The Purpose We Lend: On Causality, the Death of the Gods, the Failure of the Ballot, and the Machine that Will One Day Govern the West by Our Design
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: This essay sets out a single, explicitly personal position on causality, ethics, religion, technology and government. It argues that humans are animals whose norms and ethics are social constructions, and that a strictly causal universe holds no inherent purpose. It reviews evidence from biology, neuroscience, cosmology and textual history against traditional religious accounts, and evidence from data on poverty, mortality and life expectancy for the reality of material progress. On that basis it argues that artificial general intelligence is near, that its development should be accelerated, and that the main risks are extinction and slow progress. Its central claim is that machines have no purpose of their own: purpose is something living beings lend them. The essay then criticises democratic voting as unworkable in practice and proposes a unified West governed by an AI bound to the goal of preserving humanity and raising the quality and equality of human life.
Author: Bakkum, Hessel
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225086049