Imagine our future civilization building humongous robots and subsequently declaring them to be Gods. This is exactly premise of certain seasons of actual play podcast “Friends at the table”. Odd numbered seasons follow fantasy campaign, while even numbered fall into science fictional Divine Cycle which is the one that I am talking about here. Series falls into mecha genre, which originates from Japan. Most mecha stories were created also there. In fact, mecha historically was the most popular form of anime, but it fell out of fashion in recent times and not many shows of that genre are created anymore. At the center of genre is “mecha” - giant robot, usually piloted by human as sort of weapon. In the world of Divine Cycle, mecha could be separated into more “regular” machines and the more powerful, unique titular Divines.

“Friends At The Table” uses mecha genre and tightly connects its to religious concepts of its world. They consciously use mecha genre to tell something about society, ethics, politics, history and finally religions. And it’s unashamedly leftist podcast, if you need further recommendations, although it speaks about politics indirectly through fascinating stories and engaging characters. Whole Divine Cycle is fine example of space opera that spans millenia of history. Every season contains tabletop roleplay campaign set in different places and different time periods, even more distant from each other than we are from ancient Egypt. It gives them space to explore various ways that machine divinity could be conceptualized. In fact, every era, polity, faction and individuals have diverging ideas about titular Divines. In initial entry to the series, season “COUNTER/Weight” Divines are understood as embodiments of democratic virtues and symbols to which their society aspires to. In further seasons and in-world millenia later, those special machines get to be interpreted in more familiar religious ways, but still with interesting distinct underlining philosophies. Those ideas are explored in fascinating ways and I can’t recommend that podcast enough¹. But I want to focus on one aspect of their setup which perhaps is less conscious, namely technology. Perhaps it is treated more, nomen omen, instrumentally to jump to these other topics. I want to drill more into technological side of mecha gods scenario. I want to uncover certain ideas that sparked my thoughts about real life technologies in broad sense.

At first glance it could feel contradictory to claim that technological products could be in some meaningful sense gods. But there are number of familiar tropes which were explored across science fiction and beyond it which could be invoked here when we try to think about machine gods. I will mention them first and then argue how “Friends at the table” manage to do something different, something more subtle and interesting.

First trope could be summed up as “cargo cult” phenomenon. I won’t be recounting here story and meaning of this term, but I apply it to imagine how it can help us imagine how hypothetical society could see machines as gods. In this sense society who revere machines as gods is not the same which built them. It doesn’t matter if builders of mecha gods are from that society past (which would cross-over with other popular speculative fiction trope of advanced past civilization) or if they are just parallel culture with more sophisticated technical knowledge in relevant field.

Another possibility is that the society indeed built the mecha gods or initialized their creation, but is incapable of truly understanding them and perhaps also of repeating this feat. It is exemplified to extreme degree in the concept of “technological singularity”. According to that idea, some society kickstarts it by building artificial intelligence which would be capable to modify itself in a way that improves their capability and intelligence exponentially. In effect it would lead to creation of beings vastly more intelligent than original society. So much so that it could be effectively seen as godly. Although it’s not the same case, in somehow diminished form we can see parallel in our existing machine learning software². We can build chat bots or other generative software which are based on neural networks and trained on vast data. All of that is well understood and reproducible. As a result, besides desired outputs, we get weights on neural network. It is hardly interpretable why any given set of weights produce its output. We can probe it, but it is in a way completely independent task from building relatively simple algorithms that set up the system³.

However apparently different that both ideas are, there are some through lines. In both cases the society which thinks about machines as gods, doesn’t understand how they work. Maybe they are even completely wrong about fundamental nature of machines. Also, they are incapable of recreating in principle the creation of gods. Yes, in case of singularity they kickstarted it first, but because further process is not understandable, there is no guarantee for getting same results with another attempts. But what if that wouldn’t be the case? Is it possible to imagine a society which can build the machines, revere them as gods, but not being ignorant as a whole about them?

Uniqueness

If we want to find other possibilities than cargo cult and singularity, we need to clarify first under which conditions machines could be accepted as gods. I think that one stumbling block that I encountered in pondering that idea was that technology seems to me at first glance as something patently reproducible. Since Industrial Revolution manufacturing creates on mass scale near-identical objects. We see it everywhere in our daily life, the most obviously by going to big shop with shelves filled with same objects in rows and rows. Another ubiquitous experience is that of computers and software. We know that software in principle is easy to copy and transfer between computers and only artificial restrictions constrain it. But is it really always the case?

I have been thinking if there are some real life examples of technology that in some sense reminds me the Divines. Humongous scale itself lead me into the trail. What is technological artifact that is massive in scale, culturally and scientifically significant, but in the same time couldn’t be simply reproduced? Probably there is no better example than Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Stretching for 27 kilometers and deep underground in range between 50 to 175 metres. Machinery structure that is mind-boggingly complex and required armies of scientists, engineers and workers to build, operate and maintain. Institution in itself that brought together scientists from all over the world. Technical and administrative marvel that allowed us to confirm our fundamental theories about how nature works on deep level and probe it with new questions⁴. If anything in the real world deserves that comparison then LHC does.

Here we approach the point of this essay. The question arises here. Would it be possible to build LHC again?