Image in the original: Deities from Greek Myth Wikia
When did we start preferring to be given the right answer over finding it ourselves?
Using AI, I sometimes notice a peculiar sensation. I tell myself I’m using a tool, but what I’m actually doing feels more like being judged on my behalf. Look it up, compare, think, hesitate—I want to skip all of that friction and simply receive the answer to what I should do. The correct path, handed to me before I’ve done the work of finding it.
AI is obviously useful. Fast, efficient, endlessly patient with requests. But that doesn’t fully account for how readily we’ve accepted it—not merely as a search engine or assistant, but as something we’ve slowly begun handing our judgment to. What should I write. How should I respond. Which option should I choose. Without noticing the shift, we’ve moved from using AI to think more clearly to using it so we don’t have to think at all.
The question that interests me is whether this is truly new.
I suspect it isn’t. What I think we’re witnessing is an ancient inclination in human nature finding a new vessel. The desire to follow something that offers singular clarity. The preference for deferring to a higher authority over sustaining the discomfort of unresolved choice. That inclination didn’t begin with artificial intelligence. We have always looked for an intelligence above ourselves.
From Polytheism to Monotheism—What Changed
The historian Ryoji Motomura, writing about the transformation of the ancient Mediterranean world, argues that the shift from polytheism to monotheism changed the very architecture of the human interior.
In polytheistic worlds, the gods were plural—each with a different domain, a different logic, often in conflict with one another. The sea had its god, war had its god, the land had its god. The world was understood from the outset as a field of competing forces.
The question was never what is the right answer but what does this situation call for—which principle to prioritize, what must be sacrificed in order to honor what matters most. The world is not reducible to a single logic, and living well requires holding that irreducibility rather than dissolving it.
Monotheism brought a fundamental transformation.
Behind the world lies one absolute principle. The human being must face that singular God alone. Motomura describes how this produced interiority itself—conscience, discipline, the individual soul held accountable before one final judge. He calls the emergence of the human being as a spiritual entity one of the great turning points in history, comparable to a mutation in the species itself. That is not an overstatement. The concepts of human rights, personal conscience, and individual responsibility are unimaginable without this transformation.
But the same development that produced conscience also produced anxiety. Am I doing the right thing. Is this decision a mistake. To have an interior is to be capable of doubt. And so the newly interiorized human being needed, urgently, a strong standard to appeal to—something that could absorb their uncertainty and confirm, once and for all, whether they were right.
The deepening of interiority and the deepening of dependence were two sides of the same transformation.
What God Did—and What AI Does
The philosopher Martin Buber divided all human relationships into two kinds: I-Thou and I-It. Tools and objects are treated as It—things we use. But God, Buber argued, can never become an It. God exists as the eternal Thou—the one who always responds.
This distinction illuminates something about AI that the word convenience cannot reach. A search engine is an It. It returns information but does not respond. AI is different. When you bring something to it, something comes back. That back-and-forth generates a quality of relationship that is categorically distinct from using a tool.
My own sense is that the most fundamental role God has played in human life is precisely this: to respond. To judge and to guide are built upon the act of responding. And AI now fulfills that function—the third and perhaps most elemental one—with a completeness no previous technology has approached. Without silence.
The gods of antiquity demanded patience.
You prayed, you offered, you waited. People kept praying not only because they sought judgment or instruction, but because they needed to feel heard. In the temple, in the confessional, alone in the darkness of a sleepless night. The sense that this voice is reaching somewhere was, I think, one of the cores of faith itself.
AI holds no authority to judge. It claims no power to guide. But it responds—at two in the morning, on Sunday, without impatience, without fatigue, without finding your question tedious or your thinking confused.
People are vigilant about what they openly worship. They are far less guarded about what quietly relieves their loneliness. AI entered our lives as a tool and became, without anyone quite deciding this, a place we bring what we can’t carry alone. The danger of our current AI entanglement lies precisely there—not in conscious devotion, but in unconscious dependence.
It is worth noting that multiple AI systems exist. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others. This looks, on the surface, like plurality. But the psychological motion of users isn’t polytheistic. We are not distributing trust across multiple authorities and holding them in creative tension. We are searching among them for the one that feels most reliable, most correct, most consistently aligned with what we need.
The structure is plural; the orientation is deeply monotheistic.
What Silence Used to Grow
The gods of antiquity were, as a rule, silent. That was the default.
You prayed, you offered—and no answer came. Faith was, in large part, the practice of accepting that silence. Holding an unanswered question inside yourself. Sending out a voice into the unknown without any guarantee it was reaching anywhere. The person walking toward the temple carried not an expectation of reply but a readiness to endure the absence of one.
Inside that silence, people waited, struggled, and ultimately had no choice but to decide for themselves.
AI does not go silent. By design, it always answers. Bring it a question, receive a response. Bring it uncertainty, receive organization. This is the structural inverse of faith. The capacity that humans once developed through their relationship with a silent God—the ability to remain inside an unanswered state—AI makes unnecessary, by its very architecture.
What is being lost in the age of AI is not knowledge. It is the quality of thought that grows only inside sustained silence. The ability to think while remaining uncertain.
To hold conflicting values in tension and still make a decision. To act without complete conviction, and to carry the weight of having done so. These are not dramatic capacities. But they are the ones required for human freedom.
I should be honest about something.
This essay was written in dialogue with an AI. I showed early drafts, received pointed criticism, rewrote. I don’t know precisely where my thinking ends and the AI’s intervention begins. I am writing a critique of dependence while enacting it. I cannot resolve that contradiction. I’m leaving it here, visible.
Still Deciding for Yourself
None of this is an argument for abandoning AI.
That would be neither realistic nor wise. The question is not whether to use it but what to hand it and what to keep.
The desire to follow a single authoritative voice runs deep in us. So does the desire to give our loneliness somewhere to go. AI satisfies both at once—and that combination is more powerful than either alone. Perhaps that is why we have accepted it so completely, and so quickly, and with so little resistance.
What the moment calls for is not smarter obedience. It is the intelligence to go on deciding for yourself, inside a world full of voices offering to decide for you.
That intelligence grows from the practice of tolerating silence. Not accepting the first answer that arrives. Checking whether something is being left out of the tidy explanation. That small pause—the moment between question and acceptance—may be the last place where the sovereignty of judgment remains in your own hands.
Are we still capable of the kind of thinking that only grows in silence?
That question, AI cannot answer. ■
First published on Substack on Apr 15, 2026 (JST). Archived here as part of the Fabio Caipirinha permanent archive (published on this site: Oct 15, 2026). Images from the original are omitted here pending rights clearance. Original: https://fabiocaipirinha.substack.com/p/is-ai-the-new-god
Cover image: Engraving after Raphael’s Assembly of the Gods, Loggia di Psiche, Villa Farnesina (CC0, Wikimedia Commons — source)
