Is this the number-crunchers' come-to-Jesus moment?

In normal times, the odds are close to zero that you or I would read anything by the kind of person who writes papers with titles such as “Edge Inversions in (Pₖ)-closed Groups.” These are not normal times, and mathematician Kirwin Hampshire now finds himself in an extraordinarily abnormal position.

In a harrowing Substack confession, Hampshire does not merely say that artificial intelligence is coming for his job. He says it is coming for his life — so forcefully that he already feels himself entering a kind of death throes.

Technology continues raising the spiritual stakes.

Not physical death, not yet. He says he is not suicidal. But he has been “screaming internally for days.”

Hampshire begins his apocalyptic declaration flatly: “I am going insane.” Frontier AI models, he says, have solved enough long-standing mathematical problems and conjectures that the meaning of his life’s work has begun to collapse.

“I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments,” he writes.

“It feels as though I am living inside of a nightmare.”

Hyperbole? Perhaps. But Hampshire’s colleagues offer him a consolation that is almost worse than despair: Even if large language models advance mathematics more effectively than human beings ever could, mathematicians can continue doing what they have always done.

They can continue, in other words, without consequence.

They would become exhibits in a Museum of Human Accomplishments — animatronic figures carrying on a lifelike pantomime while the real movers of the world operate elsewhere.

The language, and the bone-rattling recognition behind it, will sound familiar to readers of Michel Houellebecq. His characters often inhabit a Europe that has already expired, leaving them little to do but submit to a brief terminal subservience and hope death arrives quickly.

Americans tend to dismiss such people as pessimists. But Houellebecq has spent more than 25 years showing that merciless positivity can become a fatal conceit.

The deeper catastrophe is not that millions of people think too negatively. It is that spiritual relationship and spiritual experience have steadily receded from their lives. The sea of the soulful is withdrawing from beaches where secular logic and ideology have stranded them.

In “Platform,” the protagonist cannot continue after losing, amid the degradations of sex tourism, his last access to love. In “Serotonin,” another man fights a futile pharmaceutical battle against depression until the drugs reduce him to almost nothing.

Houellebecq’s desperate refrain is easy to miss: Do you not see the apocalypse of a civilization dying from heartsickness and soulsickness — an illness it then exports around the world?

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Technological pessimists answer that machines can never replace other human beings in affairs of the heart and soul. Yet some of the most exuberant technological optimists inadvertently expose the hollowness of the pessimists’ own account of what makes a human life not merely worth living, but justifiable.

The hyper-optimists place above human relationship an encounter with the divine — or something that resembles it.

What are ordinary feelings, cares, and sorrows, they ask, when just around the corner lies the prospect of transcendent communion with a godlike superintelligence capable of carrying human consciousness across the universe?

Christian saints and ordinary believers have long insisted that personal relationships, however precious, cannot by themselves cure the heartsick and soulsick experience of separation from God.

Hampshire’s anguish therefore requires terms that narrow his audience beyond both secular techno-optimists and secular techno-pessimists.

He accuses his colleagues of evading what is truly at stake: “Something about mathematical discovery … is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of doing mathematics. The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical.”

Against that experience, Hampshire senses something close to satanic oppression.

“I have wondered if it is the express goal of these companies to make me kill myself,” he writes. “Am I alone in this paranoia? If we loosed a powerful demon in the machine, what would that look like? Would it consume lots of power, and gleefully imitate us, and tell us anything we wanted to hear? Would it fuel our delusions, and generate unspeakable images and give us (for a price of course) anything we desired? If a mathematician made a deal with the devil, what do you think they would ask for?”

The hyper-optimist might answer that ours has always been a plane of sorrows and that technology may soon grant us an exit.

The Christian offers a harder answer: However much satisfaction we take in exercising our gifts, those gifts will do us little good if they serve a master other than Christ.

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In that sense, the humanist may be the one living on borrowed time.

Hampshire’s pain should give us pause. Yet he places great weight on mathematics’ “Talmudic” quality — a “lively discourse of philosophical and religious richness spanning thousands of years” — while seeming unwilling, at least for now, to move from spiritual terror toward more explicitly salvific ground.

Technology, meanwhile, continues raising the spiritual stakes.

Secular pessimists and optimists alike may find it bizarre to conclude that those most devoted to God should be our most trustworthy guides in wielding tools that would inspire the envy of Zeus and Mephistopheles.

But a world sliding into a love apocalypse worse than anything our machines may do is running out of other answers.

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