The test will be to develop a medium of revelation not based on text. For example, could there be such a thing as a divinely inspired video? Or a snatch of computer code not made with human hands? I’m afraid the real impetus behind the development of AI is so we can worship it. Imagine a designer god programed to tell us exactly what we want to hear. Whose supreme act of divine mercy will be to kill us all.

Perhaps we are slowly but surely returning to a largely oral culture? Perhaps we never really left. In my experience very few Christians actually read the Bible. They still have the stories told to and interpreted for them.

In ancient times words were considered mystical and magical though the purview of a few. Today words are still the purview of a few though no longer considered mystical and magical.

In the popular realm the ideas of AI and ET are so suffused with religious longing that one can only imagine that if we ever did make contact with extraterrestrials or actually create AI that a substantial portion of our populations would immediately fall on their knees.

I am fascinated by the idea of a divinely inspired video. Would we have fundamentalists insisting every pixel is inerrant and infallible, rationalizing continuity errors pointed out by critical video scholars? What would such a video be about? How long must it be?

Dover Beach
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.