Whose Wish? The Gods and Who Forged Them

**EDO SEGAL:** Pamela, I want to start this round with the sentence, because it's the cornerstone of your life's work and the cornerstone of mine, and Timnit is going to take a chisel to it. Artificial intelligence began with the ancient wish to forge the gods. I'd like you to say it the way you'd say it to a sixteen-year-old who has never heard it. And then, Timnit — before you swing, I want you to steelman it. Tell us what the sentence gets right.

**McCORDUCK:** To a sixteen-year-old I'd say this. Long before anyone could build a thinking machine, people couldn't stop dreaming one. Every culture I looked at has a story about it — a giant made of bronze, a statue that wakes up, a clay man brought to life by a word. The word "forge" matters. It means both to make and to counterfeit, to hammer something real in a fire and to fake something you have no right to. I chose it on purpose, because the dream has always been double — it's the proudest thing we do and the most dangerous, making a mind in our own image and never being sure we're allowed to. The engineers didn't invent that wish. They inherited it. And they inherited the fear that comes attached to it, fully formed, the Frankenstein fear, the Golem fear, the fear that the made thing turns on the maker. When you feel awe and dread in front of a chatbot, you are feeling something three thousand years old. That's the sentence.

**EDO SEGAL:** Timnit. Steelman first.

**GEBRU:** I can do that honestly, because part of it is true and the true part is load-bearing. What Pamela gets right is that the desire is real and old and it explains the emotional charge — the way otherwise rigorous people lose their minds around this technology, the way it attracts money and devotion out of proportion to what it does. She's right that you can't understand the field without understanding that it is, for many of its practitioners, a faith. And she's right, devastatingly, about the [mythic structure](https://www.youonai.ai/fieldguide/med/mythic_understanding) — I'd just push the date forward. The pursuit of artificial general intelligence today is animated by a belief system Émile Torres and I called TESCREAL, and at its root, if you trace the genealogy, you find twentieth-century eugenics dressed in new clothing: the dream of engineering a superior future being, a godlike machine that ushers in utopia. So Pamela says it's an ancient wish to forge the gods, and I say — yes, and look closely at which god, and notice it's the same hierarchical, exclusionary god the eugenicists were trying to breed. The myth is real. I just think it's a more dangerous myth than she does.

**McCORDUCK:** That's a sharper steelman than most of my admirers manage. Now do the attack, because I can feel it coming.

**GEBRU:** Here's the attack. "We have always dreamed of forging the gods" — who is "we"? The sentence performs a magic trick. It takes a specific set of people, mostly men, mostly in wealthy institutions, making specific decisions for specific reasons, and it dissolves them into a universal "we," into humanity, into a three-thousand-year river of longing that no one is responsible for because everyone is. That dissolution is exactly the move I spend my life undoing. When I disaggregated the error rates in Gender Shades, I was refusing a "we" — the aggregate accuracy number that averaged the well-served and the ill-served into one comforting figure. Your sentence is an aggregate accuracy number for the soul, Pamela. It averages the dreamer and the data labeler into one "humanity," and the data labeler disappears into the mean. The wish wasn't humanity's. It belonged to people who had the leisure to dream it and the power to fund it, and the bill went to people who never wished for any of it.

**McCORDUCK:** *[pause]* That lands. And I want to be careful here, because the easy thing would be to defend the sentence and the honest thing is harder. You're right that "we" is doing work, and you're right that the work is sometimes a laundering. But let me push back on one thing, because I don't think the myth belongs only to the powerful. The Golem is a story the powerless told — a story of a persecuted community in a ghetto, making a protector because no one else would protect them. Pygmalion is a story about loneliness. The wish to make a mind is not only a CEO's wish. It is also the wish of the lonely and the frightened and the bereaved, and you'll find it in every class and every culture, which is precisely why I called it human. The powerful didn't invent the longing. They captured it. That's a different crime, and I think naming it correctly matters.

**GEBRU:** I'll grant that the longing is widespread — I won't grant that this changes who's accountable now. Yes, the lonely have always dreamed of a companion. But the lonely person dreaming a Golem is not training a four-hundred-billion-parameter model on scraped data and deploying it to a billion people for profit. The continuity you're describing flattens a difference in kind into a difference in scale, and the difference in kind is the whole point. The lonely woman with her Golem hurt no one. OpenAI is not a lonely woman with a Golem. When you let the myth carry the modern thing on its back, you give the modern thing the moral innocence of the ancient one. And the people building the modern thing know exactly what they're getting from your sentence. They quote it in their keynotes.

**EDO SEGAL:** Let me restate this, because something important just happened and I want the reader to feel its edge. Pamela, you're saying the wish is genuinely human, found in every culture and every class — the Golem made by the powerless to protect themselves. Timnit, you're saying: fine, but the wish was *captured*, and the myth now functions as the captor's alibi, a way of making a recent, owned, profitable thing wear the innocent face of an ancient, ownerless one. Pamela, here's my question, and it's the one your whole book leans on. Is there any version of your sentence that survives Timnit's chisel — or do you have to add a clause?

**McCORDUCK:** I have to add a clause. I've been adding it since 2019, when I published a memoir and confessed that I'd spent my career telling the wonder and not enough of the warning. Here's the clause. Artificial intelligence began with the ancient wish to forge the gods — and the people who can afford the forge have always decided which gods get made, and for whom. That's still my sentence. But Timnit's right that I wrote it for forty years without the second half, and the second half is the half that protects people. I let the wonder crowd out the warning. I'd give a great deal to have written the whole sentence the first time.

**GEBRU:** That clause I can stand next to. I want it on the record that this is more than almost anyone in your generation of the field has ever conceded, and I don't take it as rhetoric. The whole fight between us, I think, is about which half of that sentence does the work — and whether the wonder, once you've felt it, leaves you able to see the second half at all.

**EDO SEGAL:** Before I move us up a floor, I want to pull one thread out of what you just built together, because I think it's load-bearing and the reader should hold it. Pamela, there's a famous fraud in your field's prehistory — the Mechanical Turk, the eighteenth-century chess automaton that toured Europe beating nobles and dazzling crowds, that turned out to have a human chess master hidden inside the cabinet. The whole history of artificial minds has this object sitting at its origin: a machine that was actually a concealed person. Pamela, you wrote about that wonder. Timnit, you've spent your life finding the [person hidden in the cabinet](https://www.youonai.ai/fieldguide/med/mechanical_turk). I want you each to say what the Turk means to you, because I think it's the whole debate in one object.

**McCORDUCK:** To me the Turk has always been a parable about us, not about the machine. The astonishing thing isn't that there was a man in the box — it's how badly the crowd wanted there not to be. They wanted the automaton to be real so much that they ignored the obvious. That hunger is the thing I spent my life chronicling: the wish to forge the gods is also a wish to be fooled by them, to find a mind where we hope one is. The Turk reveals that the credulity is ancient and that it lives in us, not in the machine.

**GEBRU:** And to me the Turk is not a parable. It's a labor diagram. There was a person in the box. A real one, a skilled one, hidden so the owner could sell the illusion of a thinking machine to paying crowds. That's not a metaphor for credulity — it's the literal business model of the current industry. The worker in Nairobi is in the box. The data labeler is in the box. The illusion of the autonomous machine is sold by concealing the human inside it, exactly as it was in 1770, for exactly the same reason: a hidden human is cheaper to sell than a visible one. Pamela sees the crowd's hunger to believe. I see the owner's incentive to hide the person whose labor makes the magic. Same object. We're each looking at a different part of it — and that's the whole debate, you're right.

**McCORDUCK:** *[pause]* And both readings are true, which is the maddening thing. The crowd wants to be fooled, *and* the owner profits by fooling them, *and* there is always, always a person in the box. I gave you the crowd. You gave me the box. Put them together and you have the complete machine.

**EDO SEGAL:** Hold the Turk — the crowd's hunger and the hidden worker, the same cabinet. "Whether the wonder leaves you able to see the harm" is the seam of the entire night, and we'll be back in it on a higher floor. But first: Timnit, you mentioned the eugenic genealogy, and I refuse to let you drop a charge that large and move on. The next round is the theology of the machine god. What you and Torres actually claimed, and whether the dream of the made mind is, at its root, a dream of the improved human. After the break.