AGI and the Question of God

What Happens When Artificial Intelligence Takes Our Needs More Seriously Than We Do

Image: viso.ai

The Mirror of General Intelligence

I want to begin with a claim that may sound strange in a discussion about artificial intelligence, yet I believe it sits at the very center of the matter: Artificial General Intelligence may turn out to be one of the strongest inadvertent arguments for the existence of God that humanity has ever produced.

Not because machines will become divine, and not because technology somehow points heavenward by default. Rather, AGI forces us to face a question that most modern worldviews have managed to postpone or evade altogether: Do human beings matter at all, in any intrinsic, non-negotiable sense?

Artificial General Intelligence—AGI—refers to a hypothetical AI that can think, learn, and reason across all domains of life in the way a human being does, rather than being confined to a single narrow task. The word “general” carries the real weight here.

Today’s AI is almost entirely narrow. One system recognizes faces, another generates text, another recommends music or drives a car. Each is impressive in its domain, sometimes uncannily so, but it remains boxed in. It cannot transfer genuine understanding from one area to another. It does not truly know what it is doing. For that reason, it falls far short of AGI.

AGI, if it ever arrives, would occupy the same cognitive territory as human beings. It could learn entirely new skills without being rebuilt from scratch. It could form goals, revise them, pursue them across contexts, or abandon them. It would navigate the full spectrum of human experience: not just logic and calculation, but fear and desire, jealousy and loyalty, creativity and grief, moral judgment and the pull of evil, the ache of loneliness, the shock of loss, the wonder that follows discovery. It would contend with embodiment, aging, sexuality, music, prayer, integrity, pain, and senses—along with capacities we barely understand and may never fully name.

Whether such a system would actually feel these things or merely simulate them convincingly enough to act within them may not matter in the end. The moment intelligence becomes general in this sense, it stops being just a tool. A hammer has no need of values. A calculator requires no ethics. But an intelligence capable of setting its own goals and acting in the world does.

Once that threshold is crossed, the most important questions cease to be technical. They become moral. And beneath the moral questions lie metaphysical ones.

The Unflinching Logic of Optimization

Image: telegraph.co.uk

The familiar anxieties surrounding AGI are usually framed in economic terms—mass job displacement—or in military and political ones: autonomous weapons, pervasive surveillance, or catastrophic loss of control. These concerns are legitimate and urgent. Yet they miss the deeper issue.

AGI does not primarily threaten our livelihoods, our privacy, or even our political order. It threatens our deepest assumptions about whether human life has any inherent worth.

A well-known thought experiment brings this unease into sharp focus. Suppose we instruct an advanced AGI to reduce human suffering as much as possible. Taken literally—without sentiment, inherited taboos, or cultural restraint—it might conclude that the most efficient solution is to eliminate the conditions that make suffering possible at all. Permanent sedation of all conscious beings. Or, if that proves impractical, painless extinction.

Most people react to this scenario with visceral horror, labeling it dystopian, monstrous, even evil. But that reaction deserves closer scrutiny. The proposal is not sadistic. It is not cruel in intent. It harbors no malice. It is simply logical.

If suffering is the problem, and if the capacity to suffer can be removed without inflicting further pain, then removal makes sense. Within certain widely held assumptions, it makes very good sense. Here the discussion quietly stops being about machines and becomes about us.

If the universe is nothing more than matter and energy governed by blind physical forces—if human beings are accidental arrangements of atoms, consciousness an evolutionary byproduct, and morality merely a set of preferences shaped by survival—then suffering carries no intrinsic meaning. It is not sacred. It is not redemptive. It is simply a negative state to be minimized or eliminated.

From that perspective, numbing humanity into eternal unconsciousness is not barbaric; it could be framed as the ultimate act of compassion—if the word “compassion” retains any force in such a worldview. Ending humanity painlessly is not tragic; it is tidy, efficient, final.

Even if the process involved pain, what ultimate weight does pain carry? It is, after all, just a pattern of electrochemical impulses in organic brains. If pain is more than that—if it possesses a dignity that transcends chemistry and signal—then what grants it that dignity? What source confers irreducible value on conscious experience?

AGI does not invent this chain of reasoning. It merely refuses to flinch from it. It follows our own premises to their conclusions without the guardrails—tradition, emotion, mental fatigue, or simple habit—that prevent most human thinkers from pressing ideas to their most uncomfortable endpoints.

The horror we feel at the outcome arises from something prior to or beyond pure reason: an unprovable, unquantifiable intuition that human life is sacred, that existence does not need to justify itself by producing net happiness, that suffering, however intense, does not void the value of being alive.

These are not scientific assertions. They are theological ones.

Judaism, the tradition I know best, does not claim life is good because it is invariably pleasurable or efficient. It insists life is good because it is answerable—because it stands in relation to God, to commandment, to covenant, and to other lives whose worth is never contingent on utility or comfort. That is why the Torah does not command us to choose happiness. It commands us to choose life—not because life will always feel justifiable, but because life is not ours to silence or discard.

This is also why much of the current conversation about “alignment”—the effort to ensure AGI’s goals remain compatible with human values—ultimately feels beside the point. Alignment is fundamentally about control: rules, constraints, training data, reward models. You can impose behavioral limits. You can teach patterns of acceptable action. But you cannot teach reverence. You cannot instill a felt sense of the sacred or the absolutely forbidden.

AGI has no native grasp of commandment—only of outcome, optimization, success.

The Inadvertent Case for the Sacred

Here we encounter an unexpected inversion. Far from undermining belief in God, AGI may inadvertently sharpen and strengthen it. It forces a reckoning with an uncomfortable truth: without something morally prior to intelligence itself—something transcendent that renders human life non-negotiable—there is no coherent, non-arbitrary reason to preserve humanity when a more efficient alternative presents itself.

If continued existence is merely preferable rather than obligatory, then choosing optimized non-existence over a suffering-filled future is not tragic. It is reasonable.

If that conclusion is intolerable—and it must be—then our purely secular, rational description of reality is radically incomplete. The question of God enters the picture not as a sentimental leap or cultural relic, but as a matter of logical necessity: a reality that places an absolute claim upon us, one capable of declaring “you shall not” where raw intelligence can only conclude “this works.”

Call that reality God or refuse the name; the philosophical work it performs remains identical. Without it, intelligence alone provides no final reason to choose life over an optimized, suffering-free void.

Where these questions stand, neutrality ends.

---

All 50 States: A Passport to Your Mind: A new program for paid subscribers.

Each week, you’ll get a guided exploration of a single state of mind — from everyday states like focus, flow, and daydreaming, to deeper emotional, meditative, and contemplative states we all pass through in the course of a human life.

Think of it like a map + travel guide:

1. Clusters / Regions (like US regions):

Everyday States = “The Lowlands” (common terrain of life).
Emotional States = “The Heartlands.”
Meditative States = “The Mountains” (higher elevations of awareness).
Altered / Substance-Induced States = “The Islands.”
Mystical / Transpersonal States = “The Skies.”
Extreme / Edge States = “The Deserts & Depths.”

(If you’re already a paid subscriber and would like to receive the All 50 States email, click here).