At the tail end of 2017, a feature in Wired offered a glimpse into a new “church of artificial intelligence,” set up by Silicon Valley engineer and expert in self-driving car technology, Anthony Levandowski. The aim of Levandowski’s church — called the Way of the Future — is described in papers filed with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.”

“It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes,” Levandowski told Wired. “But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”

These words, as wobbly as they are, are painted against a backdrop of high-profile advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Speech and facial recognition have continued to find their way into our homes, pockets, and state surveillance. Neural networks are bringing superhuman levels of analysis to everything from security to finance. Last year, DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero taught itself to play the thousand-year-old game of Go in three days. Does the self-professed dean of the Way of the Future have a point?

“No,” says Luciano Floridi, professor of philosophy and ethics of information and director of the Digital Ethics Lab at the University of Oxford. “This is just an old confusion mixed with a new mistake.”

“The old confusion is in the comparison: The sun is a billion times more powerful than humans, but that does not make it a god. The mistake is in stating that AI is smarter than humans. In any serious sense of ‘smart,’ this is meaningless. AI is immensely more powerful computationally. But this, like in the sun’s case, does not make it any more divine than a kettle.”

The “God Language” of American Desires

DeepMind’s AlphaGo may be no more of a deity than a kitchen appliance, but the religious language around artificial intelligence, and the technology industry in general, ripples wider than one engineer’s church.

Game of Go. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The quasi-religious, techno-utopianism of the “the singularity,” for example — the belief that an AI will one day dominate society and alter life into forms we can’t yet comprehend — has more than a few shakes of rapture-like rhetoric. One of singularity’s keenest proponents, futurist Raymond Kurzweil, has spoken in the past about how he plans to “overcome our genetic disposition” and resurrect his dead father using AI.

On the other side of the apocalyptic divide, religious and supernatural imagery is regularly evoked when speaking about the threat of advanced artificial intelligence.

Elon Musk likened the development of artificial intelligence to “summoning the demon” in a 2014 MIT conference: “In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out.”

“Part of the problem is asking what we mean by terms like religion and god,” says Timothy Carroll, a research fellow in anthropology at UCL. “In a classic sociological analysis of who/what god is, Émile Durkheim said that ‘God is society, writ large.’”

From this sort of position, god — whatever form or person — is a projection of what society is: its hopes, dreams, values, fears, projected into the sky like the Batman signal.

“In an age of technological aspiration, especially in a context of rapid innovations such as those coming from Silicon Valley, it makes sense to see the formation of a deity out of these hopes and dreams.”