The Singularity Has Already Happened

Recent feats in so-called artificial intelligence have not only ignited Terminator-inspired apocalyptic fears but have also revived present-day prophecies of technological domination. The speed and ubiquity with which generative AI has been developed and adopted likewise reinvigorated talk of the impending singularity: the hypothetical threshold beyond which machine “intelligence” eclipses human capacity due to uncontrollable and irreversible exponential growth. Our oscillation between collective panic and ecstasy is understandable. With the latest breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs), we quietly passed a historic milestone: the Turing test. Though fuzzy by nature, it served for over half a century as the qualitative benchmark for determining the moment when synthetic “intelligence” becomes indistinguishable from its human counterpart.

Unsurprisingly, last year the futurist Ray Kurzweil released The Singularity Is Nearer, the sequel to his bestselling The Singularity Is Near. His insistence that exponential technological growth will usher in an age unrecognizable to the present certainly seems less speculative now. But the eschatology shared by Kurzweil and other futurists inverts the narrative of the only true singularity humanity has experienced. That, at least, is what the late multidisciplinary thinker René Girard’s explicitly Christian reconstruction of the genealogy of scientific modernity would suggest.

According to Girard, humans imitate the desires of other humans, rather than originate desires within themselves. Autonomous desire is an illusion. Because desire is mimetic, and its objects are often scarce, it produces competition that easily escalates to violent conflict that can spread like a contagion through a community. When “mimetic crisis” threatens the community, its violent energy is offloaded onto a single victim, whom the community unanimously believes responsible for the crisis, and whose murder or expulsion restores social peace. The scapegoat or “surrogate victim mechanism” is then recreated in ritual and disguised by attendant mythologies. This process, according to Girard, formed the basis for all archaic religion and culture.

The advent of Christianity revealed the innocence of the surrogate victim, permanently disrupting the mechanism, which requires unquestioned belief in the victim’s guilt. According to Girard, wherever the gospel of Christ took hold, it destroyed the infrastructure of archaic social organization.

One of the most subversive implications of Girard’s theory is that the event of the Cross paved the way for scientific thought by invalidating sacrificial (that is, mythological) explanations for the world’s workings. Rather than designating a surrogate victim as the cause of social violence or natural disasters, a new model of knowledge, grounded in nature, could emerge. Thus, Girard contends that we did not cease burning witches because we invented science; rather, we invented science because we stopped burning witches. In other words, the demythologization and desacralization triggered by the crucifixion was the precondition for the scientific revolution, dispelling the dominant narrative that casts enlightened reason as overcoming the epistemic darkness of religious superstition.

On this reinterpretation, Christianity’s deconstruction of the surrogate victim mechanism not only transformed our epistemic access to the world but also revolutionized our understanding of time. Whereas the sacrificial process presupposes the eternal return of violence, sacrifice, and sacralization, Christ’s crucifixion inaugurates a linear or progressive model of time open to radical novelty. From calls on God to “renew thy signs, and work new miracles” (Sir. 36:6) and exhortations to “make to yourselves a new heart, and a new spirit” (Ezek. 18:31), to Paul’s imperative that Christians become “a new creature” (Rom. 6:4) and the depiction in Revelation of the new heaven and earth, Scripture abounds with evocations of newness.

This metaphysical model of linear time not only unleashed the technological revolutions that define the modern West, it also explains why today’s variants of techno-optimism and techno-pessimism rely on fundamentally Christian eschatological imagery, albeit stripped of explicit theological content. From the current AI panic and environmentalist calls for degrowth to the transhumanist promise of a man-machine synthesis or the belief in the power of cryptocurrency to redeem our monetary sins, these secularized eschatologies are ubiquitous.

Yet, in most cases, the current purveyors of scientific rationalism are ignorant of these eschatological undercurrents and even more ignorant of the cognitive revolution from which the West’s mythology of technological progress descends. It’s hardly surprising, then, that when asked whether he believes in God, Kurzweil replied: “Not yet.”

Secular transhumanists believe the future promises to make men god-like (see Yuval Noah Harari’s execrable but telling 2015 book Homo Deus). Girard’s reconstruction of the history of religion suggests a radical alternative: The singularity has already happened. It will not unfold in a dystopian wasteland populated by cyborgs, nor in a high-tech Eden that sidesteps human finitude by uploading consciousness to the blockchain. Rather, the singularity happened when heaven and earth intersected in the incarnation, and Christ revealed by his death and resurrection “things hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matt. 13:35). This, of course, does not imply that we need not prepare for what is sometimes called a post-artificial-superintelligence future, but rather that recognizing the singularity has already occurred opens up a narrow yet agency-affirming path of action.

Whatever the state of technological advancement, the New Jerusalem will not arrive in the form of a man-made AI godhead or a techno-gnostic escape into virtual reality. Transcendence cannot be engineered. Attempts to immanentize the eschaton by renouncing all “vertical” transcendence are doomed to catastrophic failure, as both Girard and Eric Voegelin warned. What is required, according to the New Testament, is active participation in the Kingdom of God, trusting that the new creation will arrive at the end of history.

This simultaneous orientation toward the concrete, immanent present and the transcendent outside enables the radical creativity and freedom necessary to look to the future without succumbing to our age’s nihilistic fatalism.