Dataism: God is in the Algorithm

There has been a great variety of religions over the years, most of which worship some form or forms of deity. It’s not really the God that matters though, it’s the behaviour the religion promotes. There are rules, moral guidelines, that each religion preaches. God is the one that smites or rewards you for acting in accordance.

A new religion may be emerging that also comes with a code of conduct but that does away with the traditional notion of God, replacing him with an algorithm. In this emerging ideology, called Dataism, the ultimate goal is to increase the amount of information flow through the algorithm.

“Dataism declares that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus.

Rise of the Network

The seeds of dataism were sown long ago, when people learned how to pass information from one person to the next. When we first started spreading across the globe, communication was limited to the small groups we were in. But eventually, with the help of agriculture and money, those groups grew very large, and began connecting with other groups to trade information and resources.