How advanced technology feeds us with magic thoughts and religious hopes
Since the development of the telegraph, new technologies and their supposedly unlimited possibilities are prompting us with hopes of innovation that go beyond industrial applications
The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke became famous not only for his books, such as Childhood’s End or the cinematographic collaboration with Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The author also has his share of quotes that are able to summarize bigger ideas such as the one that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
This conclusion is easily approached in art when we see intersections between science fiction and fantasy in RPG systems such as Shadowrun or even in the Star Wars franchise. There we have both high tech spaceships and the Force, this power that is more fantastic than technological.
Similarly, the fact that we do not exactly understand how advanced and complex technologies work prompts us this “magical reasoning” that reminds me of this famous quote from A Dog’s Will: “Dunno, but that’s how it is.” That’s the feeling some of us may get when it comes to these new iterations in artificial intelligence, such as the case of ChatGPT.
On an article, the engineer Nabil Alouani brings up this point precisely: the hype over ChatGPT, being it in version 3 or 4, has much less to do with what the tool is actually able to do. Between marketing blurbs and actual functionalities, there is a lot to be discussed when it comes to machine learning models.
Alouani suggests that, even if engineers claim they don’t know exactly what happens “inside” those models, they still know very well how the technology works:
“It’s like when you ride a bike. You can’t fully describe how each cell of your body behaves, but you know it’s a matter of balancing your weight.”
In the case of models such as ChatGPT, what the technology would be doing is a “pastiche”, that is, the act of imitating the work of other people and creating new content out of that. Alouani argues that it’s possible to say that ChatGPT “stitches words together to form plausible answers based on patterns of text absorbed from the internet. The keyword here is “plausible.”
Recently, I read this book Haunted Media, by Jeffrey Sconce. It was published in 2000, but it’s still very much up-to-date. The researcher tackles how, since the invention of telegraphy until the advent of the internet, people have been associating these new technologies to supernatural or even magic events in a cultural and sociological perspective.
Sconce mentions, for instance, how disruptive was the development of telegraphy, which basically turned words into electricity to be transported by cables and, this way, connecting people so far away from each other — first only in the US, then the rest of the world. This “discorporification” of communication made us, as a society, question the possibility of being in touch with other worlds, other dimensions. This proposition became even stronger when radio was invented as there was this understanding of information “flowing on the air” through radio waves.
According to Sconce, it is no coincidence that Spiritualism was created so soon after the invention of the telegraph and the Morse code. The Fox sisters, known as the founders of Spiritualism, claimed to be able to communicate with spirits through rappings — one meaning “yes” and two meaning “no”, in a very similar way to how Morse code works. The sisters traveled the world showing their paranormal abilities, until a point where people grew more skeptical about that. One of the sisters published a letter declaring that they were a farce, but later on she would take that back.
But the Fox sisters weren’t the only ones. Other people were also claiming to have psychic or rather mediunic abilities shown in séance sessions. This term “medium” is particularly interesting if we consider that these people were operating during a period when new means of communication were being developed. The word media, which we sometimes use as a synonym to means of communications, is actually the plural form of “medium”, which means “mean” and thus some device (or person) that is able to intermediate.
The radio is the means that intermediates waves and turns them into sound, the same way that a pen intermediates an idea and turns it into an illustration or a text, which is intermediated by the paper to become visible. As you may have noticed, the definition of means is very broad and would be the focal point of thinkers like Marshall McLuhan (who published the book that argued that media were extensions of men). For simplicity, let’s concentrate only on the idea of media as means of communications, therefore the telegraph, radio, TV, internet, and so forth.
What Sconce describes is how means of communication such as the radio have prompted the phenomenon of “radio bugs” or DX fishing, which were amateur radio enthusiasts who had their own sets to capture distant signals. In some cases, such as Konstantin Raudive and Hans Bender’s, this kind of investigation became known as electronic voice phenomena or EVP, and it was about the possibility of intercepting voices from the “ether” through radio.
More recently though, the movie Poltergeist had the same premise when Steven Spielberg presents us a family that have their daughter abducted by beings that, at first, were able to communicate with her through a detuned television. This is the same means through which the child communicates with her parents after she is taken to this electronic “elsewhere”. In the meantime, paranormal investigators set up a technological kit to monitor possible electrical disturbances in the house.
Though this might seem something that only happens in fiction, in a Ghostbusters way, the truth is that TV series such as Ghost Hunters are still running and showing paranormal investigators that use different technical devices to measure supernatural presences in places considered haunted. If you check how this series is described on Wikipedia, for instance, it’s not fiction, but reality TV and paranormal.
The difference is that, with time, ghosts have grown less plausible to audiences, thus being replaced by something much more reasonable, such as aliens — especially if we consider the proposition of the Fermi Paradox. The famous radio transmission “War of the Worlds” hosted by Orson Welles shows exactly this replacement which is still in development if you consider all the speculations that the Pentagon might be holding secret intel on UFOs.
Such as in the case of Spiritualism and in Spiritism, other religions have also found this “channeling” of messages from elsewhere as an argument, but this time the messages would be coming from extraterrestrial entities. A famous example in Brazil was the movement Cultura Racional (Rational Culture), a religion that combined ufology with Umbanda and which was one of the main topics approached by the singer Tim Maia during a certain time of his life. In addition to that, in 1977 there was an incident in which the Ashtar Command (another entity from an ufological sect) had supposedly interrupted a TV transmission to communicate, only via audio, with humanity.
And then we finally arrive to current times, when we are confronted by new technologies that are even more “absurd” than television and radio, such as artificial intelligence or virtual reality, for instance. Sconce mentions some of these technologies in his book, also considering how the 1990s were a fertile period for this “religious” feeling about the internet (or more specifically about cyberspace) as the new frontier for transcendence.
As much as 19th century stories imagined lovers meeting in the ethereal world of radio waves, we also started to imagine how could we get rid of our physical bodies through the internet — then the publication of books such as The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, Cyberia, The Age of Spiritual Machines and, more recently, Homo deus. Transhumanism, especially when considering extropianism, is particularly interested in this transition from the biological body to a technological and cybernetical one.
When we see people like Elon Musk working in the development of artificial intelligence, neural implants, and autonomous cars, we may ask whether this is really about technological progress or an attempt of religious sublimation, one in which technology becomes an esoteric catalyst. Consequently, the existence of religions such as the Transhumanist Church or the Association of Transhumanist Christians is no coincidence or news when we consider all this background in the history of technology, religion, and the supernatural.
Therefore, the question is how much of the current hype that we project onto new technologies has to do with a religious sentiment and how much of it is something considered scientifically plausible. Or, actually, whether it is possible to guide ourselves after the argument of what is scientifically plausible if we consider time as a variable: our ancestors from the 12th century, for instance, probably wouldn’t find plausible the existence of the technologies that we have today. After all, even ChatGPT presents results that seem to be intelligent, but, as Alouani explains, it’s all pastiche.
Conciliating technology with magic and religious hopes has never felt so hard as it has been for the past century. We might be entering a new era of witchcraft, but this time powered by cybernetic magic.
