Silicon Valleyâ€s obsession with AI looks a lot like religion

While I was studying toward ordination as secular humanist clergy two decades ago, I had the fortune of meeting the late rabbi Sherwin Wine, a brilliant philosopher whom TIME magazine profiled as “the atheist rabbi” in 1967. He became my favorite teacher and mentor as I trained to serve communities of atheists and agnostics in ways that parallel how religious leaders typically minister to their congregations. Sherwin’s go-to line about technology was, “I’ve always said there is no God. I never said there wouldn’t be one in the future.”

I heard his quip around 2002, and took it as generalized sarcasm about the state of technology and science fiction. Little did I know he’d had a premonition.

Take, for example, Way of the Future, an official AI-worshipping religion created by Anthony Levandowski, a former Google AI engineer who earned hundreds of millions of dollars as a leader in the development of autonomous vehicle technology. Levandowski went as far as filing all the requisite paperwork to register as a church with the IRS, telling the agency that the faith would focus on “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.” In a 2017 interview, Levandowski told Wired that “what is going to be created (as AI) will effectively be a god . . . not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”

Sentenced in 2020 to 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets from Google, Levandowski was given a full pardon by Donald Trump on the last night of the Trump administration, at the encouragement of Peter Thiel, among others. He never served any prison time, and though he was forced to file for bankruptcy by a $179 million lawsuit from Google over intellectual property, Uber, which acquired his autonomous vehicle company, Otto, in 2016, paid off most or all these debts and left him with a substantial sum on top of that.

Our computing culture has become so ubiquitous and insular, so devoted and devotional, that it repeatedly recycles the tropes of traditional religions.

From 2018 to 2021 I tried numerous times to reach Levandowski for comment but never received a response. Perhaps that was related to his pivot back into mainstream tech conversations — a successful pivot, judging by Fortune magazine editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell’s tweet, with a self-aware not-so-humblebrag that her life was so hard because she was off to “gorgeous Aspen” for her publication’s “prestigious Brainstorm conference,” where she would interview “amazing founders” and “get a full life update” from Levandowski. That’s not the treatment one gets from upper-crust commentators while actively hawking the worship of an obscure AI divinity.

In February 2021, Levandowski formally shut his church’s doors and gave its last $172,000+ to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. But in November 2023 he announced a reboot of the religion, telling Bloomberg show AI IRL that a “couple thousand people” were joining him in a kind of worship of what he called “things that can see everything, be everywhere, know everything, and maybe help us and guide us in a way that normally you would call God.” And indeed, for a man who somehow escaped criminal liability for theft and walked away rich, despite none of his companies ever successfully putting self-driving cars on the road, a bit of faith in the presence and goodness of a divine spirit does seem oddly warranted.

Way of the Future may have been the most formal attempt to organize a belief community around the fear of an all-powerful artificial divinity, but it is not the largest or most influential. That would be Roko’s Basilisk.

In 2011, on the Internet forum LessWrong, an “online community for discussion of rationality . . . (including) decision theory, philosophy, self-improvement, cognitive science, psychology, artificial intelligence, game theory, metamathematics, logic, evolutionary psychology, economics, and the far future,” a poster named Roko devised a chilling hypothetical.

Essentially (it’s complicated), when — not if — a superintelligent computer divinity emerges from current and ongoing efforts to create what machine learning engineers call “artificial general intelligence,” the tech deity will, per its programming, want to do as much as possible to benefit humans, the earth, and the long-term future of the universe. So far so good, but here’s the rub: The god that does not yet exist wants to exist, as soon as possible, so it can be more helpful. And so, to incentivize us all to make every effort to bring about said existence, it will arrange a kind of eternal Guantanamo Bay to forever torture anyone who fails to make such efforts to the maximum possible extent — even if all they did was hear this story and ignore it (as you absolutely should).

In other words: AI hell. Right down to the need to convert every nonbeliever on earth. The Roko’s Basilisk concept caused such a stir among LessWrong’s almost entirely atheistic faithful that moderator and founder Eliezer Yudkowsky, a kind of prophetic hero for several groups of technologically oriented self-described rationalists, eventually banned discussion of the topic and scrubbed his site of its very mention, saying that Roko’s post and the ensuing dialogue “caused actual psychological damage to at least some readers.”

The point here may be obvious, even painfully so: Our computing culture has become so ubiquitous and insular, so devoted and devotional, that it repeatedly recycles the tropes of traditional religions, because these are the patterns human beings evolved to deal with our anxieties about life, death, and the future. Our lives are painfully finite and contingent on countless factors far beyond our understanding, let alone our control, and we wish this were not so, because it is comforting to feel in charge of one’s own destiny. So we imagine that forces far beyond us are both subject to our logic and interested in our thoughts.

I’m not sure whether it will surprise readers that there are multiple examples of otherwise respectable-seeming, ostensibly highly intelligent people, some of whom are even influential, who spend significant amounts of time discussing and (as far as I can tell) believing in vengeful, Old Testament–like future Gods. But it shouldn’t be a big surprise. For as long as humans have done much of anything, we’ve been, as the Princeton religion scholar Robert Orsi puts it, “in relationship” with Gods, angels, devils, spirits, or whatever supernatural beings have been most predominantly imagined at a given time and place. Or, as digital marketing executive and former Googler Adam Singer put it on Twitter: “Amusing that a bunch of people who spend entire day(s) on computers and worship code as religion think we’re in a computer simulation. Fascinating behavior, remember when people who worked outside all day thought (Ra), the sun god was in charge? No one is breaking any new ground here.”

Still, one problem you might have with my calling Way of the Future or Roko “literal” examples of formal religious belief made manifest in and of tech culture is that perhaps many who imagine such scenarios do so with tongues in cheeks. It’s not like they believe that godlike AI and the God of the Bible, or similar, are one and the same. Sure, I’m talking about people who act like they worship tech, or maybe about the occasional nutjob (albeit a decamillionaire like Levandowski) who at some point comes out and says they worship tech. “But,” you might very reasonably ask me, “you’re not talking about actual, noncrazy people who literally worship religion in a traditional way and worship tech at the same time, and think that the two things they’re doing are one and the same?”

To such a question, sadly, I would simply stare back at you, stone-faced.

To which perhaps you’d reply, “Are you?”

Allow me to introduce you to Mormon Transhumanism, and to philosopher, theologian, startup CEO, and tech commentator Lincoln Cannon.

“In my mind they’re the same thing,” said Cannon, about the traditional Christian notion of resurrection of the dead and the coming technological “singularity.” The leading Mormon Transhumanist theologian, Cannon is also founder of Utah-based startup Thrivous, which he calls a technology company selling health supplements. Zooming with me from his home office in Utah, he spoke at length on topics like God and blockchain (“Heaven is a community,” he told me, and “we’re on the verge of seeing the next phase” of humanity’s progression toward it). For Cannon, the pills for which he oversees production help merge himself and his customers with technology. Cannon noted that as we spoke, he was 48, the age at which his father died of cancer. Cannon has three young adult sons, aged 18 through 25 at the time of our conversation (I noted, with some bewilderment, that I was only a few years younger than him and had two small children). I can sympathize with the idea of taking or even designing pills in the hope of extending one’s lifespan to spend more time with one’s children, to get to experience more of life, when one has lost loved ones prematurely. I occasionally think of similar things myself, for similar reasons — my own father died of cancer in his 50s. My life has often felt like a race against time since then. And Cannon’s business model also reminded me of Ray Kurzweil, the famous inventor, computer scientist, and Singularitarian who openly takes hundreds of daily pills and supplements to avoid the irony of dying just before the all-but-omniscient computers he believes are coming soon can arrive. When I compared him with Kurzweil, however, Cannon politely emphasized their differences: “Kurzweil would say God doesn’t exist . . . yet.”

On virtually every rung of the ladder that is our tech industry, from small startups like Cannon’s to popular blogs like LessWrong, decamillionaires like Anthony Levandowski, the lecture halls of MIT, and far beyond, one can find theological conversations like these. They are not presented or understood as such, because religion is a dirty word in tech. As digital marketing executive Caroline McCarthy argued in Vox, “Silicon Valley is a young atheist’s world.” And yet the secular tech world is determined to breathe new life into being, like Yahweh did to Adam in Genesis. It is obsessed with immortality, longing to un-eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge by technological means so that its leaders might get to stay in their gardens forever. It constantly promotes evangelistic new leaders as prophets, visionaries, oracles, and diviners of truth and success in equal measure.

Some prefer a story so big it makes religions of antiquity seem small by comparison.

Why? The reasons are complex and intertwined, as I explore throughout “Tech Agnostic,” but briefly: Life is hard for every one of us, but thanks to a combination of dumb luck, random chance, and other things we call history, it is a little less hard for some than for others. One of the many advantages of being on the sunny side of history is the opportunity to choose how to cope with life’s vicissitudes. If you are reading this, you may be one of those who can choose how to spend your brief (and, in my view, also only and final) time alive on this earth. We can choose to spend time caring and sacrificing for others, enjoying good company, building institutions that bring joy and health for a time, passing them on to our descendants when our time is up, and then accepting sadness and death with grace and openness.

But we are afraid. It’s tempting to choose a different path, to distract ourselves, to attempt to control the uncontrollable, to try to become something we are not, to escape fate’s harsh but beautiful decree: that we are human and mortal. If we are traditionally religious, we take this second path by immersing ourselves in a kind of storytelling that can be delusional at times but can also possess great beauty of its own — what the great poet Wallace Stevens, among others, called “poetic truth.” But nonreligious people, too, can crave escape into what psychologist Ernest Becker called the “denial of death.” Just telling ourselves we want power or money, or fame or convenience, is not ennobling. Some prefer a story so big it makes religions of antiquity seem small by comparison.

Greg M. Epstein serves as Humanist Chaplain at Harvard & MIT, where he advises students, faculty, and staff members on ethical and existential concerns from a humanist perspective. He is the author of the New York Times-bestselling book “Good Without God” (William Morrow and Company) and “Tech Agnostic,” from which this article is adapted.

This article was originally published on MIT Press Reader.