21st century fallen angels

So, uh, everyone stay in your seats, but can anyone shed any light on why artificial intelligence company Anthropic might be recruiting for an expert in “chemical weapons and high-yield explosives”? Or indeed why OpenAI is currently offering a $450k salary for a researcher on “biological and chemical risks”?

All this in the same week that New Scientist reported on how AIs recommended nuclear strikes in 95% of wargame simulations in a recent experiment run by King’s College London, and that former CIA director David Petraeus wrote an essay on the role of AIs on ‘the autonomous battlefield’ (sample: “missions are increasingly executed by machines at speeds no human can match and electronic warfare is severing the links between operators and their machines”).

The fun just never stops, eh readers? Anthropic’s job advert included this gem of a paragraph:

Frontier AI models have the potential to benefit all of humanity, but also pose increasingly severe risks. To ensure that AI promotes positive change, the Preparedness team helps us prepare for the development of increasingly capable frontier AI models. This team is tasked with identifying, tracking, and preparing for catastrophic risks related to frontier AI models.

“Positive change” and “benefiting all of humanity” in the very same breath as “catastrophic risks” involving chemical weapons? It’s almost beyond satire.

Though not quite.

It reminds me of this Saturday Night Live spoof ad from years ago for a product called ‘Happy Fun Ball’, which starts out with “it’s happy! it’s fun!” before segueing to a voluminous list of health warnings that includes “Happy Fun Ball may stick to certain types of skin” and "Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball”.

The other clip I thought of, more seriously, was that superb sequence in Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer where Oppenheimer and his team watch the first nuclear detonation at the Trinity site in New Mexico, just before Oppenheimer’s famous quoting of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”.

It makes sense that Oppenheimer would reach instinctively for the language of myth, faced with such terrifying power. When we unlock knowledge that’s this destructive, myths might be the only things capable of apprehending what we’re dealing with.

But I think there’s another myth that Oppenheimer might also have used back in 1945, perhaps even more apposite than the Bhagavad Gita — and I think it has a lot to say to us right now.

You’ll find it in the Book of Enoch, a very old Jewish mystical text which was lost everywhere except Ethiopia (where I used to live) until the eighteenth century, and which was only translated into English in 1906.

Like the Eden myth that I wrote about a couple of posts ago, this is a story about how evil first enters the world, but there’s no mention here of snakes or apples, and no blaming it all on Eve. Instead, this is the story of a rebellion in heaven and of how fallen ‘Powers’ — angels — then wreak havoc on Earth through their pride and self-will.

(It’s very Philip Pullman.)

So what, you may be wondering, do fallen angels have to do with where we are right now in the 21st century — or what Anthropic and OpenAI might be up to? Glad you asked. A lot.

In the Book of Enoch, there are two interwoven myths about how things go wrong. In one, a powerful fallen angel named Azazel comes to Earth and shares secret knowledge with us that leads to catastrophe — for instance by teaching us how to make war (“Azazel taught man to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates”).

In the other, two hundred angels see the beautiful daughters of men from heaven, lust for them, come to Earth to rape them, and in the process father monsters or ‘great giants’. Then “when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them, and devoured mankind”.

Both myths are metaphors for what happens when technological genius escapes the protective bonds of wisdom, kindness, and justice. As my theologian friend Margaret Barker observes, this is what is described in symbolic yet vivid terms in the rape of human women by the rebellious angels:

“The urge to power shows itself in the abuse of wisdom, which is the feminine, creative aspect of God, and this manifests itself on earth in an explicitly parallel form, the abuse of women and the corruption of the creation. In Hebrew the verb ‘know’ covered both knowledge and sexual activity.”

The abuse of knowledge and technology that has become unmoored from wisdom is right at the heart of the apocalyptic crisis we’re all living through.

Look at social media, and how it’s made us more depressed and lonely, damaged our self-esteem and social cohesion, and turbocharged culture wars and polarisation. Look at emerging risks like gene-spliced bioweapons. Or look at where we started — with AIs on the loose on ‘autonomous battlefields’ and getting steadily closer to having their hands on nukes.

So that’s one way in which myths about fallen angels can help us make sense of where we are right now: in unpacking in archetypal terms what happens when our knowledge starts climbing exponential curves without a corresponding increase in wisdom. But there’s another way they’re relevant to us today, too — and it has to do with how institutions and systems become corrupted.

Meet Walter Wink. He was an American scholar and social justice campaigner (he died in 2012), and he’s one of my all time favourite writers.

As a theologian, Wink knew that lots of religious texts refer to angels as ‘Powers'. As a pioneer in non-violent activism, meanwhile, he linked the idea in his mind to the earthly ‘powers that be’ that he encountered in his work — like the apartheid regime in South Africa.

The more he reflected on this link, the more profound he found it.

Every institution, he mused — every organisation or corporation, or church or club — has a visible, tangible side; the assets it owns, say, or the people that make it up. But there’s also an intangible side, which is just as important: the institution’s culture, belief system, values, assumptions, and traditions.

Wink called these intangible characteristics the institution’s ‘spirituality’. And just like the fallen angels described in the Book of Enoch, Wink observed that “the spirituality we encounter in institutions is not always benign. It is just as likely to be pathological". He continued,

The Powers That Be are more than just the people who run things. They are the systems themselves, the institutions and structures that weave society into an intricate fabric of power and relationships. These Powers surround us on every side. They are necessary. They are useful. We could do nothing without them … But the Powers are also the source of unmitigated evils.

A corporation routinely dumps known carcinogens into a river that is the source of drinking water for towns downstream. Another industry attempts to hook children into addiction to cigarettes despite evidence that a third of them will die prematurely from smoking-related illnesses. A dictator wages war against his own citizens in order to maintain his grasp on power.

There are so many more examples. Churches systematically covering up child abuse. Endemic fraud by investment banks creating a global financial crisis. ICE raids in the US that disappear black and brown people into mass detention camps, or shoot protestors who dare to speak out. Tech companies that are increasingly playing God with all of our futures.

(Or, for that matter, how our economy works — systematically widening inequality, to the extent that the world’s richest 12 billionaires now own more than the poorest half of humanity, while driving ecosystems everywhere towards the edge of a cliff.)

For me, Wink’s work highlights three key things.

First, that “evil is not just personal but structural”. Harm in the world does not just arise from the actions of individuals. It also — perhaps more importantly — comes from institutions or systems over which none of us have full control. When that happens, it’s almost never about a few bad apples. It’s way deeper. It’s systemic.

Second, Wink invites us to reimagine what we’re trying to achieve. Our task isn’t to destroy or defeat systems that have ‘fallen’, because we depend on them. We can’t just abolish the economy, or government, or banks, or prisons, or schools, or political parties — or put the AI genie back in the bottle. Instead, Wink understood that our task is to redeem them: to do the hard work of repairing and restoring systems that have become corrupted.

And third, that entails working on their inner as well as outer dimensions. Redeeming fallen institutions means transforming their cultures, belief systems, values, assumptions, and traditions, not just firing their leaders or redrawing organograms. And doing that is about bringing moral, prophetic, and ultimately spiritual force to bear — as Nelson Mandela did, for instance, in South Africa.

Knowledge. Institutions. Systems. They’re all essential. They can be enormous blessings to the world. But what myths about fallen angels tell us is that they can also fall and become corrupted — and that when that happens, things start to unravel in a terrifying way.

Coming up: what our oldest myths tell us about what to do when that happens (sorry, I know I promised this after the Adam and Eve post — I got waylaid!)

Micah Sifry has seven things to keep in mind as the fog of war around Trump and Netanyahu’s attack on Iran thickens.

Lots of controversy here about Conservative MP Nick Timothy’s deeply offensive remark that an open iftar in Trafalgar Square, to which non-Muslims were invited for a meal to mark the end of Ramadan, was an act of “domination”. This by the Bishop of Kirkstall and this by conservative writer Fraser Nelson are both excellent.

This piece by Hanna Horvath on attitudes to money and the hollowing out of the middle class is really worth reading.

Maya Yang had a lovely piece in the Guardian on twinned payphones in San Francisco and Texas that connect you for a chat with someone who has different political views.

Want to play Fantasy Funders and imagine what you’d spend money on if you were a philanthropic foundation with $100m to splurge on catalytic social change in a polycrisis? Join the chat in this LinkedIn post I wrote yesterday!

And finally — who knew bath bombs could be so political?