While I was studying toward ordination as secular humanist clergy two decades ago, I had the fortune of meeting the late rabbi Sherwin Wine, a brillia

Silicon Valley’s Obsession With AI Looks a Lot Like Religion

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2024-12-22 00:00:07

While I was studying toward ordination as secular humanist clergy two decades ago, I had the fortune of meeting the late rabbi Sherwin Wine, a brilliant philosopher whom TIME magazine profiled as “the atheist rabbi” in 1967. He became my favorite teacher and mentor as I trained to serve communities of atheists and agnostics in ways that parallel how religious leaders typically minister to their congregations. Sherwin’s go-to line about technology was, “I’ve always said there is no God. I never said there wouldn’t be one in the future.”

I heard his quip around 2002, and took it as generalized sarcasm about the state of technology and science fiction. Little did I know he’d had a premonition.

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?”

Sentenced in 2020 to 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets from Google, Levandowski was given a full pardon by Donald Trump on the last night of the Trump administration, at the encouragement of Peter Thiel, among others. He never served any prison time, and though he was forced to file for bankruptcy by a $179 million lawsuit from Google over intellectual property, Uber, which acquired his autonomous vehicle company, Otto, in 2016, paid off most or all these debts and left him with a substantial sum on top of that.