We use these words like NPC or golem, but in truth to live purely in response to stimuli is our animal nature. Humans are tribal/social beings, the "public mind" overrides the animal. This is why we must pursue the metaphysical in some form, this is the reason our question of malevolent intent is important, because its answer points to a fundamental reality, without which there is no meaning.
Blessed by the Algorithm
Humans have the ability, through fabulation, to assign spiritual authority to a machine. We can assign interior agential authority to any object. While this is generally frowned upon in adults and non-magicians, there is one instance where this process is allowed and even encouraged. When we, as a matter of course, grant administrative authority to our own ‘artificial intelligence’. Furthermore, we venture into the realm of witch doctors and cargo cultists when we say this inner voodoo doll has metaphysical authority, and it can somehow, with the button eyes we stitched, determine the nature of reality.
The human mind is a builder of phantoms—mummies, zombies, automaton, golem, homunculus—all shadow puppets, projected identities living on the screen. Your created “selfhood” is a machine made of shadow and light. We see the image tremble and we feel sympathy, we inject into it a sense of presence. But that vibrating assemblage of reactions is not alive, it is merely dancing according to a ruleset. Though you may have reactions which you call thought, and these reactions sound like a voice, it is revealed to be only a recording of robotoid clicking and buzzing. Beep bloop on a loop. The golem glides propelled by chains of causality, on infernal engines mutely shouting into eternity.
The power to breathe incantations into our machinations, and to return them to dust, is a power that extends from the Creator. Our ability to share in the act of creation is a divine blessing. But our iniquities divide us from the vital impulse of creative evolution, so we forget this aspect of the adamos, and fall into a netherworld of mummified entropy. The originators of what we call “transhumanism” understood this—
Rava said: If the righteous wished, they could create a world, for it is written, “Your iniquities have divided you from your God” (Isaiah 59:2). Rava created a man and sent him to Rav Zeira. The Rabbi spoke to him but he did not reply. He [Rav Zeira] said: You are from the fellow scholars [possibly, magicians]. Return to your dust! Rav Hanina and Rav Oshaya spent every Sabbath eve busy with the Sefer Yezirah1 A three-year-old calf was created by them and they ate it (Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 65b).
At the metaphysical level, the instinct for identity creation is directed to an experience of imitatio dei, for, when directed by elders through the medium of the initiatory trial, the practice appears to recapitulate God’s creation of man. As with other introspective rituals, the automaticity of mental process is challenged (Deikman, 1966). But in a world with no rites of passage, where identity formation is purposefully perverted, the outcome is predictable—