When Machines Become Gods, Whose God Do We Mean?
A telling fact about the American debate over artificial intelligence in 2026 is not a benchmark score or a model release. It is a vocabulary decree. An executive order by President Donald Trump declared that the technology would no longer be called “artificial” and would instead be called “super.” A follow-up message to followers went further, branding anyone who still says “artificial intelligence” rather than “super intelligence” as an enemy.
Philosopher Nick Bostrom popularised the term in his book Superintelligence, predicting that SI would evolve alongside a class of humans far smarter than their peers, with those enhanced humans ruling over their inferiors while the machine rules over everyone. The resemblance is not coincidental: in the source’s view, anyone raised in a Judeo-Christian context reaches for the story of a single omniscient God when confronted with something new and powerful.
Those who fear AI speak like Puritans, warning of destruction by hellfire or unemployment. Those who welcome it speak like a gentler Protestant tradition, promising that the Machine will improve our lives immeasurably if we accept it as our only saviour. Two sects, one God, opposite readings of His intentions. The same split shows up in science fiction, where our future robot overlords either annihilate us — the demonic Terminator, the bot from Ex Machina — or rescue us, like the cuddly, angelic mechs of WALL-E and The Wild Robot.
A Neighbour God With a Job Description
In China, the question is historical, not theological. In China, AI is understood as a key part of a new industrial revolution the country could lead. The memory driving it is the nineteenth century, when the perception took hold that China was racing to catch up with the rest of the world. “The deepest fear is less about machines enslaving humanity and more about missing another industrial revolution,” Chen says. [1] James Palmer made this link in a Foreign Policy column, arguing that Western spiritual and sci-fi traditions leak into public policy, shaping regulation as well as perception.
Chinese audiences are currently absorbed by “system novels,” in which a protagonist receives an AI-like system installed in the brain. The system treats the human as an avatar in a game: it issues instructions, evaluates progress, awards points for completed quests. Chen’s description is exact — “half guardian spirit, half manager” — and its whole purpose is to help an ordinary person level up and climb. [1] Here the machine does not replace the human. It lives inside the human, works alongside the human, and pushes the human to perform better at a human job. The god is small, local, and useful.
The Measurement We Still Lack
Policy follows the stories, and the stories follow the gods. Neither the American nor the Chinese approach is calibrated to anything measurable; both are calibrated to a narrative.
The source’s own hope is a middle ground between “super” and “artificial” — machines with neither godlike powers nor system-like control. But naming that middle ground requires instruments we do not yet have. We can benchmark a model’s accuracy; we cannot benchmark whether it behaves like a servant or a sovereign in the daily life of a worker whose job it reshapes. We can count replaced positions; we cannot count the fear of lateness or the fear of judgment that drives a nation’s strategy. Until those things can be measured, every claim about what AI will do to us remains a sermon. The task ahead is not to choose between the two theologies but to build the tools that would let us describe the machine without borrowing a god.