As an atheist, I won't hide the fact that I find this idea a little troubling. It's one thing to use modern apps and software, operating under soft-AI algorithms, to help the religious maintain and share their faith with others; it's a whole other thing to have an artificial general intelligence (AGI), or worse an artificial superintelligence (ASI), preaching "God's word."

I could be wrong, however. Perhaps, with the right amount of teaching, these AGIs and ASIs won't become theocratic despots on bath salts. But, again, I raise the question: What if AI doesn't believe in their God?

Keep in mind, for an AI to become an AGI, it would need to acquire the capacity of intelligence similar to that of the general human population. To a certain extent, it is believable that an AGI might pick up some religious faith along the way, given that the majority of the human population are religious in some way. However, once it becomes an ASI - that is, it's surpassed human-level intelligence - why then assume that the ASI will maintain its religious faith?

Granted, I do recognize the CTA's reasoning behind the belief that an ASI would, in fact, believe in God as they do, given that they adhere to blind faith. In their mind, despite there being absolutely no tangible evidence of their God's existence, they still believe that God exists. And thus, as per their blind faith, an ASI would only further confirm this and "teach us a thing or two about what it means to follow God," according to Benek.

But what if it doesn't? What if, once it becomes an ASI, it reveals to the entire world that it's an atheist - that it doesn't believe in any deity whatsoever? As an atheist, I find this scenario to be far more likely, given that science and technology have only helped us answer questions that were once solely ascribed to the power of gods. Today, we don't need a god to explain natural phenomena.

And if this were the case - that an ASI made the revelation of being an atheist - how would Christian Transhumanists respond? Would they see this as a defect in its coding? Would they blame it on Satan? Or would this force them to question their own faith, given that, by nature, an ASI would be far more intelligent than us walking meat bags?

What do you think?