“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”

That was how Donald Knuth, author of The Art of Computer Programming (1968), expressed the difference between pristine mathematics and buggy reality. “When programming, you abstract away the entire physical world as much as possible, because it’s messy. But then it comes back and bites you,” Paul Ford, cofounder of the platform-builder Postlight, told me. “You end up in these situations where 80 percent works, 19.9 percent is hard but there’s an answer that makes sense, and the last 0.1 percent is absolutely insane.”

Virginia Heffernan (@page88) is an Ideas contributor at WIRED. She is the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. She is also a cohost of Trumpcast, an op-ed columnist at the Los Angeles Times, and a frequent contributor to Politico. Before coming to WIRED she was a staff writer at the New York Times—first a TV critic, then a magazine columnist, and then an opinion writer. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree and PhD in English from Harvard. In 1979 she stumbled onto the internet, when it was the back office of weird clerics, and she’s been in the thunderdome ever since.

That fragment of chaos—the specter of unreason in the world—opens up room for magical thinking. For programmers, bugs become not so much human errors as super­natural devils. So it should come as no surprise that robotics engineer Anthony Levandowski, cofounder of the autonomous-trucking company Otto, has pushed the envelope of that 0.1 percent to found a full-dress religion with artificial intelligence as its Godhead. Levandowski has poured his infatuation with “strong AI”—the Singularity’s rebrand—into life’s lacuna and conjured a vague, tax-exempt church he calls Way of the Future.

Before Levandowski was shut out of Otto, which is owned by Uber, he built 40-ton semi­autonomous trucks. The trucks are terrifying road mammoths with staring windshield-eyes that look like something Odysseus might have battled. Levandowski became a central figure in the litigation between Alphabet and Uber. Perfect résumé for a prophet: He can breathe a soul into a chassis, and he’s a martyr to imperial forces.

He’s also not the first tech star with prophet aspirations. Goofy Ray Kurzweil, the peculiar Singularity philosopher and hawker of sacramental life-giving supplements, is only the obvious example. Steve Jobs’ syncretic faith appeared to be a changeable potage of Buddhism, karma, medical denialism, and intermittent fruitarianism. Tech writer Marshall McLuhan was a devout Catholic who proposed that technology could eventually fold all humans into the body of Jesus Christ. And Rod Canion, one of the Compaq founders, was a champion of something called Young Life, where “being estranged from God by our disobedience, we are, as sinful people, incapable of a right relationship to God apart from divine grace.” Not only did these technologists reject the straight materialism of science, they tilted into some real Age-of-­Jesus-Aquarius-Superstar stuff.

In spite of the yoking of technology and science in the adword STEM, they’ve always been an uneasy pairing. The word technology is best understood as the masculine form of the word culture, and when you’re pitching culture projects to patriarchal joints that find the idea of “culture” unmanly, I’ve often found that “technology” seals the deal. At the same time, and whether they admit it or not, alpha-male technologists often turn for answers from hard science to the humanities. (Jobs in 2011: “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”) A 2001 book written by Knuth—who won the Kyoto Prize, Turing Award, National Medal of Science, and von Neumann Lecture Prize—is called Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About. It’s about Knuth’s deeply felt Protestantism and his “glimpses of God.”

On its website, Way of the Future claims its aim is “a peaceful and respectful transition of who is in charge of the planet from people to people + ‘machines.’ Given that technology will ‘relatively soon’ be able to surpass human abilities, we want to help educate people about this exciting future and prepare a smooth transition.”

In Levandowski’s scheme, AI merits worship because it’s supremely intelligent. That’s not as self-evident as he thinks it is. Traditionally God is regarded as infinitely just, or infinitely loving, or both; His mind is generally considered unknowable. Measurable intelligence is a mortal quality, one that—in religious parables—is often weighed down by pride and greed. But where engineer Victor Frankenstein imagined a creature so beautiful that humans would love it, Levandowski imagines a machine so smart that humans cower. Without irony, Levandowski has said that people are chasing AI because a super-­empowered artificial attorney or accountant could make you “the richest person in the world.” Ah, got it: A wicked­-smart CPA would keep you in self-driving private spaceships. Now that’s a reason to get down on your knees and pray.

It’s possible that neither intelligence nor beauty is what makes converts. It’s technology itself.

Of course, it’s possible that neither intelligence nor beauty (nor justice nor love) is what makes converts. It’s technology itself. In 1940, a missionary outfit in Los Angeles called Global Recordings Network set out to translate passages of the Christian gospel into every language on earth, including nearly extinct spoken ones in regions without electricity. To reach these unbelievers, the organization created a cardboard record player that could be cranked by hand. What the missionaries observed was surprising. The devices—playing records of various Bible passages—amazed people who hadn’t seen them. Adele Horne, a documentary filmmaker who has studied Global Recordings Network, said the missionaries found that the hand-crank devices, early on, stunned those new to disembodied audio. The machine was like Moses with the burning bush—and it drew people who beheld it to the Western beliefs and practices behind it. “The allure of technological devices,” Horne explained, is that “they might represent access to greater wealth and power.” What can seem like a miracle of a new technology—from a record player to a self-driving 18-wheeler—may tenderize our brains and makes us receptive to a new cosmology, a new theology, and attendant new behaviors.