CONCEPT
The Salvific Technology Fantasy
Mary Midgley’s diagnosis of the recurring quasi-religious pattern in which a powerful new technology is greeted not as a useful tool but as a comprehensive miracle—a deliverer promising transcendence, immortality, and the resolution of all human problems—a pattern she identified in AI research in 1984 and that returned, unchanged in structure, with large language models four decades later.
In 1984, reviewing a book by the AI researcher Donald Michie, Mary Midgley wrote that the claims being made for artificial intelligence reminded her of hymn books. They promised, she observed, “the human race a comprehensive miracle, a private providence, a mysterious saviour, a deliverer, a heaven, a guarantee of an endless happy future for the blessed who will put their faith in science and devoutly submit to it.” She asked: “Is it clear why I was reminded of hymn books?” The pattern she identified—which she developed at book length in Science as Salvation (1992)—is not a failure of specific researchers but a structural feature of how technological cultures process genuinely powerful innovations. When a technology arrives that is impressive enough to exceed the public’s existing mental models, it gets recruited into the oldest narrative template
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