The world is talking about AI, and a good deal of the talk is negative. Commentators warn that AI could threaten humanity itself, disrupt economic stability by replacing human labour, and diminish human creativity. These concerns have shaped a cultural atmosphere in which AI is often seen as a danger rather than a development. In this blog post, I want to offer a philosophical perspective based on Baha’u’llah’s unique view on the daily newspaper.
Baha’u’llah and the Mirror of Newspapers
Baha’u’llah looked at newspapers through the lens of a principle he often employed in his writings, namely, that today, we “should consider all things to be mirrors.” (Commentary on a Verse of Rumi, para 7.) He used the mirror metaphor to illustrate the relationship between the Manifestation of God and creation. The Manifestation is like the Sun and the creatures are like mirrors that reflect the Sun’s light, each according to its own capacity and characteristics. The metaphor captures the key idea that the light shining in the mirrors is not an inherent aspect of the things themselves. It is only a reflection. Even though to ordinary perception the light looks like it is part of a thing, in reality, it is not, for it comes from the Sun.
Baha’u’llah applies this principle to newspapers, describing them as mirrors reflecting the divine attributes of speech, sight, and hearing:
“In this Day the secrets of the earth are laid bare before the eyes of men. The pages of swiftly-appearing newspapers are indeed the mirror of the world. They reflect the deeds and the pursuits of divers peoples and kindreds. They both reflect them and make them known. They are a mirror endowed with hearing, sight and speech. This is an amazing and potent phenomenon.” The Sixth Taraz, Tarazat, in Tablets of Baha’u’llah.
Clearly, Baha’u’llah was not suggesting that newspapers could actually hear, see, and speak. He is saying that because newspapers receive and transmit the deeds of the world, they therefore display a form of hearing, seeing, and speaking. These attributes are not latent within the newspaper, they come from the divine Spirit, just as the divine light is not latent in the mirrors of things, but comes from the Sun. Here, the divine Spirit is shining on the material world, and newspapers are, as a result, reflecting back certain attributes of God in accordance with their capacity and purpose.
AI as a Mirror of Divine Attributes
In light of Baha’u’llah’s example, we can perhaps shed light on how best to view the phenomenon of AI. If newspapers were, for Baha’u’llah, an amazing and potent mirror of hearing, sight, and speech, then AI invites the same reading on an even larger scale. In addition to hearing, sight, and speech, AI displays the attributes of knowing, creating, designing, writing, informing, and answering, among many other remarkable things.
In fact, AI is so good at these things that one could easily slip into thinking that it possesses these attributes in itself — that it is somehow knowing, conscious, and alive. But this is a misreading of reality. The mirror principle reminds us that no matter how well a mirror reflects the Sun’s light, that light is never inherently part of the mirror’s own reality. For this reason, the seemingly miraculous features we see in AI are not its own, but rather reflections of the divine Spirit in the material world. Their emergence does not mean that circuitry has suddenly developed human abilities.
A Sign of What’s to Come
Now that AI has appeared, passages from Baha’u’llah that previously seemed baffling and incredible — such as the one below — take on a new meaning. Here Baha’u’llah explains that everything is able to reflect the names and mysteries of God, and by this means, God brings about innovation in the world. And, as if to emphasize God’s limitless power, he hints that God can even raise up the dust:
“Furthermore, all things have ever been repositories of divine names and treasuries of creative mysteries, and in every dispensation He manifests from each thing whatsoever He willeth,… And were He today to take a handful of dust and raise therefrom whatsoever name hath been or shall be, verily He is able, for He is the Sovereign, the King, the Almighty, the Powerful, the Omnipotent.” Lawh-i-Sarraj, para. 75, Phelps Partial Inventory, vol. 34, pp. 93-174.
Today, this passage might be interpreted as a sign about just how unsettling the future could be. If God can raise up from a handful of dust whatsoever divine name He wills, then AI may be only the first of many such innovations still to come, each one causing an upheaval. Baha’u’llah has promised a new world order that will replace the old one. It seems we are all already inside that transformative process, with its inevitable disruptions and uncertainty.
Two Signs Already Among Us
One example of this development process is the increased speed of the translation work. Under the stewardship of Steven Phelps, Claude has been used to translate into English the entire corpus of publicly available Babi and Baha’i scripture — close to two hundred volumes. Human beings can certainly translate such a vast body of text, but not at the pace AI makes possible. What AI contributes here is speed, not meaning. It is not generating meaning as it translates; it is carrying meaning across languages. In doing this, it does not suddenly develop sentience. The ability to understand the text remains human only.
Another purpose for AI worth considering has to do with the issue of work. Baha’u’llah requires people to work, but does not make it the purpose of a human life. Human beings were created to know God, to praise God, and to cultivate the capacities of the soul. And yet enormous numbers of people spend the whole of their waking lives bound to work that consumes their time and energy. If AI begins to loosen this bond by taking over menial tasks, that loosening may be less a disruption than the very liberation many long for.
Conclusion
If newspapers were, for Baha’u’llah, a mirror endowed with hearing, sight, and speech, then AI is a mirror endowed with far more. Just as newspapers made the world visible, AI makes the world accessible, by acting as a deliverer of knowledge and information and as a platform everyone can use to search, create, and learn. It does come with complications, but then so do newspapers. Baha’u’llah also complained that they rarely reported the truth about him, but overlooked this, seeing them instead as an innovation of God. Similarly, AI’s challenges are real, and the disruption they bring is not to be underestimated, but we can still see AI as a sign of the divine will manifesting its names through the material world, lifting humanity into a new stage of unity and liberation.
Other Relevant Passages
Baha’u’llah writes:
“Nature in its essence is the embodiment of My Name, the Maker, the Creator… It is endowed with a power whose reality men of learning fail to grasp.” (Tablet of Wisdom)
“It is indeed in Our power to take up a handful of dust and to adorn it with the vesture of Our Names. This, however, would be but a sign of Our favour, and not an indication of any merit it may have inherently possessed.” (Surah of the Temple, para. 90)
“Thou hast enabled every least pebble to resound again with Thy praise.” (Prayers and Meditations, LXXXV)
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Update on my Recent Work
I’ve published on Patreon a new Lepain essay exploring the question of what exactly are the divine worlds: The Divine Worlds as Modes of Intelligibility. For a blog post that discusses related ideas, see Reading in a Universe That Reads You Back.
I’ve also posted on YouTube an audio edition of the blog post, Extracting Baha’u’llah’s Hidden Originality from Traditional Terminology. The audio edition is an edited version of the original post, tailored for easy listening: Baha’u’llah’s Hidden Originality.