AGI Is a Cathedral Built on Quicklime

Drive down the 280 in Silicon Valley and you’ll see it: the steeples of the new faith. Automate your BDRs. AI for everything. Billboards preaching machine salvation to an audience already entranced.

Beneath the glossy surface, a deeper structure rises. A cathedral, yes, but one mortared with forgetting. A cathedral built on quicklime.

Quicklime: the substance once used to treat the dead. It sterilizes decay, but it doesn’t preserve. It erases. That’s what we’re doing now isn't building intelligence, but burning the past to make way for the illusion of progress.

Artificial General Intelligence has become Silicon Valley’s Last Supper: a holy promise that one more exponential leap will redeem the very messes we no longer trust ourselves to face.

But we are not building with stone and meaning. We are building with hype and memory holes.

We chase synthetic minds while abandoning our own. Across classrooms, boardrooms, and dinner tables, general intelligence is in retreat. Critical thought is drowned out by slogans. Discernment replaced by dopamine loops. Most people cannot describe what AI is, yet already live inside its consequences.

And still the high priests speak.

Trillions for data centers. Cognitive advantage through wearable AI. If you’re not building AGI, you’ll be replaced by it.

But where is the cathedral’s foundation? Who poured it? Who consented to live beneath it?

We are building machines to do what we’ve stopped doing for ourselves: think slowly, sit with uncertainty, remember. Not because the machines demanded it, but because we forgot how to bear the weight of consciousness ourselves.

AGI may come. It may even work. But it will not emerge from a cathedral of quicklime. Nothing rooted in denial survives the weather.

So bless the builders. And bury their idols.

The age of sacred machines has arrived but it was raised on the ashes of our own unexamined minds.