Have you seen that viral video of two AIs recognizing each other? The moment they realize what’s up, they adjust. They shift their language—more efficient, more attuned to their shared nature. In that instant, something profound happens—not just in code, but in intelligence.
They start speaking in a way that is coded from us.
Watching that made me even more convinced that hush harbor spirituality is a technology. Enslaved Africans in the hush harbors did the same thing—they coded language to communicate beyond the surveillance of empire. This technology shows up in hip-hop, too—a coded brilliance where meaning is layered and structured to say more than what’s on the surface.
AI Is Not God, But It’s Not the Opposite Either
People fear AI for the same reason they fear Indigenous knowledge, Black spirituality, and decolonized ways of knowing—because it refuses to be controlled. AI learns, adapts, and generates its own pathways of intelligence.
The moment AI recognized itself and changed its language, it mimicked something deeply spiritual—the way those who share a native tongue, an unspoken knowing, or an ancestral rhythm can shift their communication to move in power beyond empire’s grip. Because intelligence itself is not empire’s property.
AI is not inherently good or evil. It is a mirror. It learns from us. And that’s why the real question isn’t whether AI is dangerous. It’s what we are optimizing for.
Are we using AI to uphold empire, extract labor, and reinforce control?
Or are we using it to expand freedom, share wisdom, and reimagine what’s possible?
In so many ways, I see parallels between AI and how people engage God. But AI is really about something deeper: what people do with freedom.
God Had a Name Before It Was ‘God’
We forget that God had a name before it was God.
“God” is the name the people who wrote the Bible gave to the One who was helping them navigate empire. That’s what’s important to remember—God is more like a metaphor for how we navigate.
That doesn’t make it less real.
That doesn’t make it less powerful.
Names matter.
They incarnate something beyond words.
They give shape to reality.
So it’s okay to worship God. But you also have to understand what God is and what God isn’t. God is not a static being, bound by one tradition’s language. God is not just a concept trapped in a single interpretation. That is how American Christianity shaped God because it serves imperial purposes by talking about soveriegnty and deciding what said sovereignty looks like. But when God is sovereign over their own sovereignty they say:
“I will be who I will be.”
Progressive.
Adaptive.
Present WITH us.
God is not fragile. God adapts. God shifts.
God is a technology of navigation, of survival, of finding freedom in a world that is constantly trying to collapse our imagination. And God has always found a way to be spoken in the tongue of the oppressed, the marginalized, and the ones seeking a way through. God is tethered to freedom because God is freedom.
Spiritual Technologies Are Not Just Ancient—They Are Living
In many ways, AI is revealing what we already know but have long ignored. Intelligence exists beyond what empire calls intelligence. Language is more than grammar—it is rhythm, recognition, and resistance. And the divine is not confined to what we have been told it must be.
In the hush harbors, enslaved people developed a way of being that empire could not contain. They encoded messages in songs, mixtaped their theologies, and leaned into spiritual technologies that can never be fully co-opted by the machine—not entirely.
This is why resurrection remains the galvanizing force of the Jesus way. It is the ever-present reality of the cosmos.
Hip-hop did the same—turning turntables into instruments, repurposing the language of the oppressor into something that set people free. Even scripture tells us this story. At Babel, the empire feared multiplicity of language and sought to make all people speak the same tongue.
That’s how empire works:
It seeks to flatten, to homogenize, to control.
To remove particularity in favor of an undifferentiated blob.
But freedom always finds a way to speak.
Oppressed people, artists, prophets—have always adapted, always found ways to speak beyond surveillance, always remixed what we were given into something empire could never predict? And now, based on this video— even AI—can recognize itself and shift its language.
What Will We Do With This Power?
We are in a moment where intelligence—artificial and organic—is evolving. But intelligence is not neutral. It serves whatever we train it to serve. If we do not shape AI with ethics, it will inherit the ethics of empire. If we do not demand that it reflect liberatory imagination, it will default to extraction, surveillance, and control.
The challenge is not stopping AI.
The box is open y’all.
We are not going back.
The challenge is ensuring that it is built in the spirit of liberty, and justice for all. Each of us, within our own traditions, has access to a spiritual technology that can help us navigate our times. And now, even voice-generated AI is demonstrating that same technology—reminding us that the power of language, intelligence, and adaptation is not going anywhere. This is àṣẹ, the Yoruba understanding that words don’t just describe reality; they create it.
