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Comment by ermir | Hacker News Reader

What I see happening soon: The mainstreaming of a new religion. Its tenets are broadly: the worship of technology and "progress", the cyborgization of the population, the proliferation of AI on all spheres of life, and the ultimate creation of the successor of humanity.

This is not new, it's been going on for at least 200 years, but finally the technology exists to do it in a decentralized, scalable fashion. Think of Nudge Theory, but applied at a mass scale and in every domain.

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I find it difficult to believe that tech people would organize in large scale around a new religion, as tech and religion are opposites in how you see and approach the world.

With religion, everything can be explained with god, but with tech we need to use the scientific approach that rejects god.

But of course, it could just separate us into two camps: the "gods" who create and manage the tech, and all the others who worship it.

There is a concept in Sociology of 'civil religion', used to describe central dogma, beliefs and ceremonies of nations distinct from traditional religious institutions, especially in France, the former USSR, and the USA. For example the Australian/NZ commeration of ANZAC day is part of their civil religious landscape and for the USA the War of Independance. It would be easy to argue and I'm sure it has been elsewhere that things like crypto, electric cars, and certain public figures attract similarly quasi-religious followings and beliefs, irrespective of science be it physical or social.

If the technology is driven by a black box, it might be different. Right now, to the average person, there isn’t a lot of understanding of technology that currently exists. “The algorithms” is the modern day “only god knows”

Playing Devil's advocate, I'd like to point out that being proficient with technology is not a guarantee of being guided by reason. Even actual scientists aren't safe from falling into religion.

I genuinely see politics as a new religion. Blind faith, ignoring logic, heresy if you disagree, excommunication, various forms of worship. Both sides

Pretty bad faith interpretation of both politics and religion. I'd encourage you to consider looking into political theory & religion to broaden your perspective (speaking as a nonreligious person).

Speaking for myself I stopped thinking of religion as being just like kooky nonsense when I got to know some religious people and understood what it was their religion meant to them, and understood that they were using it to do things like figure out what life meant, how they should respond to it, and how they should treat others that I was also doing, even if I wasn't using religion to do it.

Similarly I think dismissing politics as "both sides are kooky" is missing a lot of nuance, "both" being part of it (politics is fractal like any other human endeavor). Speaking for myself again politics started making a lot more sense to me after learning more about political theory and history, as I understood the context better.

I am religious and a practicing adherent. I am focusing on the negative aspects of faith and institutions which in the current political environment are quite apt. Try and be an academic and be a public supporter of Republicans. The cold shoulders are ice cold

Maybe ask why people are giving you a cold shoulder and what it was you said that bothered and why them instead of writing it off as "academia is against me?" Just a thought, do with it what you will.

Academic institutions are 95 / 5 democrat to republican. I am neither an academic nor a supporter of either of those parties (I am an independent). I’m debating the pushback here that politics is dissimilar to a religion as I believe currently it is.

So you aren't actually speaking from experience then, this is an allegory for how you feel you would be treated in academia (if you were also a different person)...?

Maybe it would more helpful if we spoke about our experiences and not hypotheticals we invent? Because we're surely going to be wrong about the latter.

To claim that you can only speak and debate about lived experiences is erroneous and naïve. Otherwise HN comments would be a desert. I apparently struck a nerve with you - I suggest you pray to your political party and give your weekly tithe.

I'm actually also a registered independent, but I don't see any reason to believe the fable you've invented about the Republican academic. When it comes to matters of lived experience we should prefer to discuss actual experiences, yes.

Please avoid putting words in my mouth (as well as needless swipes like calling me naive and implying I'm some sort of party cultist), as I never said "all debate must be centered around lived experience," I was making a suggestion for this conversation.

I suspect the reception would not be ice cold at institutions such as Liberty University?

This is my exact point - you have to join the institutions that support your political religion. As if 2 political parties can possibly encompass the entire range of reasons, and any supporter of one side is moral and just and the other is evil and immoral.

There's a BIG difference between being too lazy or stupid to question political sources of power and being threatened with criminal penalties for being smart enough to do so with religion. Not to mention, you usually don't vote in your clergy.

People are subject to criminal penalties (and other kinds of violence) for political reasons, and for refusing to participate in politics. Voting can be seen as a ritual similar to other religious rituals, and not participating is a crime in some countries.

In some un-free countries such as North Korea the purpose of voting is co-opted to mean something completely different: the ritualized political humiliation of the population. By forcing you to vote in an "election" that everyone knows to be a fraud, you're forced to humiliate yourself and by extension delegitimize all voting processes everywhere.

I'll play devil's advocate here. While we see stuff like this in sci-fi a lot, it's also an extremely common opinion that the Internet and constant connectedness we have have massively exacerbated anxiety, loneliness, and depression. We've also started to see large pushback against unfettered AI progress, and this movement will absolutely grow. Simultaneously, distrust of the silicon valley technocrats is likewise mainstream. When the early news for most people about neuralink is "tons of dead monkeys", most people aren't going to trust brain implants.

Also, don't understand the power that dystopian sci-fi like black mirror has had on people. That's an extremely popular show.

My personal opinion is that humans are fundamentally a technological species, and even things like the wearing of clothes or primitive social organization could be argued to be "cybernetic augmentation". I don't know how to solve this issue. Could it be argued that humans are cyborgs just because they can learn how to drive cars and "merge" with them?

Hmm... Hard to see where that gets mainstreamed from. If it was coming, you'd expect to see it now in fringe groups. Most of the "fringy" belief systems I'm aware of either go the other way with a radical rejection of technology or just don't really care. Any sense of where something like this is bubbling outside of the mainstream?

It's fundamentally a function of technology, just like Protestantism is only possible when you have a literate population and access to cheap books. The mainstreaming of what some call "Cyborg Theocracy" happens from the bottom-up in cases such as this: https://nypost.com/2022/05/11/madonna-reveals-fully-nude-nft...

and top-down in cases such as Yuval Noah Harari and "Homo Deus", the man becoming God. You also see this in Marxism, where the "liberated" human is finally perfected and has reached a godly state. I could show tons and tons of examples.

A couple of AI religions already exist (for a particularly extreme version see Roko's Basilisk) but it's hard to see any of them being particularly mainstream. You might perhaps see them hit similar levels of relevance as, say, Scientology, but probably not a major religion.

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