Huxiu republishes Labatut’s “The God of Logic” as China’s AI debate turns existential

Labatut’s mirror

Huxiu (虎嗅) has resurfaced a long essay by Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut that reframes the current AI moment as more than a tech boom: it’s a centuries‑long quest to "make gods." Labatut threads an anecdote—of an elderly engineer leaving Google—into a larger genealogy that runs from Vedic altars to George Boole’s logic, from McCulloch and Pitts’ first mathematical neuron to Geoffrey Hinton’s revival of neural networks, and finally to today’s generative models. He leans on Frank Herbert’s Dune and the fictional Butlerian Jihad to ask a blunt question: are we building tools, or are we building gods?

The historical throughline

The essay’s power is its historical sweep. Labatut argues that the same impulse that stacked sacrificial bricks into bird‑shaped altars is now embodied in engineers stacking layers of math in data centers. Short sentence: it’s a religious project dressed as engineering. He does not offer easy answers. Instead he holds up a mirror: what does it mean when technical mastery can mimic reasoning, authorship and judgment? The piece asks readers to consider the human costs and obsessions behind milestones we usually treat as purely scientific.

Why this matters in China

Chinese readers are not reading this as abstract philosophy. Beijing and Chinese firms are rushing to deploy large‑scale models even as regulators move to draft rules for generative AI and recommendation engines. Companies such as Baidu (百度) and SenseTime (商汤) are often cited as national champions in conversational AI and computer vision; it has been reported that both industry and state actors in China are wrestling with how to balance strategic advantage, social stability and ethical risk. Globally, Washington’s export controls on advanced AI chips add a geopolitical dimension: the race to build—or to restrain—intelligent systems now sits at the intersection of industrial policy, national security and age‑old questions about power. Will governance steer the technology, or will the technology reshape governance?