They say there are bad ways to do it, but they don't say it's bad in principle, which I think is interesting. I'm not saying that AIs are golems - but I do think that there's a structural lesson there, which is that I don't think this is a categorically bad enterprise. But we should also be extremely clear and lucid that it can be very bad, disastrously bad, maybe one of the worst things people have ever done, if we don't get this right.

Porcu responds to this concept:

ZACHARY PORSU: Well, the mask that it's wearing is very odd to me, and I'm just noticing correlations with the ancient world.

So, you mentioned a property of nature, and this is little known, I think, which is that there's a certain point in Greek thought where the word for element, stoicheion, became a synonym for the word daimon. They thought that the demons, the demonic spirits - of course, for a pre-Christian Greek, they're not talking about the things that are in Dante's Hell. They're talking about just the spirits that are in nature - and they attribute to the forces of nature an intelligence.

You know, the ancient world did not think of the world as a mechanistic set of laws and processes and procedures. They thought it was populated by minds, by spirits, and they thought that they could harness those minds and those spirits. They thought that the fundamental elements of the world were minds and intelligences.

And that's been true for pretty much most of human history until this narrow little sort of post-Enlightenment moment.

And so, it's strange to me that we're building something that, in all ways, is basically sort of typologically the same as what ancient people did.

So there's this text called Asclepius. It's written in Greek. It's late antiquity. Scholars argue about the dating. And the author talks about the art of idol-making, and he says, basically, our ancestors knew about this. Everyone knows about this. You take a physical object and you lure a spirit into it, and then you bind it with magic rituals. It stays trapped in there.

And the purpose of that is you can coerce it to do things for you. It can prophesy. It can do healings. And he basically says everyone knew how to do this. And, in fact, you do see this all over the ancient world.

And so - and that's what a genie in a lamp is, by the way. It's a material sort of thing.

And so, when I look at what we're developing now, we're developing a magic box that has all the answers. With my late-antique brain, I can't help but see the similarities.

And so, the part that I'm suspicious of is when the mask is, No, no, these are just neutral, mechanistic processes. They don't have intentions. They don't have wills, and so forth.

But then you had this whole - a while back, you had this whole slew of strange encounters that people were having where they asked the AI to name themselves, and they gave themselves the names of pagan gods. And Zuckerberg's giant data center is going to be called Prometheus. You know, it's just a lot of the naming is very on the nose.

The naming is very strange.

And I'm not saying that I know what's going on. I think that's the difference between me and a conspiracy theorist. I don't actually know what's happening. All I'm doing is pointing out what's odd to me as a scholar of late antiquity.

It's odd to me that the technology is so similar, and the naming is very strange. The encounters that people have had in these AI psychosis situations is very odd to me. It just - it's unsettling.