Carl Öhman - Gods of data | Higher Research Seminar
Seminar
Date: Wednesday 17 September 2025
Time: 12.00 – 13.30
Location: F702
Join us for a Higher Research Seminar featuring Carl Öhman. He will give a talk about Gods of data.
Brief information in Swedish
Everyone agrees that the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) may pose serious dangers to democracy. But how we perceive the nature and gravity of these dangers depends on the concepts and metaphors we use for it. So, what are AI systems? ‘Synthetic minds’ that may escape their confines and take over humanity? ‘Stochastic parrots’ that reify a racist and sexist past? Or perhaps ‘mirrors of code’ that distort reality?
In my forthcoming book Gods of Data, I propose an alternative answer: They are gods. In a theological sense, gods refer to supernatural beings beyond time and space. Obviously, this is nothing like AI. In an anthropological sense, however, gods are rather to be seen as the personified authority of a group over time—a social mechanism that molds a collective of ancestors into a unified voice. And this is exactly what AI systems have become—vast volumes of past data compressed into a single agency, a personification of our digital ancestors. Why is this analogy important? Because it allows us to review the dangers of AI in a completely new light. Specifically, it opens the door to religious critique—one of the richest traditions of Western thought—as a depository of critical perspectives applicable to AI.
Specifically, in the chapter I intend to present at the research seminar, titled The Political Theology of AI, I draw on Lefort, Nietzsche, Arendt, and Schmitt to articulate what is at stake as we increasingly outsource political deliberation to machines. AI, with its jaw-dropping ability to predict the outcomes of both policy and communicative action, threatens democracy not because it is opaque, biased or unpredictable, but because, like a god, it offers a relief from the fundamental uncertainty upon which democracy rests—a way to fill what Lefort calls the “empty place” of democracy with the predictive authority of the past. As such, the true political danger of AI is not that it will become too smart and take over, but that we, like our pre-modern predecessors, become mere subjects to our history rather than being the subjects of it.
Carl Öhman earned his PhD in 2020 from the University of Oxford. His research focuses broadly on the politics and ethics of AI and has been covered by media outlets such as New York Times, BBC and TIME Magazine. In 2020 he was named the UK’s #1 early career researcher in the arts and humanities by Scopus. His book The Afterlife of Data, was listed by Nature, The Economist and The Guardian as one of 2024's top 10 books and has been translated into 8 languages, incl. Chinese, Arabic and Spanish.
Last updated: August 22, 2025
Source: Dept of Political Science