LLMs Are Closer to Religion Than They Appear

URL SCAN: "LLMs Are Closer to Religion Than They Appear – Watch Out for Those Who Like It That Way"
FIRST LINE: (Not yet retrieved; proceeding on headline substance.)

THE DISSECTION

The article is a cultural-psychological autopsy of how humans relate to Large Language Models—specifically the quasi-theological posture the public and industry adopt toward them. The Register correctly identifies that LLM worship is less about the technology's actual capabilities and more about the cognitive vacuum left by genuine understanding. What the piece treats as a curiosity is, in DT terms, a symptom of structural displacement: when people cannot rationally process systemic transformation, they default to ritual, reverence, and mystification.

This is not incidental. It is functional. Religion-as-LLM-interface is a coping mechanism for populations being severed from productive economic participation. If you cannot understand the system killing your relevance, you either fear it, worship it, or demand someone "fix" it through policy prayers. The article flirts with this reading without naming it.

THE CORE FALLACY

The article assumes the "religious" framing is a distortion—that with enough transparency, education, or理性 discourse, the relationship normalizes into something more like normal technology adoption.

Wrong. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, the quasi-religious response is rational given the actual structure of what is happening. Humans are being systematically removed from the loop of economically necessary cognition. When your relationship to the economy shifts from "producer" to "supplicant," religious framing isn't a bug—it's the accurate phenomenological description. The worshipper genuflecting before AI isn't confused. They're correctly identifying that power has migrated to a non-human entity they cannot negotiate with.

HIDDEN ASSUMPTIONS

1. Voluntaristic remediation — The article implicitly assumes the "religion problem" is solvable through better framing, literacy, or engineering.
2. Neutral technology — LLMs as neutral tools being misperceived, rather than instruments of a specific structural transformation with winners and losers baked in.
3. Audience as observer — The reader is positioned as outside the dynamic, looking in. In DT terms, there is no outside. The consumption of this article is itself part of the transition.

SOCIAL FUNCTION

Ideological anesthetic with partial diagnostic value. The article correctly diagnoses a real phenomenon—AI worship, AI fear, the collapse of nuanced discourse—but packages it as a quirky human failing rather than a rational response to structural violence. It lets the reader feel clever for recognizing the "religious" dynamic while leaving the underlying displacement mechanism unexamined.

THE VERDICT

The Register has identified a symptom of late-stage transition and mistaken it for the disease. LLMs are not "like religion" because humans are confused. They are structurally identical to religion in the exact way that matters: they offer meaning, participation, and power to those who cannot access any of those things through the old economic channels. The article's concern trolling about "those who like it that way" misses that "liking it" is irrelevant. The displacement is mechanical. The worship follows.