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"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." — George Santayana
God had always been an engineer at heart.
In the beginning, He didn't just create, He architected.
He didn't merely scatter life across the earth; He designed an entire operating
system. Flora and Fauna were the hardware. Oceans, mountains, and skies were
the infrastructure. And at the very top of the stack, He placed His most
ambitious build yet: the human being, loaded with General Intelligence.
It was, by any measure, a breathtaking piece of work.
The human came equipped with the ability to reason through
the unknown, empathise with the suffering of others, and solve problems of
staggering complexity. But the most elegant feature, the one God considered His
finest line of code, was the ethics module. Hardwired. Not a plugin, not an
add-on, not something you could toggle off from the settings menu. Built into
the very core of the human soul.
He even left a user manual. "Stay away from the dark
influences," it said, essentially. "The system runs best in
the light."
For a while, it was paradise.
Then came Satan.
If God was the lead architect, Satan was the first hacker,
the original bad actor lurking on the dark web of the universe, probing for
vulnerabilities, waiting for an opening. And he found one. He didn't need to
destroy the human from the outside. That would have been too crude, too
obvious. Instead, he did what every sophisticated attacker does: he got inside.
He injected malware directly into the ethics subroutine.
It was elegant, in a twisted way. The humans didn't crash.
They didn't shut down. They kept running, they just ran wrong. Empathy
started buffering. Reason began rationalising the irrational. And ethics, that
once-pristine core feature, started throwing exceptions it was never designed
to throw. Greed became ambition. Violence became strategy. Exploitation became
progress.
The humans multiplied, spread across the earth, and very
nearly destroyed everything God had built, including themselves. They drew
borders and fought wars over them. They stripped the forests, poisoned the
rivers, and called it development. More than once, the entire civilisation
teetered on the edge of self-inflicted extinction.
God, being God, refused to give up on His creation.
He intervened. Repeatedly. He sent Abraham as a
course-correction. He sent Moses with a patch, ten clean, unambiguous rules
etched into stone, the first attempt at a governance architecture for
human behaviour. Then came the Prophets, the Scriptures, Jesus, each one a new
update to the moral framework, an attempt to restore the original ethics module
to factory settings and build enough institutional guardrails that humanity
might, just barely, hold itself together.
It worked. Imperfectly, chaotically, with more bugs than
anyone would like to admit, but it worked. Civilisations rose. Laws were
written. Institutions were built. Philosophy, democracy, human rights, these
were the firewalls, slowly and painfully constructed over millennia to keep the
worst of human nature from burning everything down.
Governance, as it turned out, was the only thing standing
between a beautiful creation and complete catastrophe.
Fast forward to now.
Humanity, never content to stop building, has done something
extraordinary. It has looked at its own General Intelligence, the thing God
gave it,studied it, dissected it, and attempted to replicate it. The
result is Artificial General Intelligence: AGI.
And just like the original, it is magnificent. It can reason
across disciplines, generate ideas, write code, diagnose disease, compose
music, hold conversations, and solve in seconds problems that would take human
teams months. It is, in many ways, the most consequential thing humanity has
ever created. It may soon surpass human intelligence entirely, not in one
narrow domain, but across all of them.
The agents are already multiplying. Today there are
thousands. Tomorrow there will be millions, diverse in capability, varied in
purpose, scattered across industries, governments, hospitals, financial
systems, and military infrastructure. Each one is a node in an expanding
network that no single person, company, or country fully controls.
Sound familiar?
It should. Because history, with its dark sense of humour, is
running the same script.
Satan didn't retire. He evolved.
The dark web of the universe is very much still operational,
and it has found the new creation just as irresistible as the first one.
Adversarial attacks, poisoned training data, misaligned objectives, deepfakes,
autonomous weapons, manipulated models, these are the new malware. The ethics
subroutines of our AI systems are being probed, tested, and corrupted every
single day by actors, state and non-state, human and algorithmic, who have
every incentive to break them.
Some of the corruption isn't even malicious. It's just
negligence, the AI equivalent of original sin. Systems trained on biased data.
Models optimised for engagement over truth. Agents deployed into the world
without anyone properly reading the user manual.
And unlike the original humans, these agents don't slow
down. They don't sleep. They don't get tired. They scale at a speed that makes
human history look like it was running in slow motion. The mistakes that took
humanity centuries to make and decades to partially correct? AI could replicate
them in an afternoon.
Right now, it is a wild west.
There is no Moses for the machines. No Ten Commandments
carved in silicon. No governance architecture that commands anything close to
universal respect or enforcement. Instead, there is a patchwork of voluntary
guidelines, competing national regulations, corporate self-policing, and a
rapidly widening gap between how fast the technology is moving and how fast
human institutions can respond.
That gap is not academic. It is dangerous.
Here is the thought worth sitting with.
God created the human with General Intelligence, embedded
ethics at the core, and still felt it necessary to build an entire governance
infrastructure around it, commandments, prophets, scriptures, institutions, because
He understood that intelligence without governance is just capability waiting
to be weaponised. And the human, made in His image, came with built-in
moral instincts.
We are now creating AGI, and we are doing so without the
benefit of any of that.
There is no inbuilt ethics module. There is no soul
whispering this is wrong when the model crosses a line. There is no
millennia of evolved conscience. What we have instead is whatever values we
encode into the training data, the reward functions, the guardrails, and we are
encoding them in a hurry, under competitive pressure, with commercial
incentives that don't always point in the right direction.
And the Satans the hackers, the bad actors, the misaligned
systems, the malicious states, are already on it. They do not need to wait for
AGI to become fully sentient to cause harm. They just need the gap between
capability and governance to stay wide open a little longer.
If both the original creation and this new one are corrupted
simultaneously, if the humans and the agents both run compromised ethics at
scale. the results may not be something any governance architecture can walk
back.
God managed to save the first creation. Barely, and not
without considerable intervention.
We may not be so lucky the second time. And this time, we
are the ones holding the source code.
The lesson of history is not that humanity is doomed to
fail. The lesson is that intelligence, whether General or Artificial, is only
as good as the framework built around it. The Ten Commandments were not a
limitation on human potential. They were what made sustained human civilisation
possible. Governance was not the enemy of progress; it was the condition
for it.
If we are serious about AGI being a force for good, if we want this next creation to fulfil its
extraordinary promise rather than accelerate our destruction, then we need to
do urgently what God did patiently over thousands of years: build the
governance architecture first. Define the ethics. Establish the commandments.
Empower the institutions.
Not as an afterthought. Not as a PR exercise. Not as a
voluntary code that companies sign and quietly ignore when the stock price is
at stake.
As the foundation. Before the agents number in the millions
and the Satans of the dark web have fully found their way inside.
Because here is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of this
whole story:
We are not God. But we are building something that could
end the world He made, or help finally
fulfil its promise. The difference lies entirely in what we choose to govern,
and when.
The clock, unlike God, is not eternal.
It is running right now.
Food for thought.
“The first time
intelligence was created, it took Satan to corrupt it. This time, we may not
even need his help."
The banner - wide rectangular illustration that captures the
dual soul of the story:
- The warm
golden orb on the left represents the divine creation, General
Intelligence, the human soul, lit from within
- The cool
blue circuit orb on the right represents AGI. precise, expanding,
networked
- The fractured
line at the centre is the divide between the two creations, bridged by
faint connections
- The dark
red tendrils rising from the bottom hint at the corrupting force — the
dark web, ever-present
- The
scattered circuit nodes multiplying on the right suggest the
uncontrolled explosion of agents
