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Techno-Religion Will Snare the Unbeliever
They will seek salvation in silicon and lines of code
By Joe Allen | February 17, 2025
Originally published in the Spring 2024 print issue of The American Spectator
As humanity descends into digital madness, the air crackles with strange prophecies. We’re told "godlike" artificial intelligence will soon arrive. Techno-cultists assure us AI will solve the world’s problems, such as writer's block and climate change. AI may even calculate the meaning of the universe. These Silicon Valley sects are like UFO cults for people who don't believe in aliens, but do believe in magic computers.
Before long, I fear, the masses will begin praying to AI gods. They will ask machines to answer their deepest questions. Their glowing oracles will reply with things like "buy more Google stock" or "tell your sexbot you love her." In time, the rise of techno-religions will create a new set of problems—even as the climate continues to change and frustrated writers have nothing to say.
OpenAI exec Sam Altman is a prime example. In late 2022, his company set off a cultural firestorm with the release of ChatGPT, a large language model capable of doing a person's research and analysis for them. By most metrics—including the US Biology Olympiads and the LSAT—ChatGPT outperforms average humans at fact-retrieval and writing. Emboldened by this technical achievement, Bill Gates and Sal Khan say every child should have an AI tutor.
More importantly, such programs provide a direct interface with etheric digital minds. For the credulous, it feels like speaking to another soul. Used to power social robots, chatbots form a bridge between artificial intelligence and the physical world. In that sense, an AI's "soul" can incarnate.
Back in 2013, two years before he co-founded OpenAI, Altman shared a quote on his blog: "Successful people create companies. … The most successful people create religions." The idea drips with implicit cynicism. "It got me thinking," Altman mused, “the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so."
This corporate religiosity—a world where logos are sacred symbols, mission statements are creeds, and top execs are saints—was born of American optimism. Today, that gilded faith is accelerating toward some dismal omega point in the Future™. Artificial intelligence advances just ahead of robotics. Brain-computer interfaces are catching up to genetic engineering. Digital currency pulses through the system like electric blood.
Mammon-worship is coming to full realization through technology. The average consumer may not believe any of it, but that hardly matters. The people selling them the Future™ are true believers.
Last year, the billionaire investor Marc Andreessen wove this infernal thread into his "Techno-Optimist Manifesto." The document is a "materialist" declaration of religious aspiration. "We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being," the manifesto promises. "We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher's Stone—we are literally making sand think. We believe Artificial Intelligence is best thought of as a universal problem solver."
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Another philosopher wants to an end "democracy" and replace it with a digital authoritarian dictatorship (digital monarchy) of Yarvinism:
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