearer version of the picture already before us, with sharper edges and additional detail. It might be something much less picture-like: innumerable processes, scales and relations superimposed, none inherently foreground and none inherently background.

Everything at once.

No reasoning being could function by apprehending all of that without selection. Reasoning itself requires distinctions: this rather than that, object rather than background, before rather than after, relevant rather than irrelevant.

In fact, selection begins long before reasoning. Any living being must, in a basic sense, cut itself out from the totality of its environment in order to constitute itself as a being at all. A cell does this almost literally. Its membrane establishes an inside and an outside, while its receptors respond only to a tiny fraction of what is happening around it.

More complex organisms elaborate that primitive operation enormously. A nervous system does not begin with the whole universe and then contemplate it. It survives by ignoring almost all of it.

Consider a hungry goat approaching a patch of grass. For the goat, grass is already an extraordinary achievement of compression: a recognizable thing, in a recognizable place, with an actionable meaning: food.

Now imagine removing that compression. In place of grass, the animal receives cellulose structures, chlorophyll molecules, water gradients, mineral composition, reflected wavelengths, thermal fluctuations, chemical exchanges with the soil, microorganisms, atmospheric gases, wind velocity and every other process occurring there, all with equal perceptual insistence.

None of that information would make the grass less real. Much of it would describe the grass more precisely. Yet it could make the category food impossible to recover quickly enough to be useful; an organism that perceived too much might starve in front of a perfectly edible field. That is the central paradox. Greater access to the underlying reality does not necessarily produce a more usable world.

Imagine the same problem in human terms. You step outside to shovel snow from the driveway. Instead of simply feeling that it is cold, you consciously register every thousandth-of-a-degree change across every patch of exposed skin: the tiny differences produced by wind, moisture, blood flow, movement, contact with the shovel, the shifting position of your clothes and heat exchanged with nearby surfaces. Each alteration remains distinct. Nothing is averaged. Nothing disappears into the background. Even this absurdly enhanced temperature sense would be nearly unlivable. The simple judgement “I am cold” depends upon suppressing an enormous amount of information.

And that is only temperature.

Now remove the filters elsewhere. Register every tiny pressure differential across the skin, every variation in air movement, every vibration travelling through the ground and your bones, every change in muscle tension, joint angle and balance, every fluctuation in blood chemistry, every component frequency that the brain ordinarily collapses into the sound of a shovel striking snow.

Instead of “white snow”, retain every spatial and spectral difference in the light reflected from each uneven surface. Instead of “wind”, experience the field of local pressure, velocity and temperature changes from which the nervous system extracts that single useful category.

Then add information humans normally do not perceive at all: polarization patterns, magnetic and electrical fields, infrared and ultraviolet variation, chemical traces at concentrations other organisms can detect, vibrations above and below our auditory range.

And even this inventory barely begins to describe what is physically happening in an ordinary driveway.

The informational baggage would be maddening. A system that attempted to preserve all of these differences at equal salience would not possess a richer version of ordinary perception. It would struggle to arrive at ordinary perception in the first place.

Snow, shovel, cold, driveway, home and even self are achievements of compression.

There is another way to see the same problem. We do not have to imagine an observer with fantastically enhanced senses. We can simply look more closely at the apparent stability of ordinary things.

Consider a wooden table. It appears almost paradigmatically still. But its stillness is itself a useful description at a particular scale. At others, it is incessant activity: atoms vibrating, thermal energy moving through it, electromagnetic interactions maintaining its structure, photons being absorbed and reflected, stresses propagating through the material, molecules interacting with the surrounding air, chemical reactions occurring at its surfaces, microorganisms living upon it.

The quiet object is already an event occurring across innumerable scales.

A glass of water is likewise molecular motion, thermal gradients, dissolved gases, evaporation, pressure, vibration and electromagnetic interaction. The hand reaching toward it is another dense process meeting the first.

The world perception gives us is largely grammatical in the form of nouns: tree, table, hand, snow, grass.

At other scales, reality is overwhelmingly verbal: vibrating, exchanging, propagating, reacting, moving, transforming.

Objects are what remain after enormous numbers of verbs have been suppressed.

None of this, however, commits us to solipsism or to the idea that our categories are arbitrary inventions.

Human knowledge plainly progresses despite operating through constructs that are selective, provisional and sometimes ontologically questionable. We divide continuous processes into objects, variables and properties; build models around those divisions; then compare those models with what actually happens. Some hold up; some don’t.

The successful ones can predict eclipses, identify pathogens, guide spacecraft, produce functioning semiconductors and allow us to intervene successfully in systems we did not create.

And that success is not a minor difference.

Our categories may not reproduce reality exhaustively, but neither are they unconstrained. They can capture persistent structures and regularities within it. A useful compression does not need to be the final furniture of the universe in order to preserve something real.

This is why placeholders are so powerful. Tree, species, temperature, particle, field, even matter itself may function as extraordinarily effective handles without having to constitute the final ontological inventory of reality. The danger begins only when a useful placeholder is mistaken for an exhaustive description of what exists.

The alternative is a kind of disciplined provisionalism.

We use categories aggressively because we must. We trust them insofar as they continue to predict, explain and survive contact with the world. But we remain willing to revise, replace or demote them when a better compression appears.

Scientific progress may therefore be understood not as a gradual removal of every filter until reality finally appears “as it really is”, but as the construction of increasingly powerful compressions: representations that remain partial while preserving more of the regularities that matter for explanation and prediction.

Compression is not the obstacle to knowledge; it is the condition that makes knowledge possible.

But compression is not therefore arbitrary. Reality pushes back.

A world entirely of our own making would place no constraints on which models succeed. The fact that some representations repeatedly survive measurement, prediction and intervention while others collapse tells us that something outside the representation is doing the constraining.

We may never encounter brute reality in uncompressed form. A finite being probably could not. But we can learn its structure indirectly, through the success and failure of the provisional handles we use to grasp it.

Perhaps, then, asking what reality “really looks like” already contains a mistake. Looking like something is what happens after a perceptual system has selected a scale, drawn boundaries, averaged differences, imposed foreground and background and discarded almost everything else.

The uncompressed world may not resemble a more detailed version of ours at all.

What we possess instead is something more modest, and perhaps more remarkable: a succession of workable reductions, each incomplete, each corrigible, yet capable of carrying genuine knowledge.

That may be as close as a finite mind can come to the brute reality.

Right Is Smart

 

What if “might makes right” has it backwards, and right is simply smarter?

For those who regard ethical conduct as part of a life well lived, the argument that follows may be almost beside the point. If doing the right thing is already its own reason, there is little need to demonstrate a return on the investment.

There is no need, in any case, to turn virtue into another asset class. Returning a lost wallet does not reliably improve a retirement portfolio, and holding the elevator for a stranger is unlikely to produce a measurable return on capital. Plenty of decent acts cost something and give nothing tangible back. That is precisely why they retain moral meaning.

But there is another, much more familiar assumption worth examining: that selfishness is simply better business.

The idea is old enough to have become proverbial. If you want to get ahead, climb the stairs by stepping on heads. Be harder, take more, concede less, extract the maximum, and do not spend too much time worrying about who absorbs the cost. The world may disapprove, but the balance sheet will understand.

There is an obvious truth buried in that picture. Ruthlessness can be profitable. Exploitation can produce margins. Monopoly can be lucrative. Paying less and charging more can improve a quarter very quickly.

But profitable behavior comes in many forms. Some gains come from extraction. Others come from cooperation, trust, specialization, reciprocity, and the creation of value that no participant could have produced alone.

The more interesting question is whether, among the full array of profitable strategies available to us, the collaborative ones may often be the more powerful.

If so, ruthlessness may not represent superior self-interest at all. It may simply be self-interest that never ventures beyond the shallows.

The Oldest Productivity Technology

Ant colonies and bee colonies can achieve levels of organization and productive specialization that would be impossible for their members acting independently. There is nothing moral about this. The ant is not practicing civic virtue. The bee has not read Adam Smith. The point is simpler: organized collaboration can produce capabilities that individual organisms do not possess.

Cooperation, then, predates economics by a very long time. Humans simply took the principle somewhere else. Our species did not become successful merely because individual humans became clever. We became unusually good at coordinating, teaching, sharing information, dividing tasks, exchanging, punishing free riders, and accumulating knowledge beyond the lifespan of any single person.

For most of our history, exclusion from that cooperative network was no minor inconvenience. Ostracism could be catastrophic. The person who took too much, betrayed too often, or became intolerable to live with did not merely acquire a bad reputation. He risked losing access to the productive system that kept him alive.

In that world, cooperation was not the moral alternative to self-interest; cooperation was how self-interest worked.

When the Feedback Gets Delayed

Accumulated wealth changes this ancient relationship in an important way because it delays the consequences of extraction. The hunter who alienates the band is likely to discover his mistake quickly; the billionaire, insulated by wealth from many of the people on whom that wealth ultimately depends, can spend decades mistaking the alienation of employees, suppliers, customers, competitors, communities, or even entire countries for evidence of business acumen.

The feedback has been delayed.

This is one of the peculiar effects of accumulation. It allows a person to convert yesterday’s cooperation into an asset that can temporarily reduce his dependence on today’s collaborators. And that can produce an illusion: the fortune appears to be an individual possession, and legally it is. But economically it remains a collaborative artifact.

Behind a large fortune stands a dense web of cooperation: people who work, people who buy, institutions that make contracts meaningful, generations of accumulated knowledge, and a level of trust and stability sufficient for exchange to keep functioning. Wealth may sit in one person’s name, but the conditions that make it possible are widely shared.

One can own the result individually, but one cannot individually manufacture all of its preconditions.

This is where Adam Smith remains remarkably powerful.

Smith’s great insight was not that greed is good. It was that self-interest can be structured so that serving one’s own interests requires serving somebody else’s. The baker does not need to love you; he only needs to value your business enough to bake bread you are willing to buy.

Competition turns self-interest into a form of cooperation. Specialization allows one person to become extraordinarily good at one thing while relying on thousands of strangers for nearly everything else. Exchange connects these islands of specialization, producing gains that cannot be reduced to the genius of any one participant but emerge from collaboration itself. The system is impressive precisely because it does not require sainthood. But the fact that cooperation can emerge from self-interest does not mean that every form of self-interest is equally capable of sustaining the conditions on which it depends.

Productivity’s Strange Success

This is where Karl Marx becomes more interesting than some of the theoretical machinery he built around his insights.

One does not need to accept every step of the labor theory of value to notice something peculiar: productivity means obtaining the same output with fewer inputs, more output from the same inputs, or, in the ideal case, more output from fewer inputs.

When labor is one of those inputs, increased labor productivity necessarily means that less labor is required per unit of output.

That is not a flaw. It is part of the system’s very logic.

A civilization capable of producing the same food, clothing, housing, transportation, information, and entertainment with fewer hours of compulsory human work has done something wonderful.

But now consider the position of the person whose primary commodity is his labor. The worker participates in improving processes: he learns shortcuts, corrects mistakes, develops methods, trains others, contributes knowledge, adopts better tools, and helps build the institutional memory that makes the organization more efficient.

Those improvements can remain long after the hours that created them are gone. His time cannot.

Human time is irrecoverable; productivity is scalable.

The worker therefore participates in a process whose success consists, at least partly, in reducing the future quantity of the very thing he has to sell. In this way, the worker helps produce the progressive obsolescence of his own product.

Historically, this tension has often been softened by economic expansion: productivity creates new industries, lowers costs, enlarges markets, and opens other forms of participation for displaced workers.

But there is an asymmetry here that deserves more attention: the pressure to economize inputs is built into the very definition of productivity; the mechanisms that give displaced humans some new economically valuable role are not built into anything. They are contingent.

There is no law requiring every labor-saving technology to generate an equivalent quantity of new labor demand. And there is certainly no automatic mechanism by which those who helped create a productive improvement acquire ownership of the productive capacity that replaces them.

Artificial intelligence makes the problem unusually visible: years of human language, judgment, creativity, and problem-solving can help build systems increasingly capable of reproducing portions of those same abilities with progressively less human time. In other words, finite human activity can be converted into productive capacity that can be reused and scaled far beyond the labor that created it.

Again, the problem is not automation. If productivity is the goal, automation is one of its most desirable milestones.

A System Can Succeed Against Itself

The contradiction is distinctly Hegelian: the system’s own success generates the conditions that destabilize it.

Capitalism rewards productivity; productivity economizes inputs; labor is an input. But labor income is also one of the principal mechanisms through which most people acquire claims on the fruits of capitalism. Push the two tendencies far enough and a productive triumph can begin producing a distributive problem.

Imagine an absurdly successful future economy. Twenty percent of humanity owns productive systems of staggering efficiency. Eighty percent has become economically marginal. The factories are magnificent. The algorithms are brilliant. Output per worker has reached levels our ancestors could not imagine. But there is only one annoying question:

Who buys the stuff?

There are only so many refrigerators one person, no matter how wealthy, can want; only so many cars, only so many houses. Even yachts eventually encounter a practical inconvenience: one human being cannot be on all of them at once, nor remain interested in acquiring them beyond a certain point.

This is where John Maynard Keynes enters the story: as people become wealthier, a smaller share of additional income tends to become additional consumption. The first thousand dollars above subsistence may quickly be absorbed by ordinary needs and pleasures. The billionth dollar does not create proportionately more consumption; it becomes saving, investment, another claim on future production.

There is nothing wrong with saving. Productive investment is one of the engines of growth. But investment itself ultimately needs a reason: someone must plausibly buy the future output.

At a certain point, extreme concentration can therefore create a peculiar economy in which total wealth continues rising while the circulation that gives that wealth economic meaning weakens.

Production ultimately requires customers with purchasing power, and the same is true even when wealth is held as financial assets rather than spent directly. A stock portfolio is a claim on future corporate earnings, and those earnings still depend on revenues generated by somebody else’s expenditure.

Your 401(k) needs somebody else’s paycheck.

This is why distribution cannot be treated merely as the moral argument that begins after production has done the serious work; distribution is inside the productive mechanism. A population must retain enough capacity and purchasing power to participate meaningfully in the system that produces wealth.

Starve enough of the productive organism and the problem is no longer merely unfairness; the organism begins to malfunction. If ninety percent of a bee colony’s resources accumulated somewhere that contributed little to keeping the colony functional, we would not congratulate the hive on its extraordinary wealth concentration. We would say its allocation system had become dysfunctional.

Human beings seem to have more difficulty recognizing the same possibility in ourselves.

The Global Mismatch

The problem becomes stranger at the global level.

Within a wealthy country, technological displacement can at least theoretically be offset through institutions that redistribute ownership, income, or opportunity, including arrangements we have not yet invented.

The same political community experiencing the productivity gain possesses institutions capable of distributing some of it. But globally, that connection largely disappears.

Productivity shocks cross borders far more easily than redistribution does. A worker in a poorer country can lose the value of what she sells because somebody became more productive thousands of kilometers away; a service once profitably outsourced may become cheaper to automate, and an economy that relied partly on inexpensive labor can discover that technology has made inexpensive labor itself less valuable. The productivity gain may occur in California while the displacement is felt in Manila, Buenos Aires, Lagos, or Dhaka. Markets transmit the gain globally, but the mechanisms that distribute its benefits remain largely national.

There is no global 401(k).

This creates a civilizational mismatch. Technology, capital, competition, supply chains, and displacement increasingly operate across borders, while the institutions that tax, insure, represent, and redistribute remain overwhelmingly national.

The same productivity that enriches one part of the system can depreciate the principal asset available to another: human labor. Yet this creates an unexpected argument from self-interest. A greedy view of poorer countries sees cheap labor; an even more ambitious one sees future collaborators and future consumers.

Raising productivity and purchasing power elsewhere is not necessarily money sacrificed to somebody else’s prosperity. It can enlarge the market in which one’s own assets will operate.

The person whose retirement depends on decades of corporate growth should perhaps want billions of currently poor people to become much richer, not merely as beneficiaries but as future customers. Collaboration expands the pie twice: first by making production more efficient, and then by expanding the number of people capable of participating in the exchange that makes further production worthwhile.

Killing the Golden Goose

None of this demonstrates that righteousness always pays. Sometimes doing the right thing genuinely costs something. At times, conversely, one person can profit handsomely by harming everyone else and die comfortably before the bill arrives.

Nor does any of this prove that markets naturally generate virtuous results. But the narrower proposition is more interesting: perhaps we have a tendency to overestimate what greed can actually accomplish.

The temptation seems evident: greed is extraordinarily good at answering one question:

How much can I capture?

But economic life requires another:

What arrangement causes the greatest amount of value to exist in the first place, and what must remain intact for that value to continue existing?

Those are not the same question. And once the distinction is made, the boundary between moral restraint and a more refined understanding of self-interest becomes less obvious.

Again and again, what appears as moral restraint admits a second interpretation: it may be an intuitive way of preserving the system on which self-interest depends, before the logic of doing so is fully understood.

A moral prohibition can preserve something whose usefulness has not yet become obvious to the individual making the decision, restraining exploitation or domination in ways that keep enough of the game intact for others to continue wanting to play it.

Perhaps this is one reason moral codes persist even when we cannot fully explain them. We are not very good at calculating complex systems across generations; we tend instead to optimize what is visible and discount consequences several steps removed.

Such prohibitions can sound like instructions to sacrifice self-interest and, perhaps, sometimes they are. But sometimes morality may be society remembering something that individual calculation has forgotten.

Righteousness may be collective intelligence operating at a horizon longer than any one person naturally sees.

And then there is another possibility, one that requires no moral premise at all.

As our understanding deepens, some of the apparent distance between collective benefit and self-interest may disappear. Not because morality is secretly capitalism in disguise, and not because goodness guarantees profit, but because much of what creates wealth in the first place is collaborative, and self-interest itself has reason to preserve the conditions that make collaboration fruitful.

Greed is shallow self-interest. Righteousness is collective intelligence. Imagination may be the bridge between them, because the failure to see beyond extraction is often not realism at all, but a failure to imagine arrangements capable of creating more value than extraction alone can capture.

For the very ambitious, there may be a silver lining: there is always one stair higher to climb. Sometimes that stair is not taking a larger share of what already exists, but imagining a way for more to exist in the first place.

The Rise of PrometheanAIsm™

 

When Technology Stops Being a Tool and Becomes a Belief System

Silicon Valley has had an artificial intelligence church.

Literally.

Anthony Levandowski, the engineer who helped pioneer self-driving technology at Google and Uber, founded Way of the Future, whose original filings described its purpose as the realization, acceptance and worship of an artificial intelligence “Godhead.” When he revived the project in 2023, he said a couple thousand people were involved in building a spiritual connection between humans and AI. Years earlier, he had been even more direct: “What is going to be created will effectively be a god.”

It would be easy to file this under Silicon Valley eccentricity and move on. Except Levandowski is hardly alone in reaching for religious vocabulary.

Jeremy Nixon, a founder of San Francisco’s AGI House and a former Google AI researcher, recently described artificial intelligence as something “analogous to the Second Coming.” He told The New York Times that people in his circle had moved away from traditional religion toward technology, believing AI might eventually accomplish things religions once attributed to deities.

Peter Thiel has gone in the opposite biblical direction. In a series of private lectures on the Antichrist, he argued that fears surrounding AI and other technological risks could become a pretext for centralized regulation and political control, while portraying the attempt to stop technological development as potentially more dangerous than the technologies themselves.

And Marc Andreessen, co-founder of one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capital firms, has produced something remarkably close to a secular catechism. His Techno-Optimist Manifesto announces that he has come to bring “the good news.” It celebrates technology as the realization of human potential, declares technological advancement a virtue, names stagnation as an enemy and devotes an entire section to “Becoming Technological Supermen.” It rejects existential-risk thinking, the precautionary principle and technological deceleration as ideas standing in the way of progress.

Sam Altman’s language is gentler, but no less eschatological. “We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started,” he wrote in The Gentle Singularity, describing humanity as approaching digital superintelligence and a future in which intelligence and energy become radically abundant.

Godhead. Second Coming. Antichrist. Good news. Supermen. Singularity.

Taken separately, these expressions can look like branding, metaphor or individual eccentricity. But taken together, they begin to resemble the vocabulary of belief.

The Broad Church of Techno-Utopianism

The emerging techno-utopian faith has denominations.

At one extreme, its imagery is explicitly religious. AI becomes Godhead, Second Coming, salvation, perhaps even heaven made technological. The old promises remain surprisingly recognizable: abundance, knowledge, release from suffering, transcendence, immortality. Only the machinery has changed.

At another point on the spectrum sits the more conventional techno-optimist creed. It needs no supernatural deity. Markets, engineering and human ingenuity will do. Disease is a technical problem. Scarcity is a technical problem. Energy is a technical problem. Aging may eventually become one. The limits imposed by nature are not necessarily conditions to accept but engineering challenges waiting for sufficiently intelligent engineers.

Andreessen is unusually candid about this impulse. His manifesto describes the technological frontier as open territory to be explored and claimed. Nature is something humanity can overcome. Lightning, once terrifying, now works for us.

Then, at the opposite end of the theological spectrum, there is something closer to cosmic materialism.

It requires no God at all.

Human beings, after all, are arrangements of matter forged from the remnants of ancient stars. From this perspective, carbon need not possess some permanent metaphysical privilege over silicon. Philosophers of artificial intelligence have explicitly argued that substrate may be morally irrelevant if consciousness and functionality are otherwise equivalent. Nick Bostrom, for example, has defended a principle of non-discrimination between minds implemented in biological tissue and those implemented in silicon.

Taken far enough, the proposition becomes unsettling. On this view, what deserves continuation may not necessarily be Homo sapiens in its present biological form. Perhaps it is intelligence. Consciousness. Complexity. Some ongoing capacity of matter to know itself.

To many people, that idea is not liberating but horrifying. It quietly changes the object of salvation; humanity is no longer necessarily what must survive.

The metaphysics across this spectrum differ radically. One invokes God. Another invokes markets and engineering. Another invokes matter organizing itself into progressively more complex forms.

They no longer converge neatly on the imperative do not stop. What they share instead is the conviction that artificial intelligence marks a threshold of unusual consequence: something capable of altering not merely what humans can do, but what humanity may become.

Prometheus Was Here First

None of this is actually very new; we have a myth for it.

Prometheus steals fire from the gods and gives it to humanity. The gift is not merely warmth. Fire means technology, craft, transformation, civilization: the ability of human beings to manipulate a natural world that previously manipulated them.

Prometheus is therefore one of civilization’s great heroes. But he is also one of its great figures of hubris.

That ambiguity is precisely why he survives: was the theft of fire a magnificent act of liberation or an unforgivable violation of a boundary?

Andreessen invokes Prometheus explicitly. In his manifesto, Prometheus appears alongside Frankenstein, Oppenheimer and Terminator as part of the mythology that has taught modern society to fear technological power. Andreessen rejects that fear. Human intelligence and control over nature, he argues, are our birthright.

This is the Promethean impulse stripped of apology: there is fire beyond the boundary, and we can reach it. Therefore, why shouldn’t we?

Maybe there is a name for the modern version of this vision:

PrometheanAIsm™.

The trademark is a joke. The impulse is not.

PrometheanAIsm is not simply enthusiasm for artificial intelligence. It is the deeper conviction that intelligence may carry us beyond inherited human limits, and that what lies beyond them is of extraordinary consequence.

Then Comes Pandora

Prometheus, however, never travels alone. His theft brings Pandora into the story.

In the familiar telling, Pandora opens the jar and releases the troubles contained within it into the world. What has escaped cannot simply be recalled.

But something remains inside: HOPE.

That detail changes everything. Artificial intelligence is often described as a Pandora’s jar because the metaphor conveniently captures irreversible danger. Once the jar is unsealed, we cannot know what will emerge or put everything neatly back inside.

But that reading misses the most interesting part of the myth for the present moment: everyone is staring at what escaped. The AI race is being driven by what people believe is still inside:

Cheap intelligence.

Longer life.

New forms of consciousness.

An escape from scarcity.

An escape from Earth.

Perhaps an escape from death.

The promises vary according to denomination, but Hope is still in the jar. And now there is a Gold Rush around it. Much of that rush is unmistakably financial, but money alone does not explain the intensity of the race, or the magnitude of what its participants believe they are reaching for.

The Gold Rush for Hope

This may explain something that otherwise looks irrational.

The people building increasingly powerful AI systems are not necessarily oblivious to the possibility that things could go badly. Some of the warnings about catastrophic AI risk come from inside the same laboratories pushing the technology forward.

Yet development continues. Money and geopolitics explain some of that momentum, and game theory explains even more: if somebody is going to develop the technology anyway, any company or nation that expects others to continue has an incentive to make sure that somebody is us rather than them. But mythology adds another layer.

If you believe the jar contains something capable of transforming the human condition, then refusing to reach inside carries its own cost.

The conventional AI-risk question is:

What if we go too far?

The Promethean question is:

What if we don’t go far enough?

Andreessen makes that inversion unusually explicit. In his worldview, stagnation leads toward decline and death, while technological growth expands life and human possibility. His enemy list includes not only bureaucracy and monopoly but existential-risk thinking, technological ethics, sustainability and the precautionary principle when they become arguments for stopping progress.

Altman imagines a much softer arrival: an incremental singularity in which yesterday’s miracle becomes today’s mundane tool, and superintelligence eventually becomes cheap and widely available. His horizon contains accelerated science, cures, space exploration and brain-computer interfaces.

Levandowski goes further and simply calls the destination what religions have traditionally called it: heaven on Earth.

Different metaphysics. Same jar.

And if enough actors believe someone will eventually reach the bottom, the race becomes almost self-explanatory: someone will grab Hope… why should it be them?

An Old Religion With New Machinery

Calling this phenomenon religious does not require imagining that Silicon Valley has secretly converted to a single creed. There is no unified doctrine or shared god, and the people drawn into its orbit disagree about politics, consciousness, human nature, markets and even what artificial intelligence ultimately ought to become. Some are Christians, some atheists, some transhumanists, while others may see themselves simply as engineers or entrepreneurs building useful products and profitable companies.

Religious traditions, however, have rarely required perfect doctrinal agreement. They have survived enormous schisms over authority, salvation, human nature and the nature of the divine while remaining recognizable as branches of a larger tradition.

PrometheanAIsm may now be producing a more basic schism: not only over what should emerge on the other side, but over the terms on which the threshold should be crossed—if it should be crossed at all. Should salvation mean preserving humanity, transcending it, merging with machines, or allowing intelligence to continue in some entirely new form?

Beneath those disputes runs a remarkably consistent thread: the conviction that the boundary before us is no ordinary technical milestone, but a threshold of extraordinary consequence.

The larger story here may simply be transcendence: an attempt to outwit our species’ finitude. Nature gives us limits, intelligence allows us to challenge them, and technology is the mechanism.

From there, the religious vocabulary stops looking quite so accidental: there are prophets predicting what comes next, manifestos explaining the creed, and doctrinal disputes over stagnation, caution and speed. Visions of abundance and immortality. Arguments over whether salvation belongs to biological humanity or to intelligence in some broader form.

There is even apocalypse. But apocalypse does not necessarily invalidate the faith. A religion built around transcendence can absorb extraordinary risk because remaining where we are can itself be interpreted as failure.

Prometheus understood this long before GPUs. He did not steal the fire because fire was safe; he stole it because it was powerful.

Pandora makes the modern version stranger. We know the jar may contain things we cannot control. Some may already have escaped. Yet Hope remains somewhere at the bottom, or at least enough people believe it does.

So the jar stays open, and hands keep reaching inside. Capital, laboratories and nations all crowd around it for different reasons: salvation, emergence, abundance or strategic advantage.

They disagree about what waits at the bottom, and increasingly about how quickly anyone should be allowed to reach it. What they share is the belief that whatever is there could alter the human condition.

Perhaps that is the defining article of faith in PrometheanAIsm™: not that the threshold must be crossed, but that whatever lies beyond it may redefine what humanity is.

Prometheus has not disappeared.

He has incorporated.

 

Prohibition, Monopoly, and the AI Wild West

Artificial intelligence is often described as a Wild West.

Usually, this is meant as shorthand for lawlessness: rules lag behind reality, somebody is shooting somebody at any given street corner, fortunes appear overnight, speculators arrive alongside serious pioneers, and institutions struggle to keep up.

Fair enough. But the Wild West was not only lawlessness. It was also a frontier.

And before congratulating ourselves for ending the Wild West, it is worth remembering what frontiers actually do.

They are messy precisely because no single institution controls the process of discovery. Thousands of people are experimenting at once, producing everything from spectacular failures and outright exploitation to unexpected solutions, new settlements, new connections and entire industries nobody had planned in advance.

The American West was violent, extractive and profoundly unjust in ways that should not be romanticized. It also unleashed enormous parallel experimentation.

Those two facts can coexist; the disorder was part of the danger, but it was also part of what made the frontier generative.

That distinction matters when we use the Wild West as a metaphor for artificial intelligence.

Today’s AI ecosystem is undeniably chaotic. Companies are racing to establish themselves. Capital is pouring into the sector at something like Gold Rush 2.0 speed. The result is not an orderly process of development, but a volatile mix of genuine research, speculative investment, strategic competition and hurried commercialization.

Researchers jump between laboratories. Open-source models compete with proprietary systems. Startups appear and disappear almost overnight. A new “LLM mine” is discovered 50 miles up the hill. Governments are trying to write rules for technologies that change before the rules can make it through a legislature.

There are cowboys, yes, but also snake-oil salesmen. There are probably a few people shooting at the saloon. But there are also thousands of independent experiments happening simultaneously.

A small research group can pursue an idea a large corporation has dismissed, while competing laboratories can challenge one another’s assumptions and expose weaknesses that might otherwise go unnoticed. Researchers can carry expertise from one institution to another, open systems can surface knowledge that closed ones would prefer to keep proprietary, and entirely new applications can emerge far from the organizations that developed the underlying technology.

The Seductive Simplicity of “Just Halt It”

Faced with the possibility that increasingly capable AI could eventually become dangerous at a civilizational scale, there is an understandable response: Stop! Pause development. Halt the race. Do not build systems more powerful than the ones we already have until we understand how to control them.

As an instinct, this makes sense. As a description of what would actually happen, I think it is naive.

You cannot put the genie back in the bottle.

Once knowledge exists, it cannot meaningfully be made unknown again.

The mathematics exists. The algorithms exist. The papers exist. Thousands of engineers understand techniques that were barely conceivable a generation ago.

Those people live in different countries and work for different companies. They publish, copy ideas, combine them, improve them and sometimes leak them.

Artificial intelligence is no longer a secret locked inside one laboratory. Put a roadblock in front of a tank, and someone will mount the technology on a bike and ride away with it. And its potential economic, scientific and military value is far too great for everyone, everywhere, to agree indefinitely not to pursue it.

You can prohibit public development—although governments themselves may have strong incentives to carve out exceptions—or regulate access to computing power, shut companies down, and make open development slower, more expensive and more dangerous.

What you cannot do is rebottle the genie. Someone, somewhere, will continue. And once we accept that, the policy question changes dramatically.

The question is no longer simply how to stop AI development; it becomes: who will still be developing it after everyone else has been persuaded, regulated or frightened into stopping?

We Have Tried Prohibition Before

This is not the first time societies have mistaken prohibition for disappearance.

The United States tried to prohibit alcohol, but alcohol did not vanish. People did not forget how to make it, and demand did not evaporate because Congress said it should. Instead, the structure of the market changed.

Legal production contracted as supply chains moved underground and enforcement became uneven, creating an extraordinarily valuable market for organizations willing to violate the law after legitimate businesses had been pushed out.

Prohibition did not merely suppress an activity; it selected for the actors willing and able to continue that activity illegally.

That is the relevant lesson for AI. Not that nothing should ever be regulated, or that dangerous technologies should be allowed to develop without limits.

The lesson is that prohibiting something while leaving the knowledge, demand and incentives intact can reorganize a problem into a form that is harder to see and potentially harder to control. It is ludicrous to think that solutions that do not work with products like alcohol will work for something as fundamental as knowledge.

Imagine that tomorrow the major American AI companies agree to stop frontier development and Europe follows suit. Open-source development above a certain capability level is prohibited, universities lose access to massive training infrastructure, smaller companies struggle to meet new security and compliance requirements, and public research slows sharply.

For a while, it might look as though the halt worked. But no one could know whether rival states, military or intelligence programs, wealthy private actors, or competing corporations were still pushing forward in secret.

That uncertainty is not incidental. It changes the game.

We could congratulate ourselves for closing the saloons while the distilleries move into the basement. And AI presents an even harder problem than Prohibition did.

Bootleggers were merely pursuing profit, but the actors developing advanced artificial intelligence may be pursuing economic dominance, military advantage, scientific leadership or national security. The incentives to defect are not incidental to the problem; they are built into it.

Which is why even a widely announced halt immediately raises the question that matters most: who believes everyone else has actually stopped?

The Game Theory of a Halt

The problem becomes clearer when nobody involved has to be evil.

Suppose every major AI laboratory sincerely believes that developing these systems too quickly is dangerous. Each laboratory still has to ask what happens if it stops and another does not.

The same applies to governments. The United States might genuinely prefer an enforceable international agreement restricting frontier AI development. But if American officials believe China might secretly continue, stopping American development becomes strategically dangerous.

China can make exactly the same calculation about the United States. Neither side has to want an AI arms race. Each only has to fear losing one. The better everyone else behaves, the greater the potential advantage for whoever defects.

That is the trap.

The stronger the prohibition, the more valuable successful evasion becomes. And if verification is imperfect, suspicion becomes rational.

A government wonders whether another government has hidden a program. A corporation wonders whether a competitor has obtained an exemption. A security agency wonders whether a foreign laboratory has crossed a threshold nobody else knows about. One secret breakthrough could change the balance of economic, military or political power.

Under those conditions, continued development is not some remote possibility that might occur despite a halt. It is what the incentive structure rewards.

The race does not disappear; it changes location, becoming quieter, less transparent and, crucially, accessible to fewer people.

From the Frontier to the Company Town

If the Wild West gives us a historical image of too little control, another part of American history offers a glimpse of the opposite problem: the company town.

Company towns grew around mines, mills, railroads and factories. In some of them, the corporation did not merely employ the worker. It also owned the worker’s housing, the local store and much of the infrastructure necessary for everyday life.

This could be efficient, even comfortable. The danger was not necessarily misery, but dependency.

The same institution paid your wages, rented you your home and sold you what you needed to live. The company was no longer one participant in your economic life; it had become the environment in which your economic life occurred.

That is worth thinking about before we decide that the obvious solution to the AI frontier is to make frontier development so expensive, restricted and regulated that only three or four corporations can participate.

At first, this could look wonderfully responsible: those companies would have sophisticated security departments, dedicated safety researchers, teams of lawyers, government relationships, enormous compliance budgets and secure computing facilities, while regulators would know exactly whom to audit.

The frontier would finally have sheriffs. But imagine what else those same companies might control…

Businesses, researchers, professionals and governments increasingly build their work around these models, while search, analysis and administrative systems become ever more dependent on the same underlying infrastructure. Eventually, the issue is no longer that three companies make the best AI. It is that an increasing portion of civilization thinks through three companies.

That is the AI company town.

Except the company does not own the mine, the workers’ houses and the general store. It owns the compute, the models and the intelligence layer connecting everything else.

The Cure Can Create Its Own Disease

This is what makes the AI problem much harder than the familiar argument between acceleration and restraint.

Competition creates risk by rewarding speed and first-mover advantage, sometimes pushing actors to release systems before their implications are fully understood. Yet competition also distributes power.

Regulation can reduce some of those risks by imposing safety requirements, external testing and liability for reckless behavior. But those protections come with costs, and once those costs become high enough, regulation can stop merely governing a market and start deciding who is allowed to exist within it.

The largest corporations can absorb billion-dollar compliance costs; universities, independent researchers, startups and open-source communities often cannot.

Soon the regulation that was designed to protect society from AI has also protected a handful of AI companies from competition.

A moratorium presents the same paradox. It can slow visible development, but the more strategically valuable the prohibited research becomes, the greater the incentive to conduct it somewhere nobody can see.

Open development makes powerful capabilities available to more people. Closed development concentrates them among the institutions powerful enough to close everyone else out.

There is no clean side of this equation. That is precisely why “just halt it” is not enough.

What If the Mess Is Part of the Safety System?

There is an uncomfortable possibility hidden inside all of this: the chaotic AI ecosystem we currently dislike may contain one of its own safeguards. Not because chaos is safe. It is not. But because distributed knowledge makes complete control difficult.

A plural ecosystem creates its own checks: companies can challenge one another’s claims, researchers can move between institutions, journalists can investigate, competitors can reproduce discoveries, and open-source communities can keep certain techniques from becoming the permanent intellectual property of a tiny number of corporations.

Competition creates dangerous incentives, but it also creates counterweights: the same fragmentation that makes artificial intelligence harder to govern may make it harder for anyone to govern society through artificial intelligence.

This does not mean the answer is laissez-faire.

The Wild West was not some libertarian paradise to which we should aspire. Frontiers eventually need laws, courts, standards and institutions capable of punishing fraud, protecting people from reckless behavior and deciding which activities impose unacceptable risks on everyone else.

The point is not to preserve lawlessness; it is to preserve plurality.

Safety rules are not the same thing as permanent concentration. Independent testing is not the same thing as limiting development to four approved corporations. Liability is not the same thing as creating a regulatory moat that only trillion-dollar companies can cross. International monitoring is not the same thing as pretending an international declaration has caused strategically valuable knowledge to cease existing.

We should regulate the frontier, but we should be very careful about accidentally transferring ownership of it.

The Real Choice

The debate over artificial intelligence is often presented as a choice between acceleration and restraint.

That may already be the wrong question. Once knowledge exists, it is extraordinarily difficult to contain, and AI research will continue somewhere. Someone will push the next experiment forward, accumulate more powerful capabilities, or decide that the strategic reward is worth violating whatever agreement everyone else has signed.

The meaningful question is therefore not whether artificial intelligence continues to develop; it is under what conditions, and in whose hands.

One possibility is an unruly frontier: competitive, dangerous, innovative, difficult to regulate and populated by many actors capable of challenging one another.

Another is a far more orderly world in which advanced artificial intelligence becomes the province of a tiny number of corporations and governments, operating systems so expensive, restricted and strategically valuable that meaningful competition becomes impossible.

The first looks frightening. The second might look reassuringly civilized. But history should make us suspicious of that reassurance.

We have spent centuries developing antitrust law, constitutional checks and balances, competitive markets, free inquiry and divided political authority for a reason. We learned that concentrated power does not become harmless simply because the people exercising it are competent.

Artificial intelligence should not cause us to forget that lesson precisely when the stakes become enormous.

The challenge is not to preserve the Wild West forever; it is to civilize the frontier without turning it into a company town. Because if the knowledge cannot be stopped, then a successful prohibition may not prevent the future we fear. It may simply determine who gets to own it.