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'Feel the AGI' OpenAI Leader Now OpenWorship
OpenAI chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever — who, according to The Atlantic, likes to burn effigies and lead ritualistic chants at the company — and appears to have been one of the main drivers behind Sam Altman's recent ousting from the company.
Sutskever has established himself as an esoteric "spiritual leader" at the company, per The Atlantic, cheering on the company's efforts to realize artificial general intelligence (AGI), a hazy and ill-defined state when AI models have become as or more capable than humans — or maybe, according to some, even godlike. (His frenemy Altman has long championed attaining AGI as OpenAI's number one goal, despite warning about the possibility of an evil AI outsmarting humans and taking over the world for many years.)
"Feel the AGI! Feel the AGI!" employees reportedly chanted, per The Atlantic, a refrain that was led by Sutskever himself.
(Via Futurism.)
Science fiction fans of course have been preparing themselves for rule by artificial intelligence for a long time. For example, in The Return of the Archons (1967), Star Trek fans recall Landru, the computer system that ran an entire planet, telling everyone what to do:

(Landru)
Fans of Arthur C. Clarke may recall the Central Computer, the artificially intelligent computer that ruled the city in City and the Stars:
The Council ruled Diaspar, but the Council itself could be overridden by a superior power - the all-but-infinite intellect of the Central Computer. It was difficult not to think of the Central Computer as a living entity...
Don't forget the Vulcan 3 computer from Philip K. Dick's 1960 novel Vulcan's Hammer:
"But who would watch the Guardians? How could we be sure this supranational body would be free of the hate and bias, the animal passions that had set man against man throughout the centuries?
...There was one answer. For years we had been using computers, giant constructs put together by the labor and talent of hundreds of trained experts, built to exact standards. Machines were free of the poisoning bias of self-interest and feeling that gnawed at man; they were capable of performing the objective calculations that for man would remain only an ideal, never a reality."
The earliest example that I can think of is the government machine from Mechanocracy, a 1932 short story by Miles J. Breuer:
"After all my explaining," Quentin said, "haven't you realized that the Government is merely a huge machine, made of metal and rubber and glass and run by electricity and light and heat?"
"But—but how can machinery govern the world?"
"Better than human beings can..."
"And are all the people willing to be governed by a machine?" It was all amazingly strange to Jack.
"They cannot conceive of anything else," Quentin explained.
(Read more about Miles Breuer's government machine)
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