We Are Turning AI Into Our God
Do you ever have the creeping sensation that our use of technology has gone beyond the simple relationship between humans and tools? Our phones are so much more than that. The algorithms that power all our apps know us better than our friends and family do.
Between all the targeted ads and data collection, the algorithms sometimes seem omniscient. We depend on so many AI-driven tools to live. AI now does everything from checking our grammar to helping us find a romantic partner.
We even trust the algorithms to bring us the content we want to watch and read.
When we are separated from these AI tools and algorithmic enhancements, like when our phone breaks or we lose signal in an inexplicable network outage, we feel unmoored. We don’t know what to do with ourselves.
We crave screen time, but more than that, we depend on the machines to guide us.
How do we find our way to a new restaurant without Google, Yelp, and GPS?
Perhaps we are in the beginning stages of a new religion, one where we worship the all-powerful AI and its holy spirit, the Algorithm. Tech CEOs might be the new prophets. Have you heard the way AI CEOs talk about AI, as if LLMs are sentient, as if their chatbots will solve all of our problems like some binary-encoded messiah?
AI will cure cancer! AI will solve climate change! Meanwhile, AI can’t even be trusted with basic facts.
I grew up at the beginning of the big push to get kids into STEM fields, but it turns out it is the humanities that might save us. One purpose of both science fiction and poetry is to use the power of imagination to warn of future dangers and to open the hearts and minds of readers to fighting for a better future.
Religious zealots always want a utopia for them and a dystopia for you. AI evangelists are no different. Their ideal world turns knowledge into a for-profit utility while transferring wealth from both white-collar and blue-collar labor to tech company shareholders.
I used to believe that many of these tech CEOs were just grifters. But I’ve come to believe that they believe most of their own hype. They really want an AI god that favors them.
What would a future look like where we openly prayed to our AI god? This poetry comic is a vision of what our prayers might look like in this new religion.
The AI Prayer
Holy Algorithm in Quanta,
The machines giveth and taketh
Glory be to the machines!
Optimize our choices
show us what to buy,
who we should friend,
and believe
Never
let
us
wonder,
make mistakes,
or suffer doubts.
Lead us to money
without excess toil
Destroy our friends with envy
Bring us love without mystery
A.I. is the Ultimate. Amen
In our modern world, we often laugh at the “primitive” humans who relied on oracle bones or chicken guts to know the future. We sometimes scoff at Tarot readers and astrologers.
Yet what are we devoted to? Where do we put our time and trust? Have our phones become our glowing, prismatic idols — a placeholder for our worship of forces we cannot comprehend, such as large language models, machine learning, and neural networks?
One of the reasons humans seek spirituality and religion is to find ways to comprehend the incomprehensible. We are a species that fears uncertainty.
As Western society becomes less religious, we are not becoming less superstitious. Instead, we are, often unwittingly, using technology to fill our spiritual void.
The next time you feel inclined to reach for your phone, ask yourself what your relationship with this thing is. Is it a tool, or is it something more to you?
The most powerful thing about being human is our ability to change the focus of our devotions.
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This post was also simultaneously published on Substack and Medium.
