A.I. as religion

Greg Epstein, Silicon Valley’s Obsession With AI Looks a Lot Like Religion, The MIT Press Reader:

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?”

There's more at the link.