NIETZSCHE SMILES: Man in the image of OpenAI.

This week, OpenAI acquired Ive’s AI device startup, io, ahead of a new product they’ve been outfitting.

It will look something like another personal device, though one devoted to the full offerings of artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal reports that it will be “able of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life” and “unobtrusive,” physically. One leak indicates the device may be worn around the neck and have camera and microphone capabilities.

In short, it’s a constant companion in the style of God — one in which the user’s life, ​​his “intimate thoughts and expressions,” are the prized input. Every consumer knows he is the real product, and as such knows his personal information is at risk implicitly anytime he is online. This time, no longer is data collection a matter of possibility, or even a negative externality: Knowing the person, and then using and preempting his experiences is the whole, explicit product. That precise mode is part of what makes it such an attempt at “creating God in our own image,” as one bizarre entrepreneur and venture capitalist has put the idea of a superintelligence.

Bryan Johnson: God didn't create us, we are creating God in our own image by building superintelligent AI pic.twitter.com/EdRweMshyf

— Tsarathustra (@tsarnick) January 8, 2025

Gosh. As Spencer Klavan writes in response:

I don’t wish death on Bryan Johnson. About that, he and I are agreed. But I wouldn’t wish the kind of life he’s living on him either, nor on my worst enemy. The man is spending millions every year to keep from dying, and he looks like a wreck. Gaunt, drained, frozen in a Botox half-smile—the kind of look you’d expect from an aggressively calibrated life.

Most recently, Johnson appeared on Bari Weiss’s Honestly podcast and murmured eerily about a common AI trope: “I think the irony is that we told stories of God creating us, and I think the reality is that we are creating God.”

Since not a single major religion proposes that God is anything like a supercomputer, I struggle to imagine what sorts of spiritual longings Johnson thinks GPT-1000 is going to satisfy or replace. But really this is just primitive Babel-tier tech worship, not even informed enough to rise to the level of error.

Baby steps, please. Let’s try to successfully get Siri mated up with ChatGPT before worrying about creating God, huh?