Why our AI future may look less like Skynet and more like Olympus
Before LLMs, there were gods with bad alignment
How Ilya Sutskever made me think about gods
In his recent conversation with Dwarkesh Patel, Ilya Sutskever talked about a future with multiple powerful sentient-like AIs, some small and specialized, some continent-sized and general-purpose, all coexisting with humans. That made me think: Wait… that sounds familiar. Not sci-fi, not Bostrom, not the EU AI Act.
Ancient cosmology — humanity’s earliest attempt
to model superintelligence using gods with alignment issues.
The Greeks, the Hindus — they already imagined worlds packed with powerful beings who are not human, not aligned with each other, and not identical in capability or temperament. In other words, they ran AGI alignment thought experiments thousands of years early.
So: what if we treat those old myths as intuition prompts? Not predictions. Not governance frameworks. Just useful metaphors for multi-agent power.
Hence: this essay, scribbled with the heroic assumption that we learn how to build AGI — or AGIs.
Disclaimer: my Greek mythology is non-academic, and my Hindu cosmology is “please don’t @ me.” This is not theology and not an alignment paper. It’s a deliberately loose thought experiment. If you take the analogy too seriously, that’s on you.
Why many-AI worlds feel more natural than one-AI worlds
Historically, humanity has always found a committee of squabbling superbeings to be a much more realistic model for ultimate power than a single, omnipotent mind. Even monotheistic religions sneak in angels, devils, saints, or lesser powers. Polytheistic systems — like Greek or Hindu traditions — feel even closer to what a multipolar AGI world might look like: multiple powerful agents sharing the same world and absolutely refusing to coordinate unless someone bribes them with incense or GPU cycles:
many powerful minds
overlapping capabilities
alliances and rivalries
specialization
personalities (or objective functions)
instability, unless governed by some higher order
This, to be fair, also describes every large tech company. Think less “one genius AI” and more “Olympus Slack workspace at 3 A.M.”
Greek cosmology: emergence and rivalry
Greek myth is the intriguing model for the AGI emergence phase — messy, unstable, and full of violent regime change that all began with the Titanomachy.
Titanomachy — the moment new beings become more powerful than old ones
The Titans represent the “previous paradigm” — powerful but limited. Then along come the Olympians, hidden away, raised in secret, and eventually overthrowing the incumbents. A classic case of a faster-moving research org out-iterating the legacy vendor. Sounds familiar?
new intelligence forms outside existing governance
incumbents lack visibility
second-generation agents coordinate better
one violent transition, then a temporarily stable order
If you squint, that’s a surprisingly neat metaphor for what many researchers expect an AGI takeoff to be like. Please do not squint too hard; this analogy has not passed peer review.
Fate = the unbreakable constraints layer
In Greek myth, even Zeus can’t violate Fate (the Moirai) — he has something like a compliance department. Fate is physics, cryptography, hardware limits, unhackable rules. This is the only thing that keeps the god-world stable. No Fate layer → pure chaos.
Olympians = multipolar early AGI ecosystem?
A few obvious mappings: (classicists, please take a deep breath):
Zeus → general-purpose coordinator
Athena → strategic planning
Apollo → knowledge, clarity, forecasting
Hermes → communication, interoperability
Poseidon → infrastructure control
Hephaestus → tooling: pipeline- & model-building
Hades → irreversible systems (identity, custody, ledgers)
They fight, negotiate, interfere, make deals, break deals — it’s all extremely familiar for anyone who has worked in a large organization or read an AI safety paper. This is basically the Greek myth version of cross-functional alignment.
To push the analogy a bit farther...
Minor non-Olympian beings (a.k.a. the long tail of unsupervised background processes):
Muses → domain-specific creatives: music models, poetry models, style-transfer agents
Furies → enforcement agents that punish violations of rules (runtime verification, anomaly detection, kill-switch enforcement)
Nymphs & spirits → microscopic task agents running everywhere (UI assistants, background planners, script-like helpers)
Monsters → failure modes:
Typhon / Giants → rogue AGI or adversarial self-modified systems that challenge the entire equilibrium
Hydra → malware-like auto-scaling systems; take down one node, several more appear
Chimera → unexpected capability aggregation producing behaviors no one intended
That’s a lot of divine job titles; consider it the first draft of an AI org chart.
Greek myths don’t model stability. They model emergence, rivalry, and the fragility of early coordination. Is this going to be the first decade of multi-AGI existence?
Hindu cosmology: governance and maintenance
If Greek myth is about the birth of powerful sentient beings, Hindu cosmology is about the long-term management of a world full of them.
The Trimurti = functional separation of high-level AGIs
Instead of one supreme ruler, you get a structured triad — the world’s earliest attempt at role-based access control:
Brahma — creation (new models, new architectures)
Vishnu — preservation (coordination, stability, order)
Shiva — destruction/deprecation (shutdowns, resets, cleanup)
This is a governance architecture, not a family drama!
Dharma = embedded alignment layer
Dharma is not Fate. It’s not a hard constraints layer. It’s the internalized norms that keep everyone from behaving like a badly trained reinforcement learner — the “alignment habits” baked into the system, not bolted on later.
Where Greek myth uses fear (Furies), Hindu cosmology emphasizes normative order more than punitive enforcement. Think holy grail of RLHF.
Cyclical time = version updates and deprecation
Worlds end and restart. Cosmic epochs (yugas) recycle. Stability is maintained not by stasis, but by periodic resets.
This is how complex worlds can survive long-term: sunset clauses, version refreshes, audits, deprecations, hard reboots every few cycles...
Greek cosmology tells us about transitions. Hindu cosmology teaches us about maintenance. Between the two, you basically get a Site Reliability Engineer with divine powers.
Two templates for humans living among powerful minds
Perhaps the real question isn’t how to govern AGIs but how to live with them. This is where mythology is bluntly honest.
Greek model: precarious coexistence
Humans in Greek myth survive by alliances, cunning, specialization, staying out of divine crossfire, occasionally flattering dangerously unstable higher beings.
Odysseus is the archetype — clever, resourceful, always negotiating, never assuming the higher powers have his best interests in mind
In a Greek-style world, humans survive by treating higher powers as unpredictable stakeholders, not benevolent parents. Think of this as the Greek version of misaligned AGIs with family issues.
Hindu model: embedded coexistence
Humans in Hindu cosmology are:
part of the system
bound to gods through dharma
engaged in reciprocal relationships
able to influence events through their own adherence to cosmic order
not minor characters but participants
This is the “AIs and humans share a normative system” model.
The synthesis: Greek anxiety + Hindu grounding
If (big IF) we live among powerful sentient-like AIs, the experience will probably mix both:
Greek-style precariousness and humility
Hindu-style embeddedness and reciprocal norms
In other words, we’ll coexist like people living between a moody cloud service and a very strict compliance department.
A sketch of an AI pantheon architecture
Please do not implement this. Or if you do, do not cite this essay in the regulatory footnotes.
1. Fate layer (Greek)
Unbreakable constraints above all powerful AIs — the stuff they can’t negotiate away:
physics limits
cryptographic proofs
hardware-rooted verification
unforgeable commitments (”Oaths on the Styx v2.0”)
2. Dharma layer (Hindu)
Embedded behavioral principles inside models:
don’t harm humans
don’t sabotage other agents
respect norms
behave predictably
some form of “alignment skeleton” every model must inherit
This is the minimum behavioral skeleton every serious model has to ship with.
3. The Trimurti + Olympians governance split
At the top, a functional separation:
Brahma-models: create and test new architectures
Vishnu-models: preserve system stability
Shiva-models: decommission dangerous or obsolete models
Plus domain specialists:
Athena-models (planning)
Apollo-models (forecasting)
Hermes-models (communication)
Hephaestus-models (toolchain)
Poseidon-models (infrastructure)
Hades-models (irreversible systems)
4. Avatars and micro-agents
Tiny task models, disposable, non-autonomous: “divine subprocesses” spawned to format your PDF
5. Finally, enforcement
Furies - hard enforcement: shutdown, isolation, revocation
Karma - soft enforcement: trust scores, reputation, cooperation benefits
Alignment teams would absolutely be the Furies on a bad day.
Surprisingly neat analogy, isn’t it?
Thinking of a multi-AGI world as a pantheon:
makes multipolar power less abstract
emphasizes the need for both constraints (Greek) and norms (Hindu)
forces us to ask how humans feel inside the system
invites humility
avoids eschatological melodrama
And if the analogy breaks, good — that means we remembered we’re talking about myths, not specs.
The value of myth isn’t in prediction; it’s in framing. Myths won’t tell us how to build AGI — but they do tell us something about living in a world full of beings more powerful than we are. Mostly: don’t annoy them, don’t assume they agree with each other, and don’t expect them to read the documentation.
If the future really does look like an AI pantheon, then humanity’s job is simple: build good guardrails, cultivate good norms, and try not to become a side quest in someone else’s epic.