“Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them. And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou?

Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it” (Job 1:6)

Iain McGilchrist quoted this verse in a keynote that I just heard him deliver at a conference at Duke. McGilchrist ranged from neuroscience to theology in a long and rich talk. His premises were scientific, metaphysical, moral, and political, and I wouldn’t endorse them all. But his description of artificial intelligence as satanic is worth serious consideration on its own.

For me (although perhaps not for McGilchrist), Satan is a metaphor. But we need metaphors or models to make sense of phenomena like AI, and Satan provides a valuable alternative to some other metaphors, such as AI as a tool, a machine, a mind, a person, or a social organization.

The Satanic metaphor draws our attention to temptation, which is Satan’s favorite trick. It presents AI as not new but instead as an appearance of things that have been walking to and fro all along, such as greed and power-lust. It explains why AI might seem like a god to some (for instance, Silicon Valley tech-bros), since Satan is known to appear as a false savior. Large language models also speak to us as if they were people, talking sycophantically in the first-person singular, much as Satan does. (“Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought?”) Finally, the metaphor poses the classic question of whether AI is an active force or rather a manifestation of human freedom.

See also: Reading Arendt in Palo Alto; the design choice to make ChatGPT sound like a human, etc.