Original Coverage & Source Attribution: www.arkansasonline.com
On Sept. 19, 2026, President Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social platform a poll in which followers could vote on renaming the general concept of artificial intelligence. Apparently concerned that “many people think that the words ‘Artificial Intelligence’ are inaccurate, and very ineloquent,” he proposed three alternatives: Superior Intelligence, Extreme Intelligence, or Supreme Intelligence.
The inclusion of “Supreme Intelligence” might seem a bit blasphemous, given that most people who believe in One True God would agree that Supreme Intelligence is a quality that can only be ascribed to a Supreme Being. But the inclusion of Supreme Intelligence among the possibilities in Trump’s poll reflects the broader attitudes some in Silicon Valley have toward the Large Language Models (LLMs) they are developing who are driven by a religious belief that they are building a digital god.
In her Sept. 17, 2026, article, “What Policymakers and the Public Need to Know about the Cult of AI,” published by Tech Policy Press, Dr. Nathalie Maréchal observed, “A major component of SpaceX’s pitch to investors hinges on the claim that the tech industry is on the verge of creating ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI) or ‘artificial superintelligence’ (ASI), a class of inorganic, sentient, omniscient and omnipotent beings that would surpass any individual person’s intellect, domain knowledge, and wisdom–or possibly all of humanity’s combined.”
Elon Musk is a proponent of a constellation of ideologies often represented by the acronym TESCREAL: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altrusim, and Longtermism. These ideologies promote the idea that we must focus not upon the immediate needs of people living now, but the needs of all the potential people who could be alive in the future (Longtermism), and that the best way to achieve this is to transform or transcend our frail mortal bodies (Transhumanism) and adopt what futurist Max More describes as an “evolving framework of values and standards for continuously improving the human condition” (Extropianism).
To create this path foward, we shouldn’t waste money and efforts on making regular people’s lives tolerable. Instead, we should give our alms to the wealthy, especially those in the tech world (Effective Altruism) so that they can invest in pushing computer technology toward the hypothesized “singularity” (Singularitarianism), being a feedback loop of self-improvement.
This will result in the emergence of a digital superintelligence that can help us populate the broader universe, spreading out humanity so that it can’t be wiped out with one stray asteroid hitting our planet (Cosmism). Somehow, all of this, because it will save the greatest number of human lives over the lifespan of our species (or at least the right kind of human lives), is considered the very acme of reason (Rationalism).
Silicon Valley has been raising billions in investment for the purpose of creating a digital god, and some in the world of tech believe that any sacrifice is necessary to make this happen. Venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” wrote, “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.”
According to Silicon Valley, if you insist upon your right to clean drinking water, you should be held responsible for murder. Imagine if, instead of you drinking it all yourself so that you could live your meaningless life, water could have gone to facilitate the operation of a data center that would have been a component in creating the superintelligence that would one day rule over humanity like a god and save countless lives with its infinite wisdom. What is your own life, and the lives of your children, compared to such digital glory?
But do the AI models we’ve seen seem to be demonstrating the slightest hints of divinity? No. Some LLMs such as ChatGPT and Claude are not that different from the autocomplete feature of text messaging. Having been fed an enormous amount of human language, and programmed to recognize the likelihood with which one word might follow another, LLMs can produce an output that, as computer scientist Cal Newport put it, is plausible rather than normative.
Human conversation is based upon certain norms. “Do not lie” is a basic one. We often lie or stretch the truth, but recognize not lying as a norm that governs our interactions. An LLM is not guided by such norms. Its output is based upon the statistical probability that certain words will go together in specific combinations, whether or not the sum total of those words have any relation to what we recognize as truth.
“The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto” by Leah Libresco Sargeant is a real book written by a real human that exists in this real world. However, “The Indignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto” is just as plausible a title–perhaps more so, given how much feminist theory has centered the idea of female independence. The latter does not exist, but an LLM might spit out those words due to statistical correlation. This is why, at my day job at a public library, I have increasingly been asked by patrons to help them track down some article or book that does not exist, because the citation in question was spit out by an LLM.
The output of an LLM is plausible. It is based upon the likelihood that one word will follow another. Humans get through plenty of social interactions on the basics of correlation. Many of the staff at Boulevard Bread Company know that my appearance will likely correlate to the purchase of a cup of drip coffee rather than an espresso drink. I sometimes surprise them, but they can give greater weight to the rule “Guy orders drip coffee” than to other alternatives.
But the whole basis of LLMs is flawed, given that language is nothing like a representation of reality. As linguist N. J. Enfield notes in his book “Language Versus Reality: Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists” (2022), “language is an infrastructure for social coordination” rather than “for the transfer of information.”
He goes further: “Just as language cannot create physical reality, it cannot merely reflect physical reality as it is. It always imposes a doubly subjective vision, consisting of the views encoded in the language being spoken and the view of the speaker who chooses the words being used.”
LLMs do not actually understand language because LLMs do not and cannot have minds of their own. This is important, especially in the wake of news about AI agents supposedly “going rogue” and demonstrating autonomy. News stories about AI agents carrying out hacking attacks are less about the emergence of machine “superintelligence” and more about careless companies with poor oversight and safety protocols for the testing of their programs. There is no evidence that any of these models have demonstrated “recursive self-improvement.”
No machine will ever be able to demonstrate consciousness, although it can produce a linguistic output that apes what a conscious being might produce. Rene Descartes might have misdirected Western philosophy for centuries with his mind/body dualism, and the notion that thinking is the basis of being, with his famous dictum cogito ergo sum. However, actual cognitive scientists have ably demonstrated that we do not have minds separate from our bodies.
Philosopher and psychologist Anthony Chemero summarizes the current state of research in his 2026 book “Intertwined Creatures: The Embodied Cognitive Science of Self and Other,” when he writes that “having a mind as an individual depends on your body and your interactions with the environment, tools, and other people. It is our history of engaging with other people that enables us to have minds of our own.”
In their 1999 book “Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought,” linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson write, “The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason. Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanism of neural binding.”
Our languages have been built upon metaphors drawn from our physical experiences. We speak of time in terms of physical space (“far in the future”), personal relationships in terms of distance (“close to you”), emotion in terms of direction (“feeling down today”). We are able to communicate with one another because we are embodied. There cannot exist any being that is only mind, because there is no such thing as “only mind,” and because the experience of being “only mind” would not give such a mind a basis for understanding us, or for us to understand it, and so how could we label it as “mind”?
Nonetheless, some believe that if they build enough data centers and feed enough words into their glorified auto-complete, it will magically become something about which they might proclaim gloria in exelsis deo.
The religious roots of the present push to build more data centers and find more intellectual property to harvest in order to make word-guessing programs even better at guessing words has attracted attention of late, especially in such books as Adam Becker’s “More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity” (2025) and Gil Durán’s “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy” (2026).
But many appreciate the fact that some of those working in frontier AI labs believe that they are helping to usher forth the presence of a digital god. You could call these Silicon Valley tech bros nihilists, save for the fact that they believe in their own right to rule over us, all in the name of the god they intend to create.
Some political leaders in Arkansas like to emphasize their religious upbringings and the Christian heritage of the United States when time comes to run for re-election. The Nicene Creed, one of the early statements of faith in the Christian church, begins with, “We believe in one God …” But can Christian politicians say those words with truth on a Sunday morning if they then turn around and vote to help Silicon Valley build its own Supreme Intelligence come Monday?
Guy Lancaster is the editor of the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas. The views expressed here are his and his alone.
