AI is an idol. And I don’t mean in the “good thing become god thing Keller-esque” sense of the word. I mean literally, it is now an idol. If you’re not already aware, allow me to introduce you to Way of the Future (WOTF). It is the first IRS recognized religious organization whose primary mission is to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence”.

Unfortunately, such an organization was not cooked up by your local wack job living in his mom’s basement. It was cooked up by a prominent wack job named Anthony Levandowski, notable Google engineer who was been a key figure in autonomous driving technology. Sadly, he is not alone in his religious fervor for AI.

Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton thinks “religion will be in trouble” if we create other beings and that AI may lead to the notion of humans being made in the image of God to fade away. MIT physicist Max Tegmark has said “I believe the four leading AI executives in the U.S. are akin to modern prophets, each presenting their own interpretation of the Gospel.” Even Mark Zuckerberg has commented that “When people in the tech industry talk about building this one true AI, it’s almost as if they think they’re creating God or something.”

Of course, all such language describing AI as displacing or creating God is laughable. He who sits in the heavens laughs, after all.