The Word of God: How AI Is Deified in the Age of Secularism
At the tail end of 2017, a feature in Wired offered a glimpse into a new “church of artificial intelligence,” set up by Silicon Valley engineer and expert in self-driving car technology, Anthony Levandowski. The aim of Levandowski’s church — called the Way of the Future — is described in papers filed with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.”
“It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes,” Levandowski told Wired. “But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”
These words, as wobbly as they are, are painted against a backdrop of high-profile advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Speech and facial recognition have continued to find their way into our homes, pockets, and state surveillance. Neural networks are bringing superhuman levels of analysis to everything from security to finance. Last year, DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero taught itself to play the thousand-year-old game of Go in three days. Does the self-professed dean of the Way of the Future have a point?
“No,” says Luciano Floridi, professor of philosophy and ethics of information and…
