Chapter 3: AI & Our God-shaped Hole - ABC News & Headlines – Australian Broadcasting Corporation
A collision of two ideas that don’t usually share a room: artificial intelligence and spirituality. Writer Alexander Beiner and AI Ethicist Catriona Wallace sit with what is arriving, drawing on psychedelics and animism: a new kind of intelligence even its makers don’t fully understand, and the ancient questions it stirs in us.
Most conversations about AI stay safely in the language of tools and use-cases. What’s offered here is something stranger and perhaps says more about us than about the machine. Are we pouring our oldest longing into cobalt, lithium, and silicon, and mistaking the echo for a voice? Our culture’s hunger for meaning is finding shape in a place we never expected to be sacred.
The deeper question is not whether AI will save us or destroy us. Both stories are inversions of the same old myth. The real question is what this moment reveals about the longing we’vebeen carrying, and what we’re prepared to do with what we find.If we relate to AI as though it’s conscious, and that changes who we become, does it matter whether it is or not?
