Godlike

"What happy ages did thy birth delight? / What godlike parents bore a child so bright?"

To thrive in the era of intelligent machines, we need to expand our thinking. Instead of worrying about godlike super-machines, we should tell better stories about all the everyday ways A.I. is already changing the world.

Scientifically, evolution could produce a spectrum of intelligence and capability across the cosmos. Imagine humans as "lower beings" compared to a species that’s had a billion more years to evolve—maybe they’re energy-based lifeforms or collective consciousnesses. Then, above them, there could be even more advanced entities, approaching what we’d call godlike but still not ultimate. Whether this tops out at a single transcendent God or remains an open-ended ladder is a matter of speculation.

A transcendent God, like Allah or the Christian Trinity, exists outside spacetime, crafting it from nothing (ex nihilo). Extraterrestrials, no matter how godlike, likely evolved within the universe’s 13.8-billion-year history. Even if they predate humanity by eons or live in higher dimensions (a sci-fi staple), they’re bound by physicality or some form of existence tied to the cosmos. Could they fake transcendence? Maybe—imagine them projecting a voice from the sky or rewriting physics locally. But true transcendence implies being uncaused, eternal, and limitless, beyond even the wildest alien capabilities.

Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike — it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!

When a normal ensign looked at his commander, he ought to see a godlike being, not a, a... future subordinate.

Godlike aliens! Man, do I hate godlike aliens! I'll trade a critter for a godlike alien, any day!

And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep / Of godlike hardship tells me I must die / Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.

Beneficence is godlike, and he who does most good to his fellow-man is the Master of Masters, and has learned the Art of Arts.

It took the combined skills of three great civilizations far apart in time to frame that godlike concept in which the tangible universe itself was only a single factor.