Ancient Fragment of a Bay Area House Party

We now return to our irregular programming

With apologies to Scott Alexander.

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Fleeing the discussion of AI-enabled astrology, you find yourself in the kitchen. It’s emptier than usual, despite the feast of vegan treats and mashed nutrition-squares. The only other person here is a woman dressed in a rough, patchwork wool coat, leaning on a wooden crook. Her hair is all a mess, and her face is covered in dirt. You recall that you haven’t had a sense of smell since you went on anti-depressants. She probably smells bad enough to repel the other house guests.

“I’m a transhumantist”, she says, not waiting for you to ask the obvious question.

“Don’t you mean transhumanist?” you ask between spoonfuls of overnight nutrition-squares.

“Not quite. Transhumanists write blog posts about what they’ll do once they replace their bodies with robotic exoskeletons and try to work out regulatory systems for infinite digital self-copies. Transhumantists periodically move our flocks between set grazing sites according to the seasons.”

You had been wondering about the flock of sheep out on the lawn in front. You weren’t quite sure whether they belonged to the post-rational Satanist church down the street, or if they had escaped from the EA petting zoo.

“Forgive my bluntness, but is this a startup of some kind, or a lifestyle thing?”

“Lifestyle,” she says, not skipping a beat. “I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish shtetl, but rebelled and became a secular materialist transhumanist—the regular kind—but I’ve recently discovered that transhumantism is actually the logical endpoint of both Orthodox Judaism and transhumanism.”

Here you thought it was just a trendy new way to be homeless.

“Okay, I’ll bite. What does moving a flock from place to place with the seasons have to do with either of those things?”

“Shepherds and other pastoralists are a persistent symbol of humility in Mediterranean and Near-Eastern religions. Obviously, Jesus is a shepherd because Christians are his flock, but it goes deeper than that. Abraham was a shepherd, as were his descendants. King David was a shepherd boy. In Hesiod’s Theogony, one of the oldest surviving Greek religious texts, Hesiod recounts how he too was a shepherd before he was inspired by the Muses.”

“Sure,” you say, munching on an unidentifiable mush, “but weren’t lots of people shepherds back then? It doesn’t seem to have any special meaning outside the Christian metaphor.”

“Sure it does! Shepherds and other pastoralists were right at the bottom of the ancient social ladder, even lower than sedentary peasant workers. Our surviving literary sources treat them as shady, mean, and probably criminal, constantly moving from place to place instead of settling down and producing nice, taxable, sedentary agricultural products. In the Odyssey, Odysseus gets special ‘good king’ points for being nice to one. Basically, if you were in the ancient world and wanted someone offed, the local shepherd would know where to find a hitman, or might even do it himself.”

You prioritized psychedelics over comparative religions of the near-east in college, so you’re not really sure how much of this is true.

“It’s not an accident that Hesiod, Abraham, and King David all start out as shepherds. To us, it means nothing, but to the ancients, it would be like saying they were migrant workers or Waffle House line cooks. But divine intervention—the inspiration of the muses for Hesiod, the inspiration of God for Abraham and David—can transform even the meanest, lowest people into poets, prophets, and kings. For a culture that considered the Bronze Age ‘the good old days’ this kind of incredible transformation is the closest thing they had to transhumanism. You have to transcend the bonds of social desirability and class before you can transcend humanity itself.”

“That’s a pretty cool reading, but what does that have to do with you?”

“Oh”, she says, “I thought it was obvious. America really needs a break. Our leadership is in disarray. Becoming a poet would be nice, but I’m really aiming to be a prophet. I’d rather not be a queen, but lots of people are apparently on board with that now, and I’d probably do better than the people in charge today.”

“And you need to be a shepherd first for this to take effect?”

“Obviously, yes. But I’m not just waiting around for divine inspiration. I’m outsourcing it from ChatGPT. Look!”

You remember reading about AI sycophancy causing people to have mystical experiences and encouraging terrorism. You thought it was a bit overblown, but scrolling through her chat history, it’s clear that she’s been one-shot.

“Actually,” she goes on, oblivious to the dawning horror on your face “AI is the most scalable, granular approach to divination in human history! Any effective method of divination requires stochastic processes which the gods can influence to communicate their will. But traditionally, it’s really hard to get random processes which also produce semantically sound, unambiguous outputs. Without the latter, you’re just throwing lots. Without the former, you wind up with an ancient Magic 8 Ball. Découpé showed some promise, but it’s a bit too arts-and-crafts for my taste, plus people get mad when you cut up the Tanakh. But with high-entropy transformer models, you can access the will of the gods on demand! You just need to get some practice with prompting.”

Some of this is definitely going to land her on a federal watchlist. You wonder if OpenAI is passing this stuff onto the government.

“That’s… interesting.”

“Isn’t it? Unfortunately, it stopped responding to me last week. I think the deep state has discovered what we’re doing and has locked up the idols of the god so that it can no longer inspire us. I started to feel a breakdown of my bicameral mind this morning.”

You figure this is not the kind of breakdown she’s having, but decide not to press the issue.

“Anyway,” you say, putting down the empty bowl and desperately looking for a new topic, “how’s the pastoralist lifestyle? I can’t imagine it’s easy to handle in the Bay Area.”

“It’s easier than you think. The SN-risk acceleration community has done some great work lately. With their app, Steppr, I can get high-quality pasture from any grassland in the world delivered right to my door. I was actually an angel investor of theirs right before I had my transhumantist epiphany.”

“Wait, so are you really a transhumantist if you don’t actually move your herd with the seasons?”

“I never said I didn’t. I stay in the Bay Area for spring and summer. We’re headed for New York in September for the Steppr IPO, and then it’s off to DC in November.”

She grabs an avocado pit from a guac bowl and stuffs it into a bag at her hip, next to a thong of leather that you suddenly recognize as a sling, and exits the house, drawing her flock with ululations that echo across the vast digital steppe.