Apologies for being serious, but this YouTube channel I really like did an episode on the religion of modern AI worship. He’s literally a religious studies scholar and shows the ways that the AI cult is quite literally a modern religion.
He doesn’t get quite sneer-y enough for my taste, but I loved the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk2aUz00_AY&ab_channel=ReligionForBreakfast
Thought this sub would enjoy!
The interesting thing is the way AGI catastrophism selectively weaves together elements of traditional religious thought and philosophical skepticism.
You have Anselm: “We cannot conceive of anything smarter than AGI therefore knowledge will necessarily terminate at AGI.” You have Pascal: “We must behave as though the Basilisk will exist because the consequences of being wrong will be unbearable.” But instead of grappling with the way omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence should automatically “align” in these same lines of thought, they mix it with Descartes’ evil demon/brain-in-a-vat skepticism. So you end up with “we 100% know god exists, but we 100% must assume he is evil.”
Been saying it for a while. The rationalists are this generation’s New Agers, only with a veneer of secular science for a secularizing age instead of religious mysticism for an age (the Fourth Great Awakening of the 1960s and ’70s) when religion was resurgent.
I’m glad this topic of the theology of AI/Longtermism is getting more attention, even if it’s due to the increased attention that those belief systems are accumulating. It’s worth noting that these sentiments (that is: this strain of AI related beliefs, stemming from Extropian and Transhumanist thinking in 70s/80s California; current acronym is TESCREAL- see Timnit Gebru/Emile Torres discussion on this) were expressed basically as soon as they were formed.
Charlie Stross has some good blog writing on this, Bruce Sterling has been mocking this since the early Drexler stuff, and there’s the famous “Rapture of the Nerds” comment from Neal Stephenson. It’s been increasingly clear that the religious connotations are not metaphorical any more, and that there’s a “secular” religion emerging that is radically dropping the connotations of “secular” as it transitions to an actual religion.
I think a fantastic science fictional coverage of this topic (the growth of a secular religion and the compromises made as a revelatory cult expands into a proper religion) is David Zindell’s A Requiem for Homo Sapiens series, Neverness or Broken God on. The proper level to respond to these kinds of ideas is science fiction, and there’s been some interesting discussion of the evolving religions from science fiction in Thomas Disch’s The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of.
Here is the previous post on this
And they’re worshipping me wrong!!!
This is a good history channel and he makes a good case for Ai apocalypticism as religion.
The discussion about alienation from biology was interesting.