Anthony Levandowski has set up an organisation dedicated to the worship of an AI God.  Or so it seems; there are few details.  The aim of the new body is to ‘develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence’, and ‘through understanding and worship of the Godhead, contribute to the betterment of society’. Levandowski is a pioneer in the field of self-driving vehicles (centrally involved in a current dispute between Uber and Google),  so he undoubtedly knows a bit about autonomous machines.

This recalls the Asimov story where they build Multivac, the most powerful computer imaginable, and ask it whether there is a God?  There is now, it replies. Of course the Singularity, mind uploading, and other speculative ideas of AI gurus have often been likened to some of the basic concepts of religion; so perhaps Levandowski is just putting down a marker to ensure his participation in the next big thing.

Yuval Noah Harari says we should, indeed, be looking to Silicon Valley for new religions. He makes some good points about the way technology has affected religion, replacing the concern with good harvests which was once at least as prominent as the task of gaining a heavenly afterlife. But I think there’s an interesting question about the difference between, as it were, steampunk and cyberpunk. Nineteenth century technology did not produce new gods, and surely helped make atheism acceptable for the first time; lately, while on the whole secularism may be advancing we also seem to have a growth of superstitious or pseudo-religious thinking. I think it might be because nineteenth century technology was so legible; you could see for yourself that there was no mystery about steam locomotives, and it made it easy to imagine a non-mysterious world. Computers now, are much more inscrutable and most of the people who use them do not have much intuitive idea of how they work. That might foster a state of mind which is more tolerant of mysterious forces.

To me it’s a little surprising, though it probably should not be, that highly intelligent people seem especially prone to belief in some slightly bonkers ideas about computers. But let’s not quibble over the impossibility of a super-intelligent and virtually omnipotent AI. I think the question is, why would you worship it? I can think of various potential reasons.

1. Humans just have an innate tendency to worship things, or a kind of spiritual hunger, and anything powerful naturally becomes an object of worship.
2. We might get extra help and benefits if we ask for them through prayer.
3. If we don’t keep on the right side of this thing, it might give us a seriously bad time (the ‘Roko’s Basilisk’ argument).
4. By worshipping we enter into a kind of communion with this entity, and we want to be in communion with it for reasons of self-improvement and possibly so we have a better chance of getting uploaded to eternal life.

There are some overlaps there, but those are the ones that would be at the forefront of my mind. The first one is sort of fatalistic; people are going to worship things, so get used to it. Maybe we need that aspect of ourselves for mental health; maybe believing in an outer force helps give us a kind of leverage that enables an integration of our personality we couldn’t otherwise achieve? I don’t think that is actually the case, but even if it were, an AI seems a poor object to choose. Traditionally, worshipping something you made yourself is idolatry, a degraded form of religion. If you made the thing, you cannot sincerely consider it superior to yourself; and a machine cannot represent the great forces of nature to which we are still ultimately subject. Ah, but perhaps an AI is not something we made; maybe the AI godhead will have designed itself, or emerged? Maybe so, but if you’re going for a mysterious being beyond our understanding, you might in my opinion do better with the thoroughly mysterious gods of tradition rather than something whose bounds we still know, and whose plug we can always pull.

Reasons two and three are really the positive and negative sides of an argument from advantage, and they both assume that the AI god is going to be humanish in displaying gratitude, resentment, and a desire to punish and reward. This seems unlikely to me, and in fact a projection of our own fears out onto the supposed deity. If we assume the AI god has projects, it will no doubt seek to accomplish them, but meting out tiny slaps and sweeties to individual humans is unlikely to be necessary. It has always seemed a little strange that the traditional God is so minutely bothered with us; as Voltaire put it “When His Highness sends a ship to Egypt does he trouble his head whether the rats in the vessel are at their ease or not?”; but while it can be argued that souls are of special interest to a traditional God, or that we know He’s like that just through revelation, the same doesn’t go for an AI god. In fact, since I think moral behaviour is ultimately rational, we might expect a super-intelligent AI to behave correctly and well without needing to be praised, worshipped, or offered sacrifices. People sometimes argue that a mad AI might seek to maximise, not the greatest good of the greatest number, but the greatest number of paperclips, using up humanity as raw material; in fact though, maximising paperclips probably requires a permanently growing economy staffed by humans who are happy and well-regulated. We may actually be living in something not that far off maximum-paperclip society.

Finally then, do we worship the AI so that we can draw closer to its godhead and make ourselves worthy to join its higher form of life? That might work for a spiritual god; in the case of AI it seems joining in with it will either be completely impossible because of the difference between neuron and silicon; or if possible, it will be a straightforward uploading/software operation which will not require any form of worship.

At the end of the day I find myself asking whether there’s a covert motive here. What if you could run your big AI project with all the tax advantages of being a registered religion, just by saying it was about electronic godhead?