Asger Risom
It’s not just hype, they argue. It’s belief, ritual, and fear of what happens if you don’t get on board.
In Silicon Valley, talk about artificial intelligence is often framed as practical and technical. But some writers and scholars say the language and behavior around AI increasingly resemble something older.
It’s not just hype, they argue. It’s belief, ritual, and fear of what happens if you don’t get on board.
Churches and gods
In excerpts adapted from his book Tech Agnostic, secular ethicist Greg Epstein describes how AI talk can slide into worship, pointing to Anthony Levandowski’s attempt to formalize it through Way of the Future, a registered church meant for “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.”
Levandowski told Wired in 2017 that “what is going to be created [as AI] will effectively be a god . . .” He later shut the organization down in 2021, Epstein writes, then announced a reboot in 2023, describing “things that can see everything, be everywhere, know everything, and maybe help us and guide us in a way that normally you would call God.”
Philosopher Charles Barbour, writing in The Conversation, argues that technology “will never be a god” in a literal sense, but says religious rhetoric has become common around AI and its future promises.
And he might be right, considering how Japan has an AI preaching the laws of Buddhism.
Prophets and punishments
Epstein also points to the internet forum LessWrong’s infamous Roko’s Basilisk thought experiment, a story about a future superintelligence punishing those who didn’t help bring it into existence. In his telling, it functions like a threat of “AI hell,” powerful enough that forum founder Eliezer Yudkowsky banned discussion after saying it “caused actual psychological damage to at least some readers.”
Barbour says this kind of language isn’t limited to fringe corners. He cites Sam Altman saying, “I don’t pray for God to be on my side, I pray to be on God’s side”, and adds that “working on these models definitely feels like being on the side of the angels”.
A shared meaning
Both writers argue the “tech religion” frame helps explain why AI culture creates moral narratives, saints and sinners, and visions of salvation. Barbour notes how tech leaders promote ethical slogans and grand social missions, while Epstein argues that in a fragmented society, “tech provides contemporary western lives… with a common principle, a common story”.
The dispute is over what to do next: Epstein calls for reform and “heretics” inside tech, while Barbour warns the metaphor can become forced even as it remains hard to ignore.
Sources: The Conversation, Tech Agnostic by Greg Epstein, The Brink
