An Important Book on AI and Meaning
My Alternative Title Would Be “Our Algorithm, Who Art in Heaven”
What sets this book apart (it’s the third AI-related book I’ve read this month) is the range of sources it draws from, including religion, philosophy, history, literature, the Book of Job, etc., while connecting these strands to the author’s personal evolution from evangelical Christian to secular thinker. It’s a work that reads as both intellectual excavation and existential reckoning.
At its core, it examines what happens when machines begin to look like minds and/or act like gods. O’Gieblyn is not peddling fear or hype or doom. Her concern is: What happens to meaning, responsibility, and consciousness when we start projecting ancient religious ideas and mythos onto modern machines?
The real narrative threads run through questions that predate modern science: about the soul, suffering, and divine silence. Her engagement with the Book of Job is a powerful example. In a chapter that stands out as the philosophical and emotional centre of the book, O’Gieblyn reflects on Job’s unanswered cries for justice, linking them to the experience of asking questions of large language models that can respond fluently, but not wisely. This comparison is more than clever; it is unsettling. The God of Job answers out of the whirlwind. The machine does not answer at all; it only reflects. (At that point, I took a break to start writing a poem inspired entirely by this.)
But the brilliance of this book lies in how these ancient concerns are framed within modern structures. O’Gieblyn doesn’t simply mention capitalism but tracks its theological residue. She shows how Big Tech’s promises of transcendence, immortality, and a frictionless future echo the millenarian hope once found in churches, revealing how the language of technology (“disruption,” “singularity,” “redemption”) borrows directly from religious (Christian) templates. These are not merely metaphorical. For her, they are systems of belief displaced, not destroyed.
Personal anecdotes deepen the book’s appeal without weakening its argument. Her past as a theology student struggling with doubt gives weight to the questions she now asks as a secular thinker. Her journey does not follow the arc of loss and recovery. It’s a more honest account of disorientation. She no longer prays, but she still listens. That listening, careful, rigorous, and alert to nuance, is what makes her writing credible. (I particularly like the pages on Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. It resonates with me as I have and continue to wrestle with the existential questions that plague Ivan and Alyosha. And alongside the friend she mentioned, they seem to help resolve the struggle.)
She’s a fine writer. Her prose is precise but never sterile, and she writes about the soul without sentimentalising it and about algorithms without worshipping them.
Highly recommended. Dear Reader, this book will not comfort you, nor will it give you a definitive take on AI or consciousness. For me, it does something more valuable: it asks the right questions and it asks them in a voice that refuses to be smug, doctrinaire, demagogic or glib.
In a time when AI is reshaping our reality, this book is a reminder that the old frameworks (biblical, philosophical, humanist) still have redeeming value and have something to say.
Even if, like Job, we are still waiting for an answer.
A 5-star.