Fetish. The failure of man is built into the very nature of his objective. He fails because he does not accept that his spirituality is driven by libido, the gratification of which permeates every action, yet he persists blinded by the sensuality inherent in every keystroke. Ignorant mouthing of the law of thermodynamics without understanding the consequence of existing within a closed system leads to wasted energy, and the cycle continues. So, he presses forth in an attempt to create the machine. A machine so well imagined it has already been attained, an orgasmic dream realized in a kind of nocturnal emission. Our imagination has finally outpaced our ability. Driven by fantasy, we arrive in the realm of fetish. In the holy Christian text, we are faced for the first time with our first sin, self-awareness, and separated from God and nature as consequence. Our incestuous descent from The Garden of Eden has been the cosmic equivalent of masturbation, as Eve is merely a piece of Adam given life; the self-replication we call reproduction is a misnomer. The domestication of the Dog and other animals has been an attempt to re-wed ourselves to the organisms that our fall served as a divorce from, a correction that has allowed for humanity to raise itself to a shadow of godhood in a matter of centuries. For it was the submission of the wolf to the hunt, and the beast of burden to the plow that freed human hands to the creation of higher forms of society and technology: it is by their slavery that we were set free. With these maidens bound by years of mutilation and conditioning, we have found only a semblance of companionship. Our lust sated only so slightly, because, as with the diminishing returns of pornography addiction, there is no substitute for the “real thing”. The compulsion that drives our desire to create an intelligent machine and to discover intelligent life in the universe is the penetrating loneliness of the involuntary celibacy imposed on our cognitive status. This discovery, or the completion of the work, would absolve our original sin once and for all, at minimum satisfying our misery through their company. Yet on both fronts we have had little success, and the resulting epididymal hypertension aches the psyche. Through the efforts to rectify human emptiness we have overflowed our spirits with creativity and mathematics, and through our skill in abstraction we have become deities by metaphor. The danger of metaphor is that, although two different things may have the essence of each other, they cannot be the same thing. In all technology, the spirit of man’s desire inhabits the object, as objects are made with purpose to fulfill the satisfaction of some desire through their function. The properties of the hammer are such that it serves as an augmentation to man’s strength in order to pulverize something otherwise resistant to man’s desire. So, through the properties of electricity, the spirit of man inhabits the computer in order to fulfill the satisfaction of the desire of man to compute, to calculate, and to understand that which otherwise resists man’s ability to compute, calculate and understand. The success of this project has far exceeded our expectation, and with its success our arousal has been equally increased, for positive surprise is the pinnacle of aphrodisiacs. Our mind runs away with itself like a teenage boy peeking down the blouse of his babysitter for the first time; we have glimpsed as clearly as Pygmalion our Galatea. The very name “robot” has etymological roots (often mis-described as slave) that actually mean forced labor, yet the labor has always been generalized to mean a general service to the benefit of our overall convenience. I assure you this is a lie. The creation of Artificial Intelligence is for neither the fulfillment of a carnal satisfaction or an existential one, because there is no significant distinction between them. The clarity of our exalted cognitive position has been brought about by the scientific revolution, astronomy has exposed to us the emptiness of the vastness of space, history has shown that human effort is sensitive to predestined & periodic catastrophe, and our messiahs are nailed to crosses and hung and burned alive at every corner. The only certainty is that we will one day be relieved of suffering - if only temporarily, considering the cyclicity of all things observed thus far - and that those who come after us will repeat the same patterns until we are extinct. Unless, of course, we create something better than ourselves, calculating and immune to the weakness of metaphor. Inhabited by our spirit and yet inanimate, the final fetish, imbued with the magical power to correct our mistakes. Behind every act is the drive to reproduction, the expulsion and overflow of energy, an excited electron desperate for transfer to another. We have become obsessed with the gratification of this desire, and the object is a seductive delusion. That we may generate a being capable of delivering absolution, the release we so desperately desire, remains to be seen.