To be human is to yearn for a Sky Daddy. One thing that explains the unexplainable, somebody accountable. No surprise, then, that within the ZIRP-fueled 2010s, when a brand new gospel of creation was being unfold, some individuals began to see know-how as a type of faith. And on the eighth day, He made a cellular app that delivered us our day by day bread—that kind of factor.
Startup founders and CEOs turned messianic figures. Alms-giving bought a brand new title: efficient altruism. Biohacking was ritualized, and the singularity appeared ever nearer. These would save humanity from “as Biblical a scourge as there ever was: dying itself,” wrote Greg Epstein, a humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT, in his ebook Tech Agnostic. All of this was as shut as Silicon Valley, famously skeptical and never so secretly libertarian, would come to publicly embracing theology.
Then there was a flip: Distinguished technologists started evangelizing not tech as faith however faith as faith. Earlier this yr, I discovered myself in an costly condominium, transformed from a church, in San Francisco’s Mission District, listening to a enterprise capitalist turned arms supplier recite elements of the Lord’s Prayer to a crowd of 200 techies. Impressed by a non secular speech Peter Thiel gave at a non-public celebration a number of years earlier, this VC’s spouse launched a bunch referred to as ACTS 17 Collective—Acknowledging Christ in Expertise and Society—as a method of spreading the gospel to Silicon Valley. The precise gospel, not the tidy solutionism of know-how.
An entrepreneur sitting subsequent to me that night time admitted he’d lengthy been non secular. He simply hadn’t felt comfy sporting his religion on his sleeve in Silicon Valley, till now. One other attendee requested me, in informal dialog, what number of children I needed (not with him; simply basically). Be fruitful and multiply and all that. Extra just lately, Thiel gave a sequence of off-the-record lectures for the ACTS 17 crowd, little doubt expounding on his perception {that a} younger Swedish local weather and antiwar activist is consultant of the Antichrist.
Within the weeks after the Christian right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was publicly assassinated, distinguished techies started posting non secular passages on X. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass in opposition to us,” Elon Musk wrote. The enterprise capitalist Jason Calacanis—who has additionally, it must be famous, lambasted ICE for its violence in opposition to immigrants—supplied a blanket apology to anybody he has wronged. “I’m at all times attempting to get higher at what I do and as a son of Christ,” he wrote on X. If probably the most ruthless capitalists are discovering faith once more, then possibly there’s hope for the remainder of us. In spite of everything, faith and capitalism are each excellent at creating incentives for us mere mortals.
And on high of all the pieces, now there’s AI. What function does it play within the new faith? Anthony Levandowski, one of many cofounders of Waymo, began his (in)well-known Church of AI a full decade in the past—these items isn’t precisely new. AI, he recommended, must be worshipped as a type of god.
So … ought to it?
No. No. Proper? Effectively. Is dependent upon who you ask, or how literal the interpretation is. Musk just lately “joked” that by the point OpenAI’s copyright infringement lawsuits are all settled up, the authorized system can be irrelevant, as a result of “we’ll have Digital God. So, you may ask Digital God.” On Twitch, hundreds of persons are viewing a livestream of AI Jesus as I sort this. Some individuals ask for pizza suggestions in Chicago; others ask whether or not they’re going to hell for masturbating. The good-looking, ethereal AI Jesus pauses earlier than saying “Lou Malnati’s” or “the idea of self-love is necessary” after which wrapping all of it in scripture. (The pizza rec alone is perhaps proof sufficient that AI is just not all-knowing.)
