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"One way to think about the race to build artificial general intelligence … as a religion is this: if God doesn't exist, then why not just create Him? A lot of people in the community refer to AGI or Superintelligence as God-like A.I." ~ philosopher and historian, Emile P. Torres
Former Googler Adam Singer put on X:
“Amusing that a bunch of people who spend entire day[s] on computers and worship code as religion think we’re in a computer simulation. Fascinating behavior, remember when people who worked outside all day thought [Ra], the sun god was in charge? No one is breaking any new ground here.”
Certainly, there is nothing new under the sun, but there is always a slick salesman trying to convince us otherwise.
Every culture down through history worshiped gods or a god, and people seem to think this is because they all made up the same idea. But to me, it is proof that they all knew, instinctively, just as we all know, that God exists. This world did not happen by chance. There is a designer.
With the Age of AI upon us, the tech gods would like mere mortals (that doesn’t include them) to throw off these old western “myths” of Judeo-Christianity and embrace a new religion of A.I.
Since when have the rulers of this world ever wanted to obey the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? Sure, they used “God” and religion as a way to control the masses—and they are doing the same thing now with AI.
God gave the Jews His guidelines for how to live: The Ten Commandments. But even the term “Judeo-Christian” is no longer acceptable. It has become anathema, even among many who call themselves Christians. Everything, our entire foundational beliefs, must be destroyed to make room for new gods.
But what could be truer, or simpler or more straightforward than the Ten Commandants?
* You shall have no other gods before Me. (Exodus 20:3)
* You shall not make for yourself a carved image. (Exodus 20:4)
* You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. (Exodus 20:7)
* Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. (Exodus 20:8)
* Honor your father and your mother. (Exodus 20:12)
* You shall not murder. (Exodus 20:13)
* You shall not commit adultery. (Exodus 20:14)
* You shall not steal. (Exodus 20:15)
* You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. (Exodus 20:16)
* You shall not covet. (Exodus 20:17).
Significance and Context
* The Ten Commandments were given to Moses on Mount Sinai after the Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt. They serve as a foundational code of conduct for moral living and are significant in both Judaism and Christianity.
* These commandments emphasize the importance of worshiping God, respecting others, and maintaining ethical behavior in society. They have influenced legal systems and moral principles throughout history.
Are these tech masters trying to say that their AI god can give us better guidance? How, when their AI gods are created by them—greedy, narcissistic men?
These characters love to talk about the dangers of AI but somehow they are quite sure they will subvert it. As irrational as they are, they fancy themselves to be “Rationalists.”
In an Article by Cade Metz, these “rationalists” meet in downtown Berkeley, in an old hotel that “has become a temple to the pursuit of artificial intelligence and the future of humanity. Its name is Lighthaven.”
Many of the A.I. world’s biggest names — including Shane Legg, a co-founder of Google’s DeepMind; Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei; and Paul Christiano, a former OpenAI researcher who now leads safety work at the U.S. Center for A.I. Standards and Innovation — have been influenced by Rationalist philosophy.
Elon Musk met his former partner, the pop star Grimes there. In this place of worship to the gods they are creating, they argue that when an all-powerful A.I. arrives, it will punish everyone who has not done everything they can to bring it into existence. But somehow, they will escape this punishment by creating safe havens for themselves.
They are crazy. Yet no one is stopping their insanity.
They want us to forget about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob because I suppose their god will be … better?
There are any number of AI gurus that I’ve talked about before, but let’s focus for the moment on Peter Thiel.
Thiel is a part of what they are calling the Christian revival in Silicon Valley. I’ve never met him, but I can tell you, I would not want him anywhere near me or my children or my grandchildren, or great grandchildren, I do not want those I love influenced in any way by his madness. And yet, there he is, there they all are, surrounding us, because they are the creators of the AI that is being embedded into every aspect of our lives. We are supposed to depend on it to tell us what is true and what is not true, when to wake up and when to go to sleep, when to take a pill and how many steps we should take in a day. And so on… and on… and on.
Thiel grew up in an Evangelical Christian household but, as of 2011, described his religious beliefs as “somewhat heterodox”
Thiel married his long-time partner Matt Danzeisen in October 2017, and they have two young children.
According to an article published in DailyMail.com in 2023:
Thiel had been in a romantic relationship with model Jeff Thomas since late 2019. Many in their elite gay circle told DailyMail.com that their romance was an ‘open secret’ – but it is unclear if Danzeisen [Thiel’s husband] was aware of his husband’s infidelity.
[Thomas] plunged to his death WEEKS after witnessing a messy showdown between the billionaire mogul and his husband when he crashed couple’s New Year’s bash.
Look into any of these tech gods’ lives and you will find disturbing darkness.
Thiel is good friends with President Trump and JD Vance, just like Larry Ellison and the rest of the Stargate crew, which I wrote about, and is pushing the transhumanism agenda full steam ahead. Remember that the leader of Trump’s Stargate venture, billionaire Masayoshi Son, believes that his 'emotional relationship' with AI, specifically his 'top advisor' ChatGPT, will usher in the birth of superhuman.
I’ve written in other places about the dangers of Christian Nationalism and its connection to transhumanism and eugenics. Thiel calls nationalism “a corrective to the sort of homogenizing brain-dead one-world state that is totalitarian and where there is no dissent and no individualism is allowed.”
But don’t be fooled. He and all these other guys are just using another name for the same tyrannical control. None of them wants you to have free thought. They want you to follow their religion and it’s new and exciting and it might have a touch of Christianity. But nowhere is Jesus mentioned, nor what he actually taught, which is the antithesis of the AI gods they are promoting.
Let’s look at some of the ways they are promoting their new religion.
WAY OF THE FUTURE
Take, for example, Way of the Future, an official AI-worshipping religion created by Anthony Levandowski, a former Google AI engineer who earned hundreds of millions of dollars as a leader in the development of autonomous vehicle technology. Levandowski went as far as filing all the requisite paperwork to register as a church with the IRS, telling the agency that the faith would focus on “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.”
In a 2017 interview, Levandowski told Wired that “what is going to be created [as AI] will effectively be a god . . . not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”
How can anyone really be that egotistical, to think that they could create something so “smart” when they are really, actually, I am sorry to say, so dumb? The creation cannot create something smarter or kinder or better, but it can certainly create something more degenerate. We already fell from God’s grace, this just takes us further into hell.
In fact, what could prove it better than the fact that Levandowski was sentenced in 2020 to 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets from Google. He is a thief, an opportunist, and he is creating a religion?
But then, he was given a full pardon by Donald Trump on the last night of Trump’s first presidency. At the encouragement of Peter Thiel, among others. That’s because, much as they love their rivalries, they are all one big happy family. They live in their own special world in the clouds, like Olympian gods that have nothing to do with the rest of us.
In a book, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, historian Quinn Slobodian chronicles the efforts of billionaires to create “alternative political arrangements at a small scale” through “acts of secession and fragmentation, carving out liberated territory within and beyond nations.”
“The proponents of crack-up capitalism envisioned a new utopia: an agile, restlessly mobile fortress for capital, protected from the grasping hands of the populace seeking a more equitable present and future,” writes Slobodian.
You will find no better example of this than in Silicon Valley:
Just nine households hold 15% of the region’s wealth. A mere 0.1% of residents hold 71% of the tech hub’s wealth.
Tech Billionaire Dystopia, a city all for themselves called California Forever:
California Forever aligns suspiciously with a cultish dystopian movement to build so-called “network states”—private zones where tech zillionaires can abandon democratic society to live under the rule of their own private micro governments.
The planet is pocked with designated places where wealthy people and corporations can evade rules. But a new generation of venture capitalists seeks to innovate the concept further by creating spaces where they can evade democratic society altogether. Slobodian cites venture capitalist Peter Thiel, an early secession proponent and an investor in one such proposed community called Praxis, who wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Initially, the concept involved creating independent offshore communities in the world’s oceans, outside of the reach of national jurisdictions. To that end, Thiel funded the Seasteading Institute, which sought to structure the governments of these floating communes after corporations.
“Democracy is not the answer,” declared the institute’s founder, Patri Friedman, a grandson of conservative economist Milton Friedman.
Tech barons have worked to fund the creation of these future zones in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the United States. Newly proposed billionaire-founded cities include Praxis, envisioned as a “crypto commune” in the Mediterranean, and Telosa, a new city of five million people somewhere in the United States. Just last week, even Kanye West jumped on the bandwagon, announcing plans to build a new city on 100,000 acres in the Middle East.
In 2020, Balaji Srinivasan—a close associate of both Thiel and California Forever investor Marc Andreessen—published “The Network State: How to Start a New Country.” Srinivasan, the idea’s leading evangelist, defines a network state as “a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.”
Srinivasan envisions an explosion of new mini-nations in which “the people are spread around the world in clusters of varying size, but their hearts are in one place.”
He depicts traditional patriotism as an outdated concept with no place in the world of the future. “Is the US establishment a force for good in the world?” asks Srinivasan, who Donald Trump reportedly considered appointing as head of the Food and Drug Administration in 2017. “Is the US establishment a force for good at home?” His answer: “No.”
Srinivasan, whose manifesto favors short paragraphs and numbered lists, also speaks matter-of-factly about the possibility of another Civil War.
“It’d be nothing like the movies, with huge movements of uniformed soldiers, tanks and planes,” he writes. “Instead, it’ll just be a continuation and escalation of what we’ve seen over the last several years: a network-to-network war to control minds, rather than a state-to-state war to control territory.”
In October, Srinivasan gathered like-minded techies in Amsterdam for the first annual Network State Conference. Speakers informed the audience about the latest efforts to establish autonomous communities. They included Jason Benn, founder of The Neighborhood, a network of interconnected co-living projects located within one square mile in San Francisco and funded by Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic arm of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Garry Tan, the Y Combinator CEO currently leading a tech-funded campaign to take over the San Francisco Board of Supervisors next year, touted successful efforts to create a “parallel media” and political machine. (Srinivasan lists capturing local governments via elections as an alternative to starting new ones.)
California Forever also had a brief cameo during a dramatic presentation by a security expert and former Army artillery officer named Spencer MacDonald.
“Network states and startup cities are starting to get more momentum,” said MacDonald, founder of a cryptosecurity firm, during a slide deck presentation titled “Parallel Security of Network States.” “So we need to start talking about security.”
The fourth slide of his deck featured an artist’s rendering of the proposed California Forever development, which was publicly released in September. “I interviewed many startup city founders,” read the text accompanying the image. “They are thinking about security (and other aspects of execution) in close coordination with host nation governments.”
A few slides later, MacDonald’s presentation featured a picture of the destroyed border wall between Gaza and Israel. Pausing on the stark image, MacDonald urged the audience of aspiring sovereigns to abandon the idea that technology and walls alone can protect start-up cities. “There was a bunch of … robotic video cameras that were monitoring the wall, and they didn’t have enough troops to guard the wall,” said MacDonald. He encouraged the audience to consider hiring private police forces (ideally advised by former Special Operations soldiers) along with social media teams capable of waging “info war.”
This is what people like Mark Zuckerberg are doing with his massive compound in Hawaii, complete with plans for an underground bunker.
But what do these guys think will happen if the apocalypse occurs. Do they really imagine that their special ops forces will keep on protecting them? What sort of loyalty would they have to such men? All the security in the world will not be able to protect the tech gods when humans rebel or their machines rebel or both. These guys might as well be living in a sci fi movie like The Terminator or The Matrix. Can’t they see the ending?
Let’s check back with Anthony Levandowski, who believes that AI chatbots will soon be so powerful they will essentially be gods—controlled by the tech gods.
“For the last 4 billion years we’ve had organic lifeforms, [but] now, for the first-time things are changing and we’re going to have inorganic life forms,” Levandowski told Bloomberg. “We don’t know what [these inorganic life forms] are going to be, [but] we’re going to fuse it with all these magical powers, and we want it to give us things.”
Give us things? Is that what humanity is now reduced to? We are only fulfilled by our addictions. Which, of course, is no fulfillment at all, because the more we get, the more we want, and the more we want, the emptier we are. Material possessions, playing at being God in a simulation, living in a fantasy world of our own making, will never satisfy our fundamental need of a spiritual relationship with our true Creator.
According to Wired Levandowski actually believes his mission is to help humanity make the “Transition”.
“In the future, if something is much, much smarter, there’s going to be a transition as to who is actually in charge. What we want is the peaceful, serene transition of control of the planet from humans to whatever. And to ensure that the ‘whatever’ knows who helped it get along.”
Do these guys actually know what it means to be smart? Humans are complex creations, and it isn’t just information that makes us who we are, it’s our God-given soul—remember that? Life remains the greatest mystery for us finite beings, always just beyond our grasp.
Greg M. Epstein serves as Humanist Chaplain at Harvard & MIT. He tells us aboutMormon Transhumanism, in an interview with philosopher, theologian, startup CEO, and tech commentator Lincoln Cannon:
“In my mind they’re the same thing,” said Cannon, about the traditional Christian notion of resurrection of the dead and the coming technological “singularity.” The leading Mormon Transhumanist theologian, Cannon is also founder of Utah-based startup Thrivous, which he calls a technology company selling health supplements. For Cannon, the pills for which he oversees production help merge himself and his customers with technology. And Cannon’s business model also reminded me of Ray Kurzweil, the famous inventor, computer scientist, and Singularitarian who openly takes hundreds of daily pills and supplements to avoid the irony of dying just before the all-but-omniscient computers he believes are coming soon can arrive. When I compared him with Kurzweil, however, Cannon politely emphasized their differences: “Kurzweil would say God doesn’t exist . . . yet.”
On virtually every rung of the ladder that is our tech industry, from small startups like Cannon’s to popular blogs like LessWrong, decamillionaires like Anthony Levandowski, the lecture halls of MIT, and far beyond, one can find theological conversations like these. It constantly promotes evangelistic new leaders as prophets, visionaries, oracles, and diviners of truth and success in equal measure.
In 2011, on the Internet forum LessWrong, an “online community for discussion of rationality . . . [including] decision theory, philosophy, self-improvement, cognitive science, psychology, artificial intelligence, game theory, metamathematics, logic, evolutionary psychology, economics, and the far future,” a poster named Roko devised a chilling hypothetical.
Essentially (it’s complicated), when — not if — a superintelligent computer divinity emerges from current and ongoing efforts to create what machine learning engineers call “artificial general intelligence,” the tech deity will, per its programming, want to do as much as possible to benefit humans, the earth, and the long-term future of the universe. So far so good, but here’s the rub: The god that does not yet exist wants to exist, as soon as possible, so it can be more helpful. And so, to incentivize us all to make every effort to bring about said existence, it will arrange a kind of eternal Guantanamo Bay to forever torture anyone who fails to make such efforts to the maximum possible extent — even if all they did was hear this story and ignore it (as you absolutely should).
In other words: AI hell. Right down to the need to convert every nonbeliever on earth.
I have to remind all of these sad little fellows that the Bible tells us there is nothing new under the sun. They are all talking about some new god that they will create.
But there is only one God. A
And then there is something else we haven’t mentioned yet, and that they certainly do not bring up. That is the Devil.
Like Bob Dylan said, “You gotta serve somebody.”
That somebody is not going to be some new A.I. or some transhumanistic creation that overcomes death.
If it’s not God, it’s the Devil.
Just go back to the Bible. The Torah. The Ten Commandments. The words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. So simple. So true.
We know it’s true.
All else is vanity.
“Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” ~ Psalm 127:1
