I’ve heard multiple times now from legacy media that AI companies in Silicon Valley are trying to build God.

That claim might be more inference than fact. When engineers talk about their hopes for AI, they say things like “‘can do anything, knows everything“‘ — which sounds like God, sure. But what I think they’re actually trying to build is more along the lines of the replicator from Star Trek.

The replicator is “magic” though, we don’t have the physics to go from energy to matter. At least not the way it’s depicted in the show.

In our world, abundance still has to be built. And building things requires intelligence to plan and execute, and muscles to do the doing. But if AI can provide that intelligence at scale, embodied in robots, the end result could be the same: freedom from material need, and freedom from coerced labor — the ability to choose what we do rather than having that choice made for us by our circumstances.