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WHY do people pray? An ancient need for rules, civil organising principles and origin stories may help explain why many seem primed to seek out a higher power. But those possible explanations aren鈥檛 the whole story. It is what we might think we are praying to that underpins our enduring commitment to a deity, and the notion that by appealing to it we might shift unexplained forces in our favour.

Today, one could be forgiven for feeling the same about algorithms. We increasingly outsource to artificial intelligence what our forebears would have subjected to the divine. AI helps us to better understand disease, to work out the right length for a prison sentence or even to decide who should get medical intervention. Which side of the line the results fall can have a large impact on someone鈥檚 life.

And while we have seen how our human biases creep into such machine judgements, the desire to create something devoid of our influence, a more omnipotent AI, is seen in our race to develop AI ethics and accountability.

Say we make it work: what would an omnipotent AI be like? What could convince us to cede all our decisions to it? How would it see us? Is there any way we could pray to an AI to save us?

鈥淲hat would an omnipotent AI be like? What could convince us to cede all our decisions to it?鈥�

These are some of the questions behind Providence, Max Barry鈥檚 deceptively straightforward AI vs aliens romp. IT philosopher Jaron Lanier says AI is less a technology, more an ideology. Barry ups the ante to make it an emerging religion.

There is a hint of 2001: A Space Odyssey in his plot. It puts four people on a Providence-class warship, effectively one giant, sentient and utterly unknowable AI 鈥� developed after humanity made contact with an alien species with similarly incomprehensible objectives. This ship-AI can spot patterns in the aliens鈥� behaviour. It takes one to know one.

These terrifying and unstoppable AIs have been spawned by a global corporate war on Earth, to the tune of a sizeable chunk of global GDP.

The crew onboard the ship are no match for its staggering capabilities. In reality, the job is a PR gig to sell the AI project to the world鈥檚 citizens, who paid for it. Because there is nothing to do in the confines of space, the four overqualified and bored heroes ponder the existential question of who they are to this unknowable ship tasked with keeping them alive in the hostility of space.

鈥淭here is logic to everything,鈥� says the intelligence chief, Gilly, who sees the ship as a collection of sophisticated code. 鈥淵ou just have to look deep enough to find it.鈥� But Beanfield, the HR officer, has a different idea, insisting that 鈥渋f we are throwaway survival machines for genes, then the ship is our throwaway survival machine. If you want to think of the ship as a body, we are its genes.鈥�

The true relationship between ship and crew is revealed when the God-class intelligence engages God-class firepower to protect its charges. Considering who survives, it is plausible that, like the old gods, AI also favours good supplicants.

Barry makes it clear what we may lose if we choose to place our faith in AI. The chilling corollary is that if we do create an AI god, we may be little more than genes or blood to it 鈥� important in great quantities, in good working order, but irrelevant as individuals.

Is the new deity better than the old? Finish the book and decide.

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