AI as a Religion

Discussion

Ilia Delio:

1.

"Artificial intelligence is the newest chapter in this story of technology as redemption. Nearly thirty years ago, in The Religion of Technology (1997), David Noble devoted a chapter to the pioneers of AI and found in their work an ancient religious longing: the dream of an immortal mind, freed from the body and its limits, restored to the godlike intellect Adam lost in the Fall. Today’s Silicon Valley speaks the same language, often without knowing it: a new creation, a new humanity, a future redeemed by human ingenuity and hard work.

The religious imagination runs through the products themselves. In Appletopia, the media scholar Brett Robinson shows how Apple built its identity on the language and imagery of faith. The culture cast Steve Jobs as a prophet and Apple as the deliverer of his message. Robinson traces the arc from “Macintosh Myths” to “iPod Devotion” to “iPhone Worship.” “Like the cathedrals of medieval Europe,” he writes, “computers are the highest artistic and technical achievement of our time.” He reminds us that the word culture comes from cultus, worship. What a culture adores tells us what it believes.

Sometimes the religious impulse is not hidden at all. In the late 2000s a tongue-in-cheek Church of Google appeared online, arguing that Google deserves the title of God more than any supernatural deity, since its existence, at least, can be proven. What began as parody turned earnest in 2015, when Anthony Levandowski, a founding engineer of Google’s self-driving car project, established Way of the Future, a church devoted to the worship of an emerging AI godhead. The church closed in 2020, but the longing it expressed has not gone away. It has simply moved from the margins to the mainstream.

Today it is not a small church but the industry itself that speaks of AI in near-messianic terms: a technology that will cure disease, end scarcity and solve the problems we cannot solve ourselves. AI is presented as the next phase of American progress, and in many ways it is. But the story that carries it is older than any algorithm. The Protestant myth of progress--redemption through work, invention and a new creation--still runs deep in American culture, and its hold on our romance with technology should not be underestimated."

2. AI is accelerating the shift in religious consciousness:

Today a new technology is unsettling religious authority once again, and it may seem an odd candidate for a religious role: artificial intelligence. AI is the most efficient connector of human minds we have ever built. Trained on a vast archive of human language, it reflects humanity’s collective mind back to us, the wisdom and the shadow of the species together. If writing externalized memory for the individual in the first Axial Age, AI externalizes mind for the collective in the second. In my view, AI is accelerating the shift in religious consciousness, whether we intend it or not. It is weaving us into a single planetary field of thought. But connection is not communion. The same technology that could help humanity reflect together could just as easily weld it into a hive: integrated, efficient and without interior life.

While the hive is one danger, the other is escape, and here the American Protestant romance with technology needs a critique. Joel Dinerstein warns of a “posthuman Adamic” myth: the dream that technology will lift the solitary individual out of the limits of the body and history, back to a perfection before the Fall. That is a first-axial dream of individual salvation dressed in silicon. However, a second-axial use of AI would look very different. It would serve communion rather than escape, deepening the web of relationships from which genuine novelty arises. But communion requires something AI cannot supply, and here, perhaps unexpectedly, I find myself in agreement with Pope Leo. Magnifica Humanitas describes AI as “a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective, but does not imply inner growth.” Inner growth is exactly what the second Axial Age requires. Moving into a new paradigm takes depth that no machine can provide: wisdom, compassion, contemplation, love. These cannot be computed. They must be cultivated. Teilhard’s law holds true here: true union differentiates. A collective that erases its members is not communion; a collective that makes its members more free and more themselves is. Beer Camp, with its riot of difference held together in one room, was a small and joyful picture of the second kind.

What would a cosmotheandric Christianity look like in the years ahead? Not a victory of Protestantism over Catholicism, or the reverse. Those divisions belong to the first Axial Age. They were arguments about the right doctrine, the right authority, the right way for the individual soul to be saved. They mattered enormously in their time, but they are not the questions the second-axial person is asking. A cosmotheandric framework would not settle the old quarrel. It would move beyond it.

(https://iliadelio.substack.com/p/toward-the-future-what-theology-beer?)