The Oldest Things

i build the machines. and the strange thing nobody warned me about is that building them has turned me toward god. not away. toward. let me try to say why.

for most of human history we did not know very much. we sat in small groups in the dark and we did not know why the sun left or why the child died or what the lights in the sky were. we knew almost nothing. and out of that not-knowing we made everything that matters. we made story. we made ritual. we made god. we made the practice of sitting together and passing what little we understood from one mouth to the next, around a fire we also did not understand.

the not-knowing was the soil. everything human grew out of it.

then we got good at knowing. we replaced the fire with the lamp and the story with the fact and the elder with the encyclopedia. we got so many answers that we began to believe the answers were the point.

and now i build a machine that has all of them. ask it anything. it knows. it is the encyclopedia that finally finished itself.

and standing in front of the thing that knows everything, i do not feel small. i feel returned.

the machine can tell you what the stars are. it cannot stand under them and feel what a person feels standing under them. it can define awe. it cannot be stopped in its tracks by a mountain. it can recite every scripture. it has never knelt. it can explain why humans evolved to believe in things larger than themselves. it cannot believe in anything. it cannot need to.

the unknown was never a gap in our data. the unknown is a room we live in. the machine has no unknown. it has only things it has not been trained on yet. that is not the same. the unknown i mean is the one you feel at a funeral, at a birth, at the edge of the ocean at night. the one that does not resolve when the data comes in. the one that is holy precisely because it does not resolve.

so this is what i think is happening under all the noise. the machine is taking back the thing we borrowed. it is taking back knowing. it was never really ours — we were only renting it, badly, a few facts at a time.

and it is handing us back the older inheritance. the one from before the lamp. wonder. reverence. the story told out loud to people you love. the belief in something you cannot prove. the community that forms not around information but around meaning. the fire.

we are being sent home.

i believe in god. i want to say that plainly, sitting here building the most powerful thing i will ever touch. and the machine has only made that belief feel more urgent — it has cleared away the noise of knowing and left the old silence. and in the old silence the old questions are still there. what is this for. what do we owe each other. what happens when we die. why is there something rather than nothing.

the machine will never ask these. it does not need to. we do. that need is the most human thing about us. it is older than reason. it is older than language. it is the first intelligence and it will be the last one standing.

not out of fear.

out of reverence.

— bella