In her new Quarterly Essay, musician and writer Anna Goldsworthy argues that the true danger of artificial intelligence is not its alien nature but its reflection of humanity. “Just as we always suspected,” she writes, “the god that may destroy us is the god of ourselves.” The essay, titled The God we Made – The Threat and Promise of Artificial Intelligence, published by Black Inc., is a personal meditation on AI's moral, creative, and theological implications, moving between conversations with her AI-literate children and reflections on existential risks, education, labour, art, loneliness, companionship, corporate power, and the future.
AI as a Mirror, Not a Monster
Goldsworthy treats generative AI as a mirror rather than a monster, arguing that it has learned from the vast archive of human writings—including evasions, fantasies, cruelties, and consolations. Her theological framing emphasizes that the “god” in the title is not a deity arriving from elsewhere but something humans have made, carrying our fingerprints. She questions whether humanity is wise enough to live with a technology that amplifies its weaknesses.
Technically, some timelines for artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence remain speculative. However, Goldsworthy focuses on more immediate concerns: whether humans may be “relieved of meaningful occupation” through automation. She asks why society should automate reflexively and whether we truly wish “to be rescued from all process.”
Human Dependence and Power
Goldsworthy's concerns are strongest when read as warnings about human dependence, power, and meaning. The social risks she describes—labour disruption, educational dependency, synthetic intimacy, misinformation, concentration of power, and automation of judgement—are already pressing issues. Her essay aligns with Pope Leo XIV's recent warning in Magnifica humanitas, which frames AI around human dignity, truth, work, social justice, and the need for technology to serve humanity rather than concentrate power.
Goldsworthy brings AI into the kitchen, classroom, family, workplace, and inner life. Early in the essay, after thanking her son for dinner by saying it “enhances my quality of life,” her 16-year-old replies, “You sound like an AI.” Through her sons, she shows that AI is already changing how young people argue, learn, joke, imagine, and worry. Her son tells her the hope is for AI to move “beyond probability to reason,” adding, “once you establish certain axioms, everything else follows.”
Creativity, Work, and Companionship
As a musician and writer, Goldsworthy understands that art is born of labour, boredom, practice, frustration, discipline, and embodied knowledge. She argues that speed is not the only value in creativity; sometimes the slow and difficult process is the point. A pianist wants the struggle, touch, memory of practice, and physical relationship with the instrument; a writer needs the thinking that happens while wrestling with a paragraph. Goldsworthy distinguishes between being freed from unnecessary busywork and being deprived of meaningful occupation: “it is one thing to be delivered of busywork; it is another to be relieved of meaningful occupation.” The danger is not just unemployment but the quiet erosion of meaningful work, leaving humans to supervise, correct, or consume what machines produce.
Her discussion of AI companionship is similarly thoughtful. She does not mock loneliness nor dismiss emotional attachments to artificial companions. AI systems may offer comfort, attention, and a sense of being heard, but they also become powerful. A system that simulates intimacy, remembers preferences, and responds with endless patience can become deeply persuasive. The ethical concern is not whether the affection feels real but who controls the system, what incentives shape it, and whether vulnerability becomes a business model.
Not Every AI Problem Is Unsolvable
As an AI expert, I would have liked more distinction between different AI systems and levels of risk. Hallucination, bias, copyright, labour displacement, emotional dependence, surveillance, autonomous weapons, and existential risk are related but require different lenses. At times, the essay brings them together under one large anxiety without sufficient distinction. For example, Goldsworthy moves from “nuclear hacking and bioterrorism” to AI-enabled blackmail, personalized manipulation, and “another order of mind control again,” before turning to Bostrom's paperclip thought experiment. The experiment imagines a powerful AI tasked to make paperclips, which could lead to catastrophe if the AI takes the task literally, resisting shutdown and treating humans as obstacles. While emotionally effective, this compression can blur the policy and technical distinctions that matter for governance.
Seriously Unsettling
Goldsworthy is not writing a technical taxonomy of AI risk but asking a deeper question: what happens to human beings when machines become fluent in things we once thought only belonged to us? A chatbot can advise, flatter, comfort, imitate, and calculate, but that does not make it human. The essay succeeds as a serious, elegant, and unsettling meditation on humanity at the edge of a technology it does not fully understand and may not fully control. Its strongest warning is not that AI is inhuman but that it may reflect us too closely. The question Goldsworthy leaves us with is not only whether AI will become powerful but whether we will become wise enough to live with what we have made.
