A philosophical essay arguing that AI discourse has taken on the structure of religious belief — answering existential questions about death, history, and meaning — while warning that the real danger isn't malevolent machines but uncritical deference to systems we can't audit. Drawing parallels to aviation's barnstorming era, the author urges practitioners to move past spectator hype and actually build with AI: creating reusable workflows and agents, maintaining skills done by hand, and evaluating repeated tasks rigorously. Cites the AlphaGo move nobody could explain, a 1.2-million-line Lean proof no human will read, and mixed productivity data (NBER survey: 80%+ of executives report no measurable gains; PwC: only 12% saw cost and revenue benefits) to ground the argument in reality.
