In Warhammer 40k the technology is a weird mix of advanced and clunky. Kinda steampunk(ish) but not steampunk.
The tech priests (read engineers) really do not have a very good grasp on what they are doing and are mostly churning out stuff from an earlier age that they barely understand. They incorporate religious beliefs into the building and maintenance of the machines in 40k. These serve to actually allow them to maintain and build things but with a lot of religious window-dressing surrounding it.
They believe the machine spirit is real and present in any machine. The more complex the machine, the more powerful the machine spirit.
Sounds like hoodoo but then you see in machines like Titans the tech priests literally need to be able to resist the machine spirit without scrambling their noodle.
So, in 40k, is the machine spirit a real thing or just tech priests hanging on to power?
This is the same milieu where Ork technology works by pure faith. (Faith augmented by their overriding stupidity, since they’re too dumb to disbelieve (for instance) that red is universally the fastest color. They believe it, they aren’t smart enough to doubt it, and it works.)
But I suppose it’s fair to ask where the dividing line is between the omipresent and intrusive supernatural and omnipresent and intrusive ambition.
I can’t quote anything canonical, but my recollection is that in-story, Machine Spirits are treated as real, not as manipulative myth. And other than generalized cynicism, there’s no obvious indication that the source material is unreliable lore-wise.
My understanding is that someone in-universe, but not Imperial, would instead describe the Machine Spirit as onboard chips, computers, networks, and possibly up to onboard AI.
The Adeptus Mechanics have essentially lost the ability to design new chips and write new code, so they’re using the old stuff, even if it’s not reliable, until it dies. They have scraps of old training manuals and help files and have turned those into religious texts to placate the spirit of the machine. (I don’t know enough about the titans and possession, but seems like it could be the more advanced end?)
But to answer your question - I think it’s a real thing, but not the way they think it is. They are trying to hold onto power as well, but it isn’t something they made up either. There are risks of chaos sympathetic engineers/programmers designing chips and programs that end up with a Battlefleet getting lost in the warp (moreso than normal), so they very much are not interested in new, unproven tech.
I always took it as an example of the 40K dark age of technology as manifested. In effect, it’s a sort of cargo cult- the Adeptus Mechanicus (supposedly) doesn’t really know how all their stuff works; it’s as much prayer to the machine spirit, as it’s solid engineering and repair knowledge, as most of what they’re working with is either extremely ancient, or new production in automated factories that have been running since that stuff was designed.
I think it’s somewhat ambiguous if there really is a machine spirit; it seems rather absurd to us, living in a world of science, but in the 40k world, there’s the Warp and psykers, so maybe the machine spirit is something along those lines.
The Warhammer 40K wiki is very non-committal about it. Everything is worded as saying that they “believe” that the spirits are real, but nothing stating whether they really are or not.
There are cites from comments there demonstrating times when technicians have called on the spirits and they seem to respond.
The aforementioned discussion mentioned that point as well. In that universe, faith is enough to make something real. As one commenter put it, “A whole lot of people believe them to be actual spirits. The way things generally works in 40k, that means to some degree they are.”
I’ve been in computer technology since before I was an adult, and trust me… There is a lot of “ha-ha only serious” superstition in computer and software engineering. It’s not taken seriously, and (for most) it’s not the actual run rules of the discipine, but most programmers will admit to whispering a prayer to the compiler gods before hitting “enter” on a critical build done under pressure.
For something in which every component and every line of code was created by the intention and action of a human being, there’s a lot of unknown emergent “gremlin” behavior in a system.
I’ve been a professional computer technician for more than 20 years. I have seen numerous examples of “gremlins”. My first experience with one was when I was just starting to learn the trade. Computers are complicated devices, there are so many things that can go wrong (hardware and software, or a combination) and you will eventually find a problem that has no reasonable explanation, or a problem that resolves itself with no reasonable explanation. It’s a waste of time to dwell too much on it if it’s a one-off issue, so you shrug, chalk it up to a gremlin, and do something important instead.
Sure- we have long joked about “computer Jonahs” or people with the “reverse Midas touch” with computers because of a perceived pattern of their negative effects on computers.
But nobody ACTUALLY thinks that these people have some supernatural ability to mess up computers by their very touch or presence. It’s almost all coincidence or ignorance.
Similarly, we joke about the compiler gods, but we don’t really think there’s a such thing. We know a lot of it is just emergent weirdness because of the extreme complexity of computer systems and their interactions with stuff.
I think in 40k it’s supposed to be more of a situation where at least the lower-level Adeptus Mechanicus members really do believe that there are “machine spirits” and seek to placate them as part of their work. So he might light a candle and murmur a prayer before changing a tire on a vehicle, even though the actual work is done with lug wrench and air compressor.
I never got super far into 40k but the way I understood it things did actually happen when they prayed to the machine spirit; it wasn’t just their imagination. As in, praying super hard to fix something could work just as well as turning a wrench.
Edward Gibbon: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in [Warhammer 40K] were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.”
I’m with everything you posted but there are cases in the books where we read a Tech Priest has to struggle to not be overwhelmed when controlling something as powerful as a Titan. The Titan literally pushes back at the Tech Priest controlling it and only a few have the mental faculties to cope.
Do they go into the details of what the Tech Priest is doing? I mean, considering the level of technology it’s not inconceivable that the Tech Priest is using some sort of brain/machine interface and interacting with some sort of artificial intelligence. Nothing supernatural, but something that could be easily interpreted as a “machine spirit”.
That’s the thing- we don’t really know how their tech works either; for all we know AI could be nearly ubiquitous and nobody actually knows it. Or it could be something to do with the Warp. I don’t know.
But 40k does have a pretty big dose of technical dark age going on in the lore; the implication, if it’s not stated outright somewhere is that technological progress has essentially stagnated since the Horus Heresy, and that progress is slow to non-existent.
Of course, this runs afoul of the same thing every dark future game milieu does, which is the makers want to sell more books and gew-gaws, so they scheme up ways around the technical dark ages. Battletech had the NAIS, the Grey Death memory core and the Clans, all of which injected new tech and knowledge into the game universe to drive sales and narrative. 40K has the same thing with the Primaris Space Marines / Mk 10 armor / etc… Of course, 40K says that some 10,000 year old leader of the Adeptus Mechanicus did this in secret starting after the Horus Heresy, so in a sense, it’s an extension of the existing (ancient) tech, not something developed in the present day.
That is technically forbidden in their religion. Creating sentient machines is punishable by execution. The closest thing that they allow is for a human mind to merge with a machine (like a cyborg), but it has to be a living brain.
That being said, there are some loopholes. Some limited AI is put in a few machines, like Space Marine tanks. Then it works like you describe, with a brain/machine interface between pilot and tank. They claim that the tanks have a particularly active machine spirit, and that’s how they get around the edict. So in some cases what you propose is certainly what’s happening, though not in most.
Apparently in the past, full AI was vulnerable to corruption from Chaos, and machines turned on their creators, so the rule is based on practicality rather than superstition.
Something like a Titan would pretty much have to have something akin to AI just to coordinate the thing, even if it wasn’t sentient. And it’s totally conceivable that a non-sentient AI could still have a great deal of agency and seem like it’s a particularly feisty “machine spirit”.
Basically it’s unclear how it works in-universe. It could be superstition and advanced tech, or it could be some Warp/Chaos related stuff. Or a blend of the two.
Some of their more advanced machines, such as the Space Marine land raiders, titans, and knights, have an artificial intelligence. Uh, but don’t tell the tech priests that it has an A.I. Maybe it’s not technically an A.I. as they need a human to operate at their best but it’s clearly a very advanced computer.
An advanced Imperial war machine could, as Odesio noted have an actual intelligence in it. There’s a famous story that has been repeated in many different places about a Land Raider whose crew had been killed in a battle against Orks. It opened its boarding ramp as the Orks approached, seeming to invite them inside. Once the Orks had boarded, it sealed the crew compartment and vented plasma from its reactor into the interior, killing them.
Such things were actually part of some rules in earlier editions. Most Imperial vehicles in Rogue Trader had “Auto-Drive” and “Auto-Aim”, and later, vehicles like Land Raiders (or those for whom the “Power of the Machine Pirit” vehicle upgrade had been purchased) could fire additional weapons using the Machine Spirit’s BS of 2 - normally needing a 5+ to hit.
Orks could loot a vehicle that came with a Machine Spirit as standard - like a Land Raider - but if they did so, it lost the “Power of the Machine Spirit” rule. A vehicle with an intact Machine Spirit was still very dangerous - they’d have to “kill” it first!
From the Warhammer 40K novels I’ve read, the answer is that for a certain value, the “machine spirit” is a real thing, but it isn’t what the Adeptus Mechanicus think it is. Fundamentally, they would ascribe to the ‘machine spirit’ things that we wouldn’t even consider AI - just simple built in subroutines.
For example, if a machine is overheating IRL, and has a programmed shutdown where it turns off and won’t restart before it cools, it isn’t an AI. But it does operate with a minimal amount of autonomy. This would be ascribed to the ‘machine spirit.’
None of the A-M understand how these things work, they operate entirely by rote. In these cases, it’s a rote based on ancient operating manuals and repair manuals, dressed up in religious garb.
Again, certainly lost tech and high end mecha and battleships would have operating systems that would be either low level AI or sufficiently complex programs to be indistinguishable from AI. But the A-M wouldn’t differentiate between low level automation and true AI other than describing it as ‘stronger’ spirit potentially.
Apparently, in the most recent story arc where one of the original Primarchs return to the Imperium, he demands the A-M repair the golden throne and the leader of the A-M flat out has no idea how the throne is made, works, or could be repaired.
So, Tl:dr, the “machine spirit” is likely 80%+ in the minds of the A-M and less than 20% a misinterpretation of basic (and rarely advanced) automation. The warp based ‘tech’ of the Orks is something else entirely, and there really isn’t any evidence that the warp works for humanity in that manner, but there is a LOT of weird stuff in 40K, so no absolutes.