Religion 2.0
When AI and religiosity become intertwined.
Summary: In an increasingly secular world, AI can fill a gap in our longing for something greater. While religious belief is declining, robots and AI are uniquely positioned to take on the role of religion. Meanwhile, believers in AGI claim it will have god-like powers.
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Amongst techno-optimists, there’s an almost dogmatic, religious belief in “scale is all we need”, and that we will cruise towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) sooner rather than later.
Here’s a revealing anecdote from a 2023 The Atlantic article, based on conversation with 10 then current and former employees at OpenAI:
Anticipating the arrival of this all-powerful technology, Sutskever began to behave like a spiritual leader, three employees who worked with him told us. His constant, enthusiastic refrain was “feel the AGI,” a reference to the idea that the company was on the cusp of its ultimate goal. At OpenAI’s 2022 holiday party, held at the California Academy of Sciences, Sutskever led employees in a chant: “Feel the AGI! Feel the AGI!” (…)
For a leadership offsite this year, according to two people familiar with the event, Sutskever commissioned a wooden effigy from a local artist that was intended to represent an “unaligned” AI—that is, one that does not meet a human’s objectives. He set it on fire to symbolize OpenAI’s commitment to its founding principles.
Chanting, wooden effigy’s, fire rituals — these are not the first things that come to mind when you think of a technology company. When did AI and religiosity become so intertwined?
Not if but when AGI will arrive
As many of you know, Ilya Sutzkever no longer works at OpenAI. Sam Altman is still spearheading the company (despite the attempt to oust him) and its mission remains unchanged: build AGI that benefits all of humanity.
What shape this technology will have, whenever it is invented, remains unclear. It could be in the form of autonomous agents, humanoid robots, or brain-user interfaces.
Altman has contemplated on his personal blog how superintelligence may one day merge with humans:
The merge can take a lot of forms: we could plug electrodes into our brains, or we could all just become really close friends with a chatbot. But I think a merge is probably our best-case scenario. If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it — in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond — they are going to have conflict. We should all want one team where all members care about the well-being of everyone else.
Besides OpenAI, achieving AGI is now the openly stated goal of Google DeepMind, Meta, Anthropic, and the Chinese tech giant Baidu. Futurists like Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky have anticipated AGI for decades. And while their timelines differ — predictions range from somewhere between 3 to 20+ years — all of them share the same, singular belief: AGI is inevitably coming.
I say belief, because this is not a scientific fact. We don’t know if it is possible to devise such a system. It’s a view that is certainly held with a lot of conviction by many, but it’s not in any way settled science, which means that the belief that AGI will arrive this decade or the next is entirely faith-based. How should we come to understand this?
The world has become more secular
Science and engineering lie at the heart of modern society. If anything, the world has become less religious, not more.
It’s a historic trend that has been described by Max Weber, one of the central figures in the development of sociology and the social sciences, as the ‘Entzauberung der Welt’, or the disenchantment of the world. One of the great casualties of scientific reason triumphing tradition and dogmatic belief is of course religion itself — a tale best told by the German philosopher-with-a-hammer Friedrich Nietzsche.
Here’s an excerpt from the Gay Science (1882):
“Where has God gone?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him — you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition?
Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us — for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.”
Nietzsche’s message is simple: removing God and religion as a source of meaning leaves humanity with a void. A void that needs to be addressed. Who are we, and who tells us wrong from right, in a world without divine guidance?
Before we answer that question, let’s acknowledge the world has in fact become less religious. Post-World War II, the Western world has seen a shift towards post-Christian, secular, multicultural societies. To demonstrate, in Germany alone, around half a million people leave the Catholic Church every year. And it’s not just the west, religion is declining around the globe and shows no signs of slowing down.
One of the main reasons, believe it or not, is the inverse relationship between automation and religiosity. Researchers conducted a series of studies and explained their reasoning as follows:
People may perceive AI as having capacities that they do not ascribe to traditional sciences and technologies and that are uniquely likely to displace the instrumental roles of religion. We therefore predict that automation exposure should predict religious declines across nations and people, even controlling for variation in wealth and other forms of technological and scientific exposure.
And:
Occupational AI exposure explained variation in religious belief across individuals, but also religious decline in the same individual over time.
The studies all supported a link between automation and religious decline, across religious traditions (Christian, Muslim, Buddhist) and world regions (North America, South Asia, Oceania).
The irony is that part of the reason why, is that today’s advanced technologies are the closest thing to magic. Unlike the invention of radios, cars or even the Internet, AI is perceived by many as having superhuman abilities. There’s research that suggests people associate robots and AI with gods more than with humans, and despite what common wisdom tells us, more often than not people prefer algorithms over human experts.
Historically, people have turned to the supernatural for that which they do not understand or control. But in today’s day and age, AI is able to — and here we circle back to our friend Nietzsche — fill that void, this religion-shaped hole left behind by God.
The idea of AI has always been deeply religious
This may come as a surprise, but religious traditions have long fueled our desire to create artificial life.
In medieval Europe, Christian engineers created automata that could move and recite prayers. Similarly, Nordic traditions speak of talking heads that could offer oracle-like wisdom. And then there’s of course the Jewish tradition of golems, which is something I’ve written about in an article from 2023. In Jewish folklore, a golem is a creature made of clay or mud that is brought to life by means of a charm. Golems were often imagined as protectors of Jewish communities, but their stories also explored themes of power, control, and the potential dangers of creating life.
From here, it is a small leap to the birth of AI. Same dream, different times.
Just like automata represented early attempts to replicate human cognition through mechanical or spiritual means, so does AI. And instead of a religious leader, we have a Lead Scientist and his coworkers chanting this new oracle into existence.
If you believe the believers, AGI will be The-Last-Invention-We’ll-Ever-Make. It will be all-knowing and all-powerful, and invent the future for us. Computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil wrote about this hypothetical tipping point:
Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity — technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.
End scarcity, free us from the bonds of labor, immortality by uploading our consciousness to the cloud and ascend into the infinite universe — if that doesn’t sound like a techno-version of Heaven, I don’t know what does. It’s New Testament, but upgraded. Religion 2.0.
Until next time,
— Jurgen
AGI is like the messiah.
Prophets can point to him coming. If and when he/she does arrive, everything will change.
You need to believe and prepare.
The point is:
Like the second coming of Christ, the timing of the arrival of AGI is completely unclear and uncertain. Everyone’s guessing, pointing at signs and precursors.
The inherent uncertainty is an excellent source of problems and potential solutions. All is so vague that lots of projections appear. No facts.
In another religious comparison, the practice of prompt engineering for LLMs is like being a priest. The LLM is like a god in the sense that it has enormous power and can't be controlled to do what we want on command, but maybe if we talk to it in juuuuuust the right way, we can coax the behavior we want out of it. That's less about displacing a sense of awe from the divine to an artificial system that you're talking about here and more just about trying to reign in the forces of nature, but the theme is similar.