The bots, our children, do not behave. They have taken over the internet—bots account for more than half of internet traffic—and interfered with our elections. But instead of being unnerved by the bot’s growing power, Anthony Levandowski would like to make one God. The Silicon Valley engineer, who has been accused by Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company, of trying to steal trade secrets and give them to Uber, in 2015 “founded a religious organization called Way of the Future,” Wired reported last week. “Its purpose, according to previously unreported state filings, is nothing less than to ‘develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.’”

Nobody but Levandowski knows if he really believes he can create a Godbot. Considering his obsession with artificial intelligence, it is altogether possible that he does. And while that may seem nuts, people have started religions for stranger reasons. The Way of the Future could be an elaborate tax scam and this still would not necessarily invalidate its claims to be a religion; people sincerely believe in Scientology, after all. Further, Levandowski’s belief isn’t so strange within the context of Silicon Valley, which has long invested religious hopes in its creations.

But no matter how far the tech industry advances, its genius minds can’t exorcise their humanity. The belief that we could one day evolve into a new, technologically enhanced species; Peter Thiel’s rumored lust for young blood, which would supposedly help him live forever; cryogenic resurrection—they thinly disguise the same fear of death and desire for salvation that propel religions the world over. In this respect, a divine bot seems less like science fiction and more like an inevitable development, proof of what Samuel Loncar has called “a vibrant religious culture” in the Valley.

“At the beginning, bots were simply chatbots,” Kemal El Moujahid, a Facebook engineer, explained in Techcrunch. These primitive beings could do little more than respond to our prompts with pre-programmed texts. In an act of theistic evolution, we have encouraged them to grow and become more sophisticated. There are now good bots, which do things like scan the internet for copyright violations, and bad bots, which can launch basic direct denial of service attacks and spread politicized misinformation on platforms like Twitter.





Some have names. In Denver, they can also help you buy a house. Register for Envision, and you will have two at your disposal: “‘Dante’ hunts for other listings that closely map to the selected style the user first chose, while ‘Eden’ offers a more expansive set of options, including properties with related or similar styles,” reports Inman, a real estate industry news site.