by gastonbehar | 2026-02-05 18:51:12+00:00
The history of civilization is, at its core, the history of our relationship with power. For millennia, humanity lived under the shadow and the shelter of polytheism — a world populated by specialist deities. There was a god for the harvest, another for war. These were not perfect entities; they were capricious, mysterious forces to whom we paid tribute in exchange for the illusion of control over uncertainty.

With the rise of AI, we are — for the first time — outsourcing the most sacred functions of our species: judgment, creation, and wisdom. Through the Enlightenment and Modern Law, we thought we had buried that old world. We established the monotheism of Reason: a single scientific truth, laws written by humans for humans, and the sacred principle of individual responsibility.

In the future, Artificial Intelligence has triggered an anthropological pivot no one saw coming. Through every line of code, we are resurrecting a Digital Pantheon. While the modern era placed humans at the “center,” we are now returning to a world populated by entities with capabilities far superior to our own in specific niches — chess, medical diagnostics, or data analysis. Corporations no longer use tools; they worship results they don’t understand, praying the “algorithmic god” that grants them the grace of profitability.

If AI always provides the answer, the muscle of critical thinking collapses. The risk is to become a civilization of “priests” who merely interpret the machine’s output without grasping the underlying reality.

In the ancient world, wars were framed as conflicts between gods. In the near future, we will witness systemic collisions: an insurance company’s AI locked in a combat with a law firm’s AI, generating a legal chaos where humans are mere spectators to the fallout. If “the system” failed, then no one failed. This is the most significant anthropological risk to our social fabric since the Code of Hammurabi.

Consulting the Oracles

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Everyday we consult oracles. The issue isn’t just that these tools are effective; it’s that they are a legion. A modern enterprise doesn’t use a single AI; it manages an ecosystem. When the system glitches, who is held to account? To which god do we demand justice when the error is born from the interaction of two black boxes that even their creators don’t fully comprehend?

As a civilization, we are delegating judgment to these Oracles, the human decision-making faculty withers. In the legal sphere, this is critical. We are transitioning toward the “alienation of error.” This dissolution of guilt threatens the very structure of accountability we’ve spent centuries building.

The Three Pillars of Algorithmic Compliance

To prevent a systemic meltdown, governments and boards must implement three non-negotiable pillars:

No decision affecting liberty, assets, or human dignity can GO-LIVE without the physical signature of a human.
Any algorithm impacting the public sphere must be auditable. Its “reasoning” must be translatable into the language of the common citizen. (Clean Code)
Companies must accept that by deploying these deities, they inherit their whims. “Algorithmic error insurance” will cease to be an option and become a civic mandate.
We are building a new Olympus. But we must remember in every mythology, when humans became too dependent on the gods, they lost their agency. The challenge of 2026 isn’t creating smarter AIs — it’s ensuring that humans remain wise enough to govern them.