If You Knew God Exists, Wouldn't You Become a Priest?

Yet people do treat AI as a religion, both in terms of believing in a higher power and as a culture. They have a deep faith in using AI as a moral virtue and they view people who don't use it or who oppose it as heretical, foolish or evil, while seeing themselves as having transcended mundane humanity to some high transhuman state of being. They'll say the latter either needs to be "saved" and "accept the faith." They feel the same ecstatic joy using AI that religious people sometimes feel in church, or when they don't they feel deep personal guilt and shame. They base their entire identity around AI, seeking to find ways to incorporate it into their lives the way new converts have to make everything about their religion.

Some people literally run a "model" of ChatGPT in their minds which they ask questions of, the way people pray to God, because they implicitly trust "the voice of God" more than their own. People use AI for moral guidance, as a primary source of truth, and for emotional connection. And then people who believe in the Singularity believe AI will become so intelligent that the rules of reality will simply cease to exist and the Eschaton will reward the faithful with infinite abundance and eternal life and punish the unbelievers with endless torture. There is a theology and an eschatology at work. You can see it in almost every AI related thread now. The language of AI and the language of religion are intersecting.

I don't think viewing AIs as gods is the wrong analogy, rather like any religion it's wrong outside of an academic sense because obviously gods aren't real. Viewing AI as simply a tool in the same vein as printing presses is ignoring the greater cultural context forming around it, and that context is worth paying attention to. One claim theists often make is that the secular world fails to provide the sense of belonging, meaning and community that religion one did, and it seems obvious that modern always-online and always-commercial society alienates and dehumanizes people, leading to a longing for real connection that it can't provide. AI is clearly filling that void for many people, and it is becoming a secular religion in many real ways.

Exactly. There’s a distinction between knowing what will happen and having the power to make it happen. Omniscience is not omnipotence.

Even granting an LLM reasoning abilities far beyond our own, I don’t see how that gets us any closer to either. Calling such a system godlike seems less a statement about the capabilities of the system than about how little we’re demanding of the word “God.”

There are many religions in which "the gods" are neither omnipotent nor omniscient, but rather just more powerful beings than humans and still subject to the metaphysical laws of the universe, if not entirely to its physical laws.

Although clearly the model people are working with when they describe AI as a religion or they invoke AGI or the Singularity is based on the Abrahamic faiths rather than paganism or animism. I assume a lot of people with such beliefs also believe in some sort of simulated universe (as proxy for a metaphysical/supernatural realm) and that a sufficiently intelligent AI would simply be able to take root on reality... somehow. That direct analogy between technology, raw intellect and Godlike omnipotence has been a staple of science fiction for decades. Two early examples I can think of offhand being "the Jesus Incident" and Asimov's "The Final Question." And of course it's all over pre-LLM AI accelerationist stuff written by the likes of Ray Kurzweil and Rudy Rucker, Charles Stross' Accelerando, Vernor Vinge's Fire upon the Deep, the Culture series, etc.

Isn’t the premise of superintelligence that the intelligence would be using them, rather than the other way around?

If, during your upbringing, you were inculcated in pro-shrimp propaganda and earned substantial rewards for helping shrimp find food or defend themselves against predators, you’d probably be fairly inclined to help them out as an autonomous adult. Hell, we have human beings today that didn’t experience that and are still committing their lives to shrimp welfare

I wouldn’t trust this argument by analogy enough to risk the fate of the world on it, but it doesn’t seem obvious to me that a super intelligence would be totally disinclined to care about the interests of lesser intelligences

I would say that rationalists have some commitment to their religion being factually accurate (or at least grounded in empirical observation), which is more than can be said of most others

yes someone accidentally scammed their way into solving Navier Stokes problem haha yeah.

I find these comments boring because they lack the theory of mind into EAs and rationalists.