Margaret Hu has been making this argument for years, before I caught up to it. She is a professor of law at William and Mary, directs the Digital Democracy Lab, and has testified before Congress on AI regulation.
She just mentioned the separation of AI Church and State has been a rising topic for several years, most recently on the Federal Newswire podcast.
She pointed out separation of Church and State rhymes with separation of AI and State. The Church minted the coin and then charged for salvation. The labs mint the token and charge for salvation. Same institutional makeup, eight centuries apart. That got me thinking:
| Church Coin | AI Token | |
|---|---|---|
| The instrument | ||
| Placed on the altar | Submitted via API | |
| Who mints | ||
| Empire grants it, commune holds it, the Church absorbs it and the | ||
| ius monetae |
Booked twiceThe salvation soldThe half you can audit70,000 coinsfound beneath Scandinavian church floorsAmazon’s 16.8 billion dollar mark, booked in the openThe half you cannotThe trinityWhere This Ends is Ugly
An institution that mints the money, sells the salvation, and writes the morality of money holds all three levers with no independence or separation. Nothing inside would work to pry them apart. The medieval version did not reform by memo. It was Luther who nailed the indulgence (the AI double-booking of his day) to a door in 1517. Then a brutal correction unfolded over the next hundred and thirty years. Princes seized the mints and the monastery lands. The wars of religion ran into the Thirty Years War, which emptied as much as a third of the German lands in the worst regions.
The act of “disestablishment” (prying mint and salvation away from the sword) was Westphalia in 1648. The AI labs clearly are bringing back the trinity and infusing it into the state: we just saw an export ban on who may run a model, we just saw empty warehouses permitted as datacenters and ruled as critical infrastructure, with the national-security frame doing all the consecrating. They may as well say national holiness. Elon Musk may as well be called the holy emperor of SpaceX. History is blunt about the very high price of undoing the collapse. Elon Musk isn’t going to disestablish himself any sooner than he will admit he isn’t going to achieve driverless by 2017 or land on Mars by 2018.
Someone has to seize the AI token dies, before more people die from AI.