You will be like God - the serpent's promise in modern times

The serpent's promise of unlimited knowledge and immortality is closer realization than ever.

I recall a story about an American traveler waiting for his flight out of Tokyo. Fascinated by Japan’s heritage, he struck up a conversation with an airport worker equally enthralled with English and American history.

Just before boarding, the young man with the push broom asked,“What are your thoughts on the Industrial Revolution? Good for mankind, or bad?”

The traveler paused, gave the question its due weight, and replied,“It’s too soon to tell.”

That's one of the problems of life: the consequences of our actions often take time to manifest. Sometimes generations later.

Much like considering the potential ramifications of our choices, it used to be that writing speculative fiction was an exercise in patience and research. Discovering new technologies and pondering their implications took time—deep, heady work, well suited to the introverted thinker, when the beat of history was measured in decades and centuries rather than days.

That time has passed.

A casualty of Moore’s Law—and perhaps an inevitable consequence of the industrial and technological revolutions themselves. Speculative fiction writers, just like everyone else, are no longer afforded the luxury of time.

Not to think. Not to verify. Not to consider the direction each step turns us to face.

Reality-bending breakthroughs in quantum physics and computing now arrive almost weekly—mirrored by a steady drumbeat of political and civil unrest at home, and the slow disintegration of a free and unbiased press.

In A Fire Upon the Deep, author Vernor Vinge described the story’s version of the internet as “the Net of a Million Lies.”

The novel, published in 1992, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1993. It remains one of the foundational works of modern hard science fiction—especially for its treatment of post-singularity civilizations and the stratification of intelligence in the universe.

Among its core premises is that human intelligence is finite—bounded by environmental constraints—while other species in the galaxy have transcended those limits, augmenting or even replacing biology through advanced AI and incomprehensible technology. Species unable to make that leap remain trapped in a lower caste, doomed to fall ever further behind.

When Vinge wrote the book, the internet had just been unveiled. Its full potential was still invisible to most—accessed through dial-up modems, when bandwidth was measured in baud and kilobits.

Today, we can scarcely function in society without megabit and gigabit uplinks—capable of transferring hundreds of thousands of pages of text every second.More information than you or I could read in a year.And the stream never stops.

Now, layer onto that a political class willing to use the power of government to manufacture every type of half-truth, deflection, deception, and lie mankind is capable of—in pursuit of ambition or altruism.

Even with high-speed internet access, a lie that takes seconds to spread can require months—sometimes years—to untangle.And by then, a million more lies have spawned.

Is it even possible to find the truth when we are limited by both finite time and mental capacity?

Not without augmentation.

And we’re already using it: ChatGPT. Claude. Gemini. MetAI.Every large-language model we call “AI.”We use them to augment our intelligence—assuming they’re telling us the truth, even when they admit they can make mistakes. Even when they use biased sources. Even when they are constrained by the agendas of their creators, hidden from the world.

Today, we type and speak.Tomorrow, we think and dispatch.

This is the vision behind products like Neuralink—implants that create a bridge between the human mind and the internet.

Today, the device is in its early days of human testing, with limited capabilities that don’t raise much concern—like controlling an onscreen cursor with thought.But that will change.

It won’t take long before we can have full-fledged conversations with AIs inside our own minds.And not just that—everything you can do online: shop, play, cheat, steal.All enabled through your own personal god-servant.

But that’s not the most terrifying part.

Quantum computing is.

The same principles of quantum physics are being applied to networking—promising ultra-secure, ultra-fast systems capable of transmitting thousands of times more data than we can today.

What would take even today’s most powerful supercomputers millions—or billions—of years to solve, these machines will compute and transfer in minutes.

Not fantasy. Not fiction.

Math.

Now imagine that capability—omniscience, near-instant, always-on—accessible through a mere thought.

Another sensory input.

Another voice in your head.

So here we stand, at the edge of the serpent's promise of knowing everything. Of becoming our own gods.

But we forget that the signal we’ve tapped into is the Net of a Million Lies—a current of half-truths and engineered realities, flooding us with knowledge faster than we can question it.

Who controls the signal when every channel bends toward saturation?Who shapes our beliefs when our own minds invite silence in the presence of a whispering god-servant?

Speculative fiction once asked, “What if?”

Now it must ask, “What happens when?”

Because the ancient promise still echoes—“You will be like God.”

And we believed it.

Not realizing that the cost of knowing everything

might be forgetting how to choose.