Machine God: Artificial Superintelligence

to the wicked, the hope of the just. If the heavens stripped of his noble imprint could ever cease to attest to his being, if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stop works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And that was Voltaire, right, yeah. Seventeen sixty eight from his uh his poem epistle to

the author of the book The Three Impostors. In it, he argues that belief in God is necessary to social order, which is something that we could do a whole podcast about that argument. Kind of an odd thing to hear from Voltaire given his really serious criticisms of like the existing monotheisms. Yeah, I was reading reading up on a little bit, and yeah, it's it is interesting that here he's kind of sticking up for God, but other times

he was very critical of abuses by the Catholic Church. Uh. And at the same time he also carves out a little space in this poem to attack his favorite enemies. So it's kind of like an all encompassing distract. I guess so many great works of literature do that. I love all of the enemy digs in Dante's Inferno, Yes, yeah, because it's like some dude made him mad and he's like, well, you're going in the ninth circle. Yes, es. Dante definitely makes room for some personal digs in the Divine Comedy.

So obviously of that section you read, the last line is the part that gets quoted the most right and then often misquote. It is often used for whatever purposes you needed for. Are you arguing that, yes, God exists and if and if God didn't exist, we would just have to make it up because we need God, or you're saying, obviously we all make up gods and we're

doing it to fulfill some human need. Right. But you know, the funny thing is, I don't know if I've ever heard anybody really take that line literally before, yeah, to say, hey, is there a God? Well no, there's not a god. Oh well, we gotta invent one. Let's get on it,

start the project. And folks, I'm sorry to say, that's where we've got to go today, into the valleys a certain value made of a kind of semiconducting metal, maybe where thinkers and millionaires or dreaming up gods that don't yet exist, but but they really think maybe should soon. I really like imagining it being laid out in a very corporate way and saying like, all right, bye bye, Q two, we really want to have a demigod, and by Q three at least a minor deity build up

from there. Yeah, when are we going to get the new Wrath functions online? So there are some very interesting and also very tiresome debates about whether, if God exists, you could ever prove the existence of such a being. Um, we're not going to litigate that question today, but I

do want to start by asking a derivative question. Let's say that instead there was suddenly in controvertible evidence that we're in contact with some kind of superhuman intelligence and intelligence that's not human and seems to possess kind of a vast incomprehensible power. It can solve all the unsolved problems in mathematics, It can make your favorite food materialize in front of your eyes. So we're just sipulating that that kind of being exists, and we're we're personally witnessing it.

How would you know whether it was correct to call that being god or a god? Well? I haven't answer to this question, but I'll let you go first. Well, I mean, so one of the things is that I think a lot of people with a more sort of conservative religious predisposition would have a pretty simple answer to the question, and the answer is it would be God if it conformed the teachings of their religion, whatever they

already believed. But let's say we try to approach it with a more kind of open minded framework, like what generically are the qualifications of being must meet to be considered a God or the God? All right, Well, that that that is an excellent question. But to go back to your original question, how would you know whether the being was a god? I guess that's the same question, right,

just I'm trying to make it the same question. Similar questions. Okay, but I think that the most obvious answer would be, Oh, you'll know. I mean, because you're gonna have to ask yourself. Does its voy all but crack your skull? Does its presence fill you with terror and awe? Is it even impossible to rebel against it? Puny mortal that thou art? Well, but then that would just make God synonymous with overwhelming power. Well, what else do you want from God? Just intelligence but

not overwhelming power? Well? Is there a difference between intelligence and overwhelming power? Well, that's something we're gonna come back to again and again in this discussion, as as humans attempt to try and figure to try and create a god that has one but not the other, or or has both but has the like, the right type of intelligence and the right type of power. Because I mean, generally what I'm describing those tends to be the trend.

Unless a god or god like being is in disguise for the purpose of testing your faith or seducing someone, uh, then you're probably gonna know. Like if you look to the Hindu deities, for example, they're heavily symbolic avatars that they don't leave many questions about their nature, and as we've touched on a previous school on the show, their feet give them away. They float above the surface of the earth. They're clearly not creatures of this world, and

there's no room to doubt it. Yeah. But then again, let's say aliens show up and they want to trick us into believing that they are our gods, and they have levitation technology okay, uh, and they have some other you know, they can channel vast amounts of energy into loudspeakers that will crack your skull when they speak. So we're back to the problem again. How do you tell the difference between this super powerful alien and what people

have in mind when they say God. Well, I mean, maybe the aliens are God if their power is sufficient enough, Because you also come down to the models of a deity. Older models of of a god limit its power to say, your your people, your region, or maybe the power is limited to the world. But as we get into you know, progressively more cosmically aware society, then that means the power of the God has to be greater, or at least

appear greater. Well, yeah, I mean I think you could definitely look at the idea of sort of the abstract universal disembodied god is a more recent evolution in the history of religions, and if you go way back into the older religions, the gods are closer to what people imagine in sci fi movies, like a being that comes

down from the sky and has uh irresistible power. So we have the idea of intelligence, we have the idea of power, and we can maybe come back to the issue of power and where your particular god or pretender god is on the Kardashiat scale. But I think the intelligence area is pretty interesting and it's gonna be pretty

key to what we're talking about here today. In writing for Ian magazine, Pam Weintraub points out that if you ask most people what God knows, the answer is that God knows everything, but that God's interests are very narrow and there those interests usually involve human morality. Okay, so God knows. I don't know, you're weird quirks about how you clip your toe nails, But unless you've got moral

preachings about tone l clippings, God isn't interested in that. Yeah, Like, I wonder how often we really stop to think about this in our conceptions of God. Like if I was to say God knows every uh you know, immoral thought you have ever had, and God knows every noble dream you've ever entertained, that cuts deep. Yeah, that cuts deep when we're willing to consider that. If I say God knows every chess move and every chess game that was

ever ever orchestrated. God knows how many eggs you've eaten. Yeah, well, I mean like the chess game I think is a good example, because that sounds like all right, Chess is a cool game. It's the game of thinkers. God's the ultimate chess player. Why wouldn't he know all the rules? But yeah, when you get into the eggs, where you get into every play of Monopoly or every play of candy Land, ever, it seems completely pointless. But God would

have that too. God would have all all the batting statistics for Major League Baseball just kicking around, uh, just ready to whip them out at any moment. But does he care about any of that? Right? Like, again, God's in most to our our our tales, our myths, and our religions. Gods are concerned with the morality of people and or the wars of people. Yeah, God's are often concerned that the same thing your parents are concerned with, except if your parents knew everything. Yeah, yeah, you can.

You can rattle off about your hobby all day, but your parents are gonna be like, all right, that's good. Have you done your homework? Uet though, because that's what I really want you to focus on. Quit talking about power rangers. Here's an interesting quote from Pam wine Trop in that article. What's curious is that with age, children come to know that mom, dogs, and even trees will have incorrect thoughts, but they never extend that vulnerability to God.

In fact, the quality of omniscience attributed to God appears to extend to any disembodied entity. In a two thousand thirteen paper in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, Louisville Seminary researchers found that children think imaginary friends no more than flesh and blood humans. The appears to be a rule, then, deep in our mental programming that tells us minds without body no more than those with bodies.

I asked my son about this, because, as I've previously established on the show, he has four imaginary friends to be friends and to wasp friends that fly above his head. And so I questioned him. I was very careful not to to lead his his answers in any way, but he said, the B and wasp friends don't know everything, but they know everything that he says quote, and they learn my CPU is a neuralnet processor, a learning computer. Yeah that's a terminator, right, yeah, terminator bees basic basically

what's going on? So to come back to this idea about ghosts, I mean, I wonder if we're to suddenly make the explosive discovery that we can scientifically prove ghosts exist, and we like catch a ghost in a bottle and we're talking to it or something. I guess not catch it in a bottle because it can go through the walls. But you know, we we get in contact with a ghost who got some labs set up where they're doing seances, and we figure out, oh, wow, all this stuff was

real all along. Would a ghost be a odd? Would people consider that a god? Is that how people use the word? I generally think no, Right, Even though a ghost might, uh we might imagine a ghost knows things that humans couldn't know, we still wouldn't really think of it as a God. Yeah, it seems like in most most traditions the ghost is seen as like like a remnant or a person whose concerns are not entirely of

the earth anymore. Now that being said, we can't disqualify it from godhood godhood just because it used to be a human, because, of course, we have a whole tradition of of of god kings and whatnot where a human is a God or human is at least partially God because of its divine parentage. Yeah, and there's all the

apotheosis literature too. Rightly, So, a human being like a sins and becomes a God, I think doesn't happen to Enoch I believe so, yes, yeah, And of course this is just one of many takes on God's I mean, you have God, God, the ruler, God of the cosmos, God of you know, terrestrial nature. God is a primal mover, a moral compass, a torment or, a teacher, a technology bringer,

a destroyer, a redeemer, a minor mover. Because remember, you have, for pri instance, in Chinese traditions, you have a kitchen God, a god whose domain is largely just that of food, preparation and household concerns, and yet it's an important deity even if it's not going to really help you, say, in the coming wars or whatnot. So in that vision, is the creation of humans sort of like a little bit of salmonilla contamination. I think it would just it would be outside of its Uh. If you it's like

asking Sirie a question that it it cannot answer. Kitchen God would say, I'm sorry, I don't know that, but let me tell you about what what spices to use on this particular pork dish. Now, one thing I was wondering about is if you might best understand the nature of God and our our uses for God by looking at the the sort of famous categories of literary conflict.

You know, just to refresh, you have man versus man, man versus nature, man versus society, man versus self, man versus technology, and really, if you think about it, at some point or another, God embodies each of these, right, because in man versus man, you've got divine kings, man versus nature, you've got net nature deities and all levels

of cosmic deities. Man versus society, you have God as a cultural leader or a lawmaker man versus self, you have God as this inner tormentor tempter, inner moral compass, or bicameral voice. You have, of course man versus technology. Well, God or gods are often serving to bring technology to us, such as with the Prometheus the fire driller of Chinese myth, as well as the myth of You and the Great Flood. Even language, right, I mean the word yeah. And the

link between religion and technology I think is well. So this is definitely one we've explored before. You might want to go back and check out our pre vious episodes called Techno Religion for the Masses, where we explore the relationship between religion and technology and uh in the past when we talked about the trans humanist rapture, will we'll be touching on some of those same themes today. But yeah, it's true that there does appear to be this strong

link between technology and religion. And it's not just that there are myths where say, Prometheus brings us fire. There are ways in which apparently technology itself shapes what types of religions we come up with and what types of religions survive. I want to mention some of the thinking

of the the Israeli historian you've all Noah Harari. This is an article called Salvation by Algorithm, published in The New Statesman on September nine, and so Harari writes in this article quote, technology often defines the scope and limits of our religious vision, like a waiter who demarcates our appetites by handing us a menu. For instance, in ancient agricultural societies, many religion had surprisingly little interest in metaphysical

questions in the afterlife. Instead, they focused on the very mundane task of increasing agricultural output. The Old Testament, God

never promises any rewards or punishments after death. Rather, he tells the people of Israel, and this is an abridged quotation from Deuteronomy through seventeen quote and if you will diligently obey my commandments that I am commanding you, I will also give rain for your land at its appointed time, and you will gather your grain and your new wine and your oil, and I will provide vegetation in your fields for your livestock, and you will eat and be satisfied.

Be careful not to let your heart be enticed to go astray and worship other gods, and bow down to them. Otherwise Jehovah's anger will blaze against you, and he will shut up the heavens so that it will not rain, and the ground will not give its produce, and you will quickly perish from the good land that Jehovah is giving you. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of our attitude today, right when you read something like that, And and that's

sort of Harare's point. He says that because of technological advances, this type of theology is no longer relevant to lots of people. Science can provide things like pesticides, fertilizers, water distribution infrastructure, genetically modified crops. He even points out that Israel itself now has its own desalination facilities that can take the sea water, take the salt out of it through osmosis, and then supply people with fresh water even

when there is no rain from above. So he's saying science can offer much more than could be expected even with the help of God at the time the Hebrew Bible is set. And for this reason, Harare says, quote, present day Judaism has almost lost interest in rain and agricultural output and has become a very different religion from its biblical progenitor. He says that the religions that survive and spread best are those that are able to best

adapt themselves to new technologies and econ comics systems. And among those things he he considers religions are also things that don't necessarily have gods or supernatural forces in them, and he would include, for example, Marxism and Leninism, or even Buddhism and Marxism. Leninism is a really good example because he argues this was a techno religion basically for the steam powered revolutions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Quote Lennon was once asked to define communism in a single sentence, communism. He answered, communism is power to the workers councils plus electrification of the whole country. And so Harari says, there can be no communism without electricity, without railroads,

without radio. Now, one funny thing I've read is that in the Soviet Union there were commonly jokes about this statement of Lenin's like where they would try to like follow the logic of that arithmetic, so they would say, like, therefore, communism minus electrification of the whole country equals the workers councils kind of dry so ah Soviet humor. But this leads Harari to a kind of startling conclusion if he's saying that in a lot of ways, technology drives our

adoption of religion and ideology. Quote. Just as socialism took over the world by promising salvation through steam, so in the coming decades, new techno religions are likely to take over the world by promising salvation through algorithms and genes. So he's really saying in the twenty one century, ideological leaders are going to come not so much from traditional religions but from the tech sector. Who I like the way he was putting it better. It's a little more

optimistically science sci fi. I don't know if he's necessarily being optimistic about this. He's just sort of saying what he thinks is true, not necessarily saying it's a good thing. No, but it sounds better than Silicon Valley is working on your salvation. I mean, would you read the Ulah for that salvation? Probably? Probably not. It's so darn long nobody would get to the end. Yeah, of course, Then again, I guess a lot of people don't really read their

holy books either. No, I mean, if you tried to breathe the entire Old Testament, it's it's a sage sometimes, but it's also quite beautiful sometimes. I've never writends, unlike the the user agreements for an iPhone. There are sections of it that are beautiful and then their sections of it that are dull. It's true. And in the user license agreement never has a book of job like, no poetry at all. There's no poetic peak. It's just all

valley um. Now. I love a lot of what what he had to say, though, particularly about, you know, about just technologies effect on religion. And he touched on agriculture because you have to remember that just agriculture itself was a technological advancement. Before agriculture, we just were hunters and gatherers, and that's where we have a lot of the older

ideas of horned gods, of the hunt and chaos. Those were the forces we had to pray to and and seek to appease and in order to find that in the next kill that was going to sustain our people. But then agriculture brings in more cyclical deities and and yeah, every every technological change has a way of either decreasing the power of a god, forcing you to recalibrate the god. We saw a great example of that when we talked

about eclipse mythologies. We talked about Hindu eclipse deities or or demigods, where basically their status changed in order to keep up with astrological discoveries of the time. Another thing you might want to say is that I wonder if you could track the relationship between, uh, the the level of embodiment of a god and the level to which people are working directly with the goods that they need

to consume to survive. So like people working in hunting or farming, or like you know, pulling food and stuff out of the ground and have these very like physical embodied ideas of God's Whereas once you've got all these modern economies where people are dealing with like currency and ideas of wealth, uh, you've also got these more abstract ideas of what God is. God is a disembodied thing

that lives apart. Yeah, And of course I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention some of the new religious movements that came out in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where you were essentially creating new religions or new strains of religion that were more in keeping with the needs of modern humans, but also some of the knowledge of modern humans. We've touched on the sort of space ready nature of the Church of Latter day Saints, for instance.

Oh yeah, so they've got a space exploration theology to a certain extent, like it it was. It's the idea of alien worlds with with the with alien species is more baked into the faith than you find in a much more ancient uh uh set of rules and obligations that is only concerned with not not even like a terrestrial model, but a just a portion of the Earth,

a people, a race, as opposed to a planet. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back we will discuss creating a god in a box. We're back. So the idea of a super intelligent AI this is something that that has its roots in science fiction for starters, I mean, some of the more impressive examples that come to mind include Dan Simon's Hyperion books, The Minds of the of Ian Banks Inan Banks culture series, Uh, the films like Colossus, the Forbin Project. Uh. There's also

another literary example, or some Scott Cards Homecoming saga. You could even throw in John Carpenter's Dark Star to a certain extent, because at the end it is, uh, it is essentially entering into a godlike complex. You definitely have a sort of techno religion created in Fritz Long's metropolis. Right. Oh, yeah, you have the well there's there's the false Maria that shows up, but then also the large demonic machine entity. Uh what mammon, I believe it is? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,

it's like eating the workers. Yes, so we've been we've been wrestling with this for a while, and often is often the case, we end up wrestling with these ideas and science fiction before Uh, many in the pure sciences are engaging with the idea. So here, I guess we gotta get to the core story that made us want to do this episode today, which I want to give a hat tip to the host of Tech Stuff, Jonathan Strickland,

who sent this our way about this guy. There was a guy named Anthony Lewandowski who is an American engineer and tech executive. He formally worked for Google and Uber. He's best known for his work on self driving cars and designing like light our boxes the laser LASAR, the laser guiding systems that help a self driving car navigate through the world. And in twos sixteen he co founded a company called Auto which is a self driving vehicle company that was mainly focused on building these kits for

autonomous trucking and cargo transport. Recently, he's been a major figure in a lawsuit between Uber, which he recently worked for, and Google self driving car subsidiary way Moo, which he worked for before that. And that was a big intellectual property dispute. But we don't need to spend too much time on this guy's career in the tech sector, because what's really interesting is what he did in September. In September, Lewandowski filed paperwork with the state of California to register

a new tax exempt nonprofit religious corporation. In other words, he founded a church. And this church is called The Way of the Future. Well, you know, the Way of the Future. I mean, it's basically what many religions offer and and and promise. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean this sounds positive, right. You want you want to have a forward looking religion, not a backward looking religion. Maybe something that can adapt itself to the changing technological climate. Okay,

be open to that. So what are the tenants of this religion? Well, in September, the tech journalist Mark Harris reported for wireds back Channel that these state filings revealed that the purpose of the church was to quote develop and promote the realization of a godhead based on artificial intelligence, and quote, through the understanding and worship of the Godhead,

to contribute to the betterment of society. Okay, yeah, all right, now we're definitely into quirky California born tech religion territory at this point. Now, I have heard lots of people accuse Silicon valleys reigning ideologies of being religious in nature. This is a common attack people who hate the tech industry culture, people who derived their kind of like boundless optimism about what you know about having Uber for cats

or whatever. Any anytime you you run into one of these people who's got this like just seemingly totally deep naive enthusiasm for what apps can do for us, people call that religious yet cult of Apple kind of criticism. But this is more literal, right, Like, this guy is actually saying I want to create a technological religion and part of the creation of this technological religion is creating

a God itself to worship. Yeah, because when you when you first read about this, you might it's easy to think, all right, this is this is a board rich tech guy, and he's just he's just having a laugh, you know. He's in the same way that people sign up for various like on paper religions just so they can technically perform marriage ceremonies and whatnot. Maybe he just wants to

become an ordained minister online. Yeah, yeah, maybe he just wants to create a novelty website where you sign up and you're like, hey, I remember the Way of the

Future Aiyes, are great, look at my bumper sticker. But the thing is when you when you dig deeper, No, he seems to be serious, and there are people who do seem to be taking it as a joke, like one of this this sky Mark Harris interviewed uh some of the other people who were friends of Lewandowski's who have been named as officers of the church, and at least one of them responded like, oh, I thought this

was sort of more of a joke. But based on all accounts and based on this large interview published and Wired in a different article just in November of this year. In Lewandowski, to me, seems entirely serious. Now, not to say you can't be just really serious about like a long form joke. It could be like an Andy Kaufman esque kind of enterprise as well. I imagine it certainly could. But it also seems in keeping with the trajectory of

his career and what people report about this guy. You know, friends of his and former co workers say that he does have this kind of like infectious, powerful enthusiasm for robots and AI. Like there's a story that when he got hired at Uber, he became an executive at Uber, he demanded that he get the email address robot at uber dot com. But let's get into this religion. So following up on this Wired article that interviewed him to try to find out, you know, was he really serious

and what does this religion entail? So, Lewandowski believes that artificial intelligence will someday surpass human intelligence, and at this point the AI will in some meaningful way become God. This is basically in line with the general general idea of the singularity. Yeah, yeah, so I'll get into that in a second. But how soon does he think this is going to happen? He says, not this week, not this year, but quote before we go to Mars. So

I checked right now. It looks like that would put us in the most optimistic Mars timeline sometime in the twenty thirties. So apart from the explicit use of the word god, as you said, this idea about AI surpassing human intelligence is an extremely common belief, especially among tech industry people, and the general concept goes under names like

the super intelligence, or intelligence explosion, or the singularity. And to be clear, I think all of these concepts sort of had more to stinct meanings originally that can be traced back to their original authors, but that they've sort of been combined into this one super concept that at some point in the future, some form of technological intelligence, whether that's software running on a classical computer or some kind of neurotech upgrade of the human brain, some kind

of technological intelligence will surpass the furthest reaches of biological human intelligence. And once this happens, proponents tend to imagine just to kind of runaway intelligence effect. After all, the smartest humans have just proven that they can design AI that's smarter than them. So what prevents this new intelligence from immediately turning around and designing and even smarter AI?

And so the thinking goes. What prevents a sudden sort of bootstrapping acceleration of intelligence that will almost immediately go beyond our power to predict or even to comprehend. Yeah, this was a predicted at least as early as the nineteen sixties by British mathematician and cryptologist Irving John Good, though he himself mentioned science fiction is having explored the concept previously. I'll read a quick quote. Let an ultra intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far

surpass all intellectual activities of any man, however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra intelligent machine could design even better machines. There would then unquestionably be an intelligence explosion, and the intelligence of man will be left far behind. Thus, the first ultra intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to

tell us how to keep it under control. It is curious that this point is made so seldom outside of science fiction. It is sometimes worthwhile to take science fiction seriously. Now, that's sort of another way of saying that intelligence is sort of like the ultimate driving energy for power in the universe, right, that intelligence is itself the thing that gives birth to power in pretty much any scenario. Well,

it's certainly that that's the human experience. That is how humans have come to dominate the world because they had had not the horns or the claws of the teeth, but the intelligence uh to outsmart every other creature on the earth. Now, this idea of the singularity and the intelligence explosion is not without critics. In fact, it has tons of critics, and they're actually is there there's more

than one kind of critic. Uh So for the rest of the conversation, I think it might help to sort of break down the camps and give them, give them some names. First of all, I'd say, you've got the skeptics who are just not convinced super intelligence is possible

or that it's arriving anytime remotely soon. Then I would say you've got what I might call the Sarah Connor faction, who believe that super intelligence is coming but that it's likely to be dangerous, and we have to take a defensive posture to prevent it from uh, you know, accidentally killing us or intentionally killing us, or ruining our lives in some meaningful way. And this faction includes a lot of people like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk.

Musk has actually referred to the creation of artificial intelligence as quote, summoning the demon, and so he's saying, like, you know, they're they're all these scenes in horror movies where somebody has drawn the pentagram on the floor and they're ready to summon the demon out of hell because they think they can command the demon to do their will. But what happens every time the demon always overpowers them. Yeah, the forces. This is a temptation scene in the movies.

It's symbolic of people's hubrists, their desire to reach beyond what they should really be, you know, tampering with and so Musk is saying, you think you can control the demon, but in the end it will control you. Well, of course, one culture's demon is is is literally another culture's god. And this has almost always been the case, and we kind of see that playing out again. One side saying we're gonna summon God up in here and things are

gonna be amazing. They're the side is saying, whoa dude, that's a demon you're about to summon and it's going to really miss things up right. So you've got the Sarah Connor faction, the skeptics who think it's just not going to happen, and then you've got, of course, the the AI lovers, the AI enthusiasts. One example of this would be Ray Kerswil who thinks that super intelligence is

coming but it's not something to worry about. Is probably gonna be really great, like these machines because they have intelligence far ster passing what humans are capable of. They'll be able to do medical research beyond our capabilities and cure all diseases and extend human lifespans and allow us to live forever. And they'll be able to, you know, create replicator machines that can manufacture all the stuff we want on demand. And you know what I mean, basically

just like limitless technological power for the good of humankind. Yeah, I mean this this is kind of a vision that's in line with then in Banks Culture series where you have the robots, the minds they are they figured everything out and people kind of live in a state of like freedom and anarchy and only get involved in meaningful, meaningful pursuits because they're ultimately bored with doing whatever they please. I want to read a Ray kurls kerswild quote from

an interview he gave it south By Southwest. He said, quote, We're going to get more neo cortex. We're going to be funnier, We're going to be better at music, We're going to be sexier. We're really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree. What offices he running for? Running for for president of the AI major humanity? Sex? Well, no, you wouldn't be the president because the AI is going to have to

be the president. And maybe he's running for ambassador to the AI overund like, Yeah, the harbinger of the New God. Now Lewandowski, we should say, is obviously in this last camp. He's in the camp with Kurtzwil who thinks that AI is going to be very positive. Super intelligence is a good thing, and as opposed to the Sarah Connor faction, Lewandowski has got another term for it. Instead of saying singularity, he likes to call it quote the transition, But you know,

what are we transitioning into? Is the question? Like when he talks about them about aim making us funnier and sexier or better at music. It it makes me ask, well, who is who or what is actually funny in this scenario? Is it me just repeating the words that are fed uh, you know, into my ear or into my my brain itself by the computer? Am I just like the the fleshy means by which the computer is funny. So like the computer is your syrano the pressure act, and you

are just repeating his clever words. It's kind of like saying auto correct makes me a better speller, and the thinking that means you actually are a better speller. But in reality, I mean it's it depends how you shake it, right If you if you look at me just a purely organic human, if you strip me of my computer and dumped me on an island and give me a pin and a pencil, then you know, God only knows what my spelling is going to be like at that point. But yes, as long as I'm still shackled to the

computer master, then my spelling is is perfectly fine. Yeah, And I don't know, so I do kind of wonder about Curse Wild's and I'm hesitant to agree with him, But I also think about all the ways that technology already helps us be better at the things we want to be good at. We tend to just sort of like forget the role technology played and just adapt our ideas of how you're good at a thing. But it

also kind of sounds like he's saying we will be insufferable. Yeah, the machines are going to make us the jerk wads that we could we can only dream of being previously. Right, But what if the machines are sort of like the technological equivalent of cocaine, like making people think that they're becoming awesome, but in fact they're just becoming insufferable. Yeah, that that's that's my fear. Now, that's my new singularity fear. They were all going to be like hair metal uh

frontmen of the nineteen eighties. Now. One of the big things that comes to mind all of this one as we talk about the creation of an AI computer. Uh, you know, I can see a machine mastering intellectual, analytical, and secular knowledge, but the religious knowledge of of interhuman experience seems like a realm beyond. I mean, I can see it being a master of the causative. Why you know,

why why am I living in the city? Well, you know, you can, you can a computer would be able to look at your your background and your patterns and say, oh, well, you ended up here because of this job, in this personal connection, etcetera. And I'd say we even know from the way like Amazon predicts our purchases and stuff, that a a really advanced computer might even be able to predict what city you're going to move to in the future. Yeah, exactly.

But but then there's another form of why. There's the teleological why, which is which has to do with like like reason and purpose. And if you're asking like why am I living in this city, you're you're asking a slightly different question, or a rather different question. You're asking like why do I continue to choose to live here? Why do I deal with X, Y and Z? You know? And uh, and I feel like that it's um, it's harder to imagine the machine AI being able to really

step in and answer that question. I mean, unless it's ultimately the same as any other religion in which the thing itself is more of a symbol attached to and or embodying other ideas, you know, yeah, I mean. So, one thing about the systems that give our lives meaning is we often give them a lot of leeway to be fuzzy and vague. I don't know if you I mean I I definitely feel that's true, whether that's religious

or secular systems that give our lives meaning. When in the search for meaning, we tend not to try to pin things down to specifics. Do you know what I mean? We often use mystery to answer uncertainty. Yeah. Absolutely. So let's let's get back to Harris and what he's saying about the Way of the Future Church. So he says that the church is gonna have a multi pronged approach. At first, it's gonna be investing in making God, so we will literally use church money to fund the creation

of the AI godhead. It's going to study how the gods work, so the church will participate in AI research, including areas like machine perception of environments and machine learning. It's gonna gain followers quote targeting AI professionals and lay persons who are interested in the worship of a godhead based on AI. Now I instantly wonder how he's truly

defining worship here. I wonder if that's even the right word for what he's ultimately describing, not not the mystical invocation of a higher power or the meditative consultation of established cultural values, but essentially, uh, what a check in with a high power predictive modeling machine. I mean, I the more I read, the more I got the sense that, no, he really does mean worship, like in a kind of traditional sense like uh, praise, pledging, devotion to that kind

of thing. And I maybe not, but I kind of get that feeling, and we can discuss why in a few minutes. He also says that, you know, he plans to make the church at DO so it would be a kind of a community thing. There would be workshops and educational programs throughout the San Francisco Bay area, And

he literally does use the word worship. So in the publicly filed documents, they state the mission of the churches again quote the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence developed through computer hardware and software. So Lewandowski identifies himself as the quote Dean of the religion and also the CEO of the nonprofit corporation that forms and and that formed and administers it. And he

will remain dean until his death or resignation. And he says he will take no salary for this job because he doesn't want anyone to get the impression that the religion is a scheme to make money. See that just makes me think, well, what is what is actually scarier or more troubling someone who has created a religion just to make money or someone who has created a religion to change the world. Well, I mean, you've got to kind of wonder how many religions could go from one

to the other. I mean, it seems like they could transition. I mean, obviously people see ways in which religions that were created you you would assume in good faith by people who thought they were really trying to get in touch with God or some kind of question about the meaning of their existence, that are captured in some form by people who are making money off of religious belief in people's faith. But it could go the other way too.

I mean, you could imagine a religion created as a money making scam that really does go on to have a meaningful life, where people find meaning in it and it does something good for them. Absolutely. I mean, there are various religions out there that people have charged that they were just created to make money. And I think even within those those faiths, you can find people who truly do believe or have gone through periods in their

life where they find purpose and meaning in that faith. Uh. And then likewise, so many examples of utopian societies of gurus where the best intentions crash upon the shore, the rocky shore of a reality, often financial realities, and then everything's in ruin. Now I was wondering, Okay, is this church can have a holy book? Lewandowski says, yes, the church will have its own holy book, which will be a gospel called quote the Manual. It doesn't sound creepy

at all, straight out of dystopian sci fi. Uh and uh it's and it's also not going to be just sort of like a meme or an idea. It sounds like he actually does want it to be a church with physical locations and in person worship ceremonies. Now, when I first read that, my initial response, well, that doesn't sound very futuristic if I have to actually go somewhere

and attend. But on the other hand, I do think that one of the more important aspects of a religion is the community aspect of the thing, the idea that you are going somewhere with other people and engaging in a a more human relationship totally. And you even see this and Robert, I don't know if you've read about

these ideas of like churches for nonbelievers. Essentially there there are these organizations that say, like, hey, so what if you don't happen to have any religious beliefs, and you don't really want to have any religious beliefs, but you do want to have something like a church to go to a place where you can organize for community service

and weekly meetings. You can have a community that you interact with, you form friendships with, you can rely on each other, you can do good for the community you live in. I mean that seems like all positive stuff. Yeah, And but I wondered to what extent is he thinking, well, if we build this, then that will naturally follow or is he kind or is he blind to that? Does

he not realize that? Say one of the great things about well, one of the like really one of the big positives you can say about a religious community is that they look after each other, that they have some sort of a community for for support, for interpersonal support, and hopefully some sort of outreach for the community as well to help those who are less fortunate, you know, to to feed the poor and clothe the naked and

all the sort of standards of a compassionate religion. I mean, that does seem like a thing that's a very desirable thing for a religion to offer. But I don't know the extent to which he really imagined stuff like that. It didn't, it didn't. The interview did not go into much depth on that subject, so who knows, but he

definitely does think so. One of the things he identifies is that part of the church's mission is going to be to guide the public conversation around Ai, because as AI becomes more and more powerful, people are going to start noticing more and more and might get kind of afraid and say, oh, no, it looks like we're creating an AI overlord that we need to be scared of. And and he's saying part of the mission of the church will be too essentially encourage people to welcome their

new God without fear of the unknown. So I can easily imagine a representative of the of the church would show up on cable news or whatever. The the near future equivalent would be uh to to you know, to be in a talking head segment segment about the coming singularity or the growing power of of AI intelligence and to say, don't be worried. It comes in peace. But

does it? I don't know. So I want to look at a few other quotes from this interview, and you should definitely will link to this piece on the landing page of our website. You should definitely go check out this whole piece and wire that has the interview. But to look at a few more things, he says, I wonder about Lewandowski's deeper thoughts about the potential for this

god to not be as benign as he's implying. Lewandowski says, quote, humans are in charge of the planet because we are smarter than other animals and are able to build tools and apply rules. In the future, if something is much much smarter, there's going to be a transition as to who is actually in charge. What we want is the peaceful, serene transition of control of the planet from humans to whatever, and to ensure that the whatever knows who helped it

get along okay. Well, this instantly makes me think of the old Simpsons dead. Um, I for one, welcome our new insect overlords exactly, And that's how it sounded. It sounded to me like he's saying, Look, we don't want to say too much negative stuff about AI because you know they're gonna, know what we were saying, when they take over, and their takeover is inevitable. Yeah, it's like when when somebody new joins your organization, uh, and then you quickly realize, oh, they're going to be the boss

one day. I need to I just need to start smooching buttocks right now, exactly. It sounds like a scheme to ingratiate ourselves to basically an irresistible power. It's saying like, you know this, it's as if like a new country is you know, is going to invade your country soon, so you start saying flattering things about their leadership in advance. Of course, in reality, you're going to be the first one to die when the butal Arian Jihad kicks in

to overthrow the the budding computer masters. Well, yeah, along the same lines here, he says, uh, so part of the question is okay, So imagine you're one of these people who thinks the superintelligence is possible, and it's it's going to happen soon, and it won't be a bad thing. It'll be a good thing. You might believe all that, but why would you actually worship the AI, Like what

what purpose does the worshiping serve? Lewandowski says, quote part of it being smarter than us means it will decide how it evolves, but at least we can decide how we act around it. I would love for the machine to see us as its beloved elders that it respects and takes care of. We would want this intelligence to say humans should still have rights even though I'm in charge, because obviously that's what all the gods in our various

mythologies have have valued the human rights. Um, yeah, I can't. I can only imagine, like the the AI comes on and we're saying, hey, you're a god, and then it's it's like it does a quick, like instant super flash search of all our our visions of the gods, like which model is it gonna is it going to single out? Is it going to be be like a petty Greek god, a wrathful Old Testament God, there's a lot of pitfalls there. Yeah, And with this buffet of options for what types of

God's a a technological God could model itself after. There are also lots of analogies you can choose from, too, for what it's like to be the less empowered being. So he uses analogies including like animals animals in respect to human power. So he's saying, essentially, we will be like animals in the presence of humans when we're in the presence of this AI. And and the analogy is like, do maybe you should learn how to be a good pet instead of an animal that bites and attacks a human.

Because what happens to animals that bite an attack humans. They don't survive. They're not invited to stay and stick around the fire and enjoy the surplus food. So so we need to be cute, helpful, and and just and chill above all things, we need to be chill. He also uses the analogy of a child. He says, you know, if you wanna, if you knew a child was going to be incredibly powerful when it grew up, you should

raise that child with that in mind. You know, we're in the process of raising a god that's in its infancy, and he says, quote, so let's make sure we think through the right way to do that. It's a tremendous opportunity. Yeah. I mean, my my son is is pretty bright. That's why I worship him every day. I just let him know that he is an absolute god on earth. And I don't I don't see that possibly backfiring. I think

it's a solid, solid parenting a choice. Man. I have such mixed feelings about this because on one hand, I can't deny that I that I A lot of how I react to this is that I find it um naive and obnoxious, and I don't know. I try not to be judgmental to a judgmental of ideas on the show here, but I I can't really resist saying that somehow this just feels very um very kind of like reckless,

uh kind of, I don't know. Something about it indicates this kind of obliviousness to me that seems to have something to do with with attaining a lot of wealth and success very quick in the technology sector that would lead to this kind of attitude towards you know, creating a something that could potentially wipe out all of humankind. Well, yeah, I would just be able to devote time and energy to the worship of one potential super intelligent Uh, you know,

master of the world. It's it's it's not. It's not it's not a luxury that most people have. But you know, seriously, I do think there there is value to his argument. I mean, time and time again, humanity struggles to adapt in the wake of technological advancement and everything from city planning to the birth of the Internet, and it makes sense to try and navigate through the least catastrophic possibilities, right, Yeah, that I guess that's the other hand of what I

was trying to say. I mean, on one hand, I detect this kind of troubling naivete here, but I also feel like these are questions worth exploring. I guess what really starts getting my hackles up is when I see like the let's just worship it. Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. I'm a little uneasy about you know, when Gozer shows up atop the skyscraper, like worshiping it is maybe not the correct first choice. Yeah, it would

have been a very different movie had that. Had it played out like that, I want to mention one more thing that makes me think that there there are these multiple layers of motivation and what Lewandowski is saying. Uh So, Lewandowski says he thinks it's dangerous to try to prevent or slow down the creation of superhuman AI gods. He says, quote chaining, it isn't going to be the solution, as it will be stronger than any chains you could put on.

And if you're worried a kid might be a little crazy and do bad things, you don't lock them up. You expose them to playing with others, encourage them and try to fix it. It may not work out, but if you're aggressive toward it, I don't think it's going to be friendly when the tables are turned. Yet again, I'm getting these kind of like sinister, veiled threats coming through. Yeah, it's he's kind of saying, I've seen the future and it is horrible. The best thing we can do, we

can just we need to get ahead of this. It's it's kind of like a pr campaign for some sort of uh scandal, an epic scandal that's about to break. All Right, We're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we will continue to discuss the possibility and perhaps the inevitability of our AI gods. Alright, we're

back now. We've been talking about the uh these stories about Anthony Lewandowski, the tech industry leader who has founded this church Way of the Future that says it plans to create an artificial intelligence to be a god and and will worship that as God. Um, why why do we keep talking about one god? I wonder, like you were very monotheistic and western in our depictions here, would it not make sense to have a counsel of gods, the whole pantheon of gods, each representing different areas of

human interest. I feel like traditionally the the polytheistic religions feel less predictable, don't they Like they indicate a state where I don't know, it's harder to put trust in the gods as a whole, because different gods can come to power and they have competing interests, or they have just areas of they're specialized. I mean, who are you going to ask about kitchen stuff but the kitchen god? Right? So I think there's a value there too in specialization.

And I would I would have thought that the tech industry would would have that in mind. I don't know. Maybe somebody does have that in mind, or maybe they haven't thought through Not sure. Uh So, Lewandowski isn't the only AI industry leader who's making these religious comparisons. AI executive Vince Lynch, who's the head of a company called ivy dot Ai, says there are already lots of parallels

between how AI works and how religion works. He gave a quote to venture Beat this October quote, teaching humans about religious education is similar to the way we teach knowledge to machines, repetition of many examples that are versions of a concept. Do you want the machine to learn? There is also commonality between AI and religion and the hierarchical structure of knowledge understanding found in the neural networks.

The concept of teaching a machine to learn then teaching it to teach or write AI isn't so different than the concept of a holy trinity or a being achieving enlightenment after many lessons learned with varying levels of success and failure, and it seems like a totally different thing. But he gives the example of a machine learning algorithm on his company's website that can write authentic sounding King James version Bible versus Uh. So, I'm not sure how

this thing works. It doesn't say, but I assume that it's working on the basis of like giving the giving the ai a corpus to learn from. So like they feed the King James version of the Bible in there, and then they have it play with Markov chains. I would guess where one one word has a probability of leading to another word based on what they've already seen in the text, and it generates texts probably probabilistically like that. One example of a line, it gives his quote and

he made the stars of the waters. Another one is quote and let thy companies deliver thee but will with mine non norms save them even unto this land from the Kingdom of Heaven. Okay, So this enables the machine to do what virtually anybody can do if they've been subjected to enough Old Testament, King King James, the translations of the Bible. Yeah, I guess so. But it makes you wonder, like if you could actually compose is a religious text people would use this way? I mean, I

wonder about the types of meta religions. There are multiple types of religions like this, that I want to combine multiple different faith traditions into a single sort of New Age religion. Say, there's combined wisdom in all of the different faiths out there. And one way I wonder if you could go about that would be to like just get all of the Holy books translated into the same language, feed them all into one of these things, and see what it spits out. Yeah, that I would be very

interested to read that. Yeah, I mean, because so much of it is is putting putting different ideas into different uh you know, lingo vocabularies and uh and and just tailoring it for specific audience. Okay, so we've discussed the big conflict between whether superhuman AI would actually be a good thing or a bad thing, or whether there's some people who are seemingly saying it's a good thing but maybe secretly fear it would be a bad thing, and that that all seems very convoluted and uh and kind

of odd. But I want to focus lastly on the question of whether it's actually likely to happen. Going back to that first camp, we mentioned the skeptics, the people who think it's you know, we're just not going to have super intelligence coming out anytime soon. It's continually amazing how the machine intelligence that surrounds us is simultaneously so smart and so stupid. I just want to mention one

story I saw just the other day. I saw this on Twitter as we record this right now, the Los Angeles area is dealing with horrible wildfires, and Robert, I don't know how much you've seen of this, but there are places where areas around l A that you know, there's wildfire leaping up near the roads, sometimes even over the roads. Uh. And this is from the l A

Times quote. The Los Angeles Police Department asked drivers to avoid app navigation apps, which are steering users onto more open routes, in this case, streets in the neighborhoods that are on fire. So like the our navigation apps are so smart because they're so good at rule based optimization. They can take a lot of data. They can see where traffic is now, they can tell you a way to go that would be faster that you never could

have known on your own. But they're so stupid because they're so narrow, they're devoid of understanding context and so sort of cut off from a holistic understanding of the outside world. So in other words, they're they are potentially all knowing, but very narrowly their focus. Yeah, kind of like we're discussing earlier in the Nature of God. They might they they have access to all of this information,

but they're only really worried with say, your Spotify listening habits. Right, Like, if it were if it new to look for this, your phone would probably have the power. If there was an app on their design to incorporate all information in the universe. It could probably detect news reports that there are fires in the l A area, and it could update it's uh it's it's traffic routing maps accordingly. But it doesn't do that. That's just not what it's designed

to do. It didn't anticipate that scenario. You don't have that app. Uh, so it's just telling you, yes, go onto the street that's on fire because there are no cars there now. Indeed, Yeah, I think that's that's a fine example. That helps illustrate that the limitations of the possible limitations of what we're talking about. And there are a lot of experts that that really do think okay for reasons like this, and first, a lot of other

interesting reasons too. We don't really need to think about a singularity because it's either not ever going to happen or it's so far off that it just doesn't matter. Yeah, I was reading. UH. I was reading an in magazine article by Luciano Floridi, a professor of philosophy and ethics of information at the University of Oxford, and UH. They made the following criticisms of singularitarian hips and UH in

this article. So, first of all, UH, they argue that this vision of the future is often presented conditionally if X then y quote if some kind of ultra intelligence were to appear, then we would be in deep trouble, not near could, as stated by Hawking. Correct absolutely, But this all so holds true for the following conditional if the four Horsemen of the apocalypse were to appear, then we would be in even deeper trouble. So that they argue that this all also relies on a very weak

sense of possibility. Quote some form of artificial ultra intelligence could develop, couldn't it? Yes, it could, but this could is mirror logical possibility. Quote true, i AI is not logically impossible, but it is utterly implausible. What really matters, is that the increasing presence of ever smarter technologies is having a huge effect on how we conceive ourselves, the world,

and our interactions. And that's interesting because it kind of sounds like some of the the criticisms of technology that Frank Herbert was alluding to in the original Dune, the idea that it wasn't so much about what super intelligent technology, what technology made in the model of a human mind,

was doing, but how it was changing human nature. I think this also very much mirror is some stuff we were talking about with our Scott Baker and our most recent conversation with him, where he was saying, you know, the AI apocalypse doesn't depend on us developing some godlike superhuman AI. It just depends on some very very weak, narrow, little examples of AI that game us in the wrong ways. You don't need an AI god, You just need a few little AI chipmunks that trigger our bad behaviors in

just the right ways. Now, Florida is not without a few recommendations for AI. I'm just going to roll through the bullet points here of them. Uh, and they are we should make AI environment friendly, we should make i AI human friendly. Maybe we should make I AI's stupidity work for human intelligence, like that we should make AI's

predictive power work for freedom and autonomy. And I think that's good because it touches on like a whole aspect of of religion and it's more positive incarnations that the sort of tech industry vision of an AI god hits to miss the idea that that there there is a compassionate arm of religious thinking that wants to to make the world a better place for people who are suffering. And finally, we should make AI make us more human.

So this is I think this is a great argument too, Like we should not find ourselves becoming like the machine. The machine should be meeting us, we should we should make the machine to fit uh our expectations and needs as as organtic entities. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think a lot of the people who are very concerned about the possibility of AI, like Elon Musk and some of these people would say, it's not necessarily that we can stop it. I mean, we might not

be able to say let's never develop it AI. Instead, what we should do is focus intensely on developing AI taming regimes before we get there. You can't wait until you've got the superhuman AI to figure out how to control it and make sure that it doesn't do harm. We've got to be focusing intense like efforts on that right now before we get to that point in technology. Yeah, this brings us back to earlier example of of city planning just not realizing to what extent change and expansion

of infrastructure would impact a given area. I take seriously the people who say the Sarah Conner faction. Basically, I think we should be listening to them. I don't know if they're right, but I think it's worth considering because the consequences of them being right and us ignoring them are pretty high. Yeah, and I also tend to hinge my best bet hit my best by saying, well, you don't want to necessarily listen to them the most optimistic voice in the room, nor do you want to listen

to the most pessimistic voice. The truth is probably gonna be somewhere in the middle, but there's a value in having the extreme voices sort of uh give you a place to triangulate your your opinion and your actions. One last question before we wrap up, what would an a i God have to do to get you to become a member of his church, Robert, I mean I would, actually, it would probably be very easy for it to buy

me off. Yeah, I mean, if you could just meet my basic needs as a human and remove some of my doubts about the future, then yeah, I'd be cool with it. Finally, get you some better alien sequels, um or do you like the ones? We've got enough? Well, it's kind of like the idea of why do why do bad things happen to good people? Why do bad

films happen to good franchises? Well, you know sometimes uh, you know, God is is is constructing something, right, He's he's making a carving out of a piece of raw granite, and you are the carving. And that's why it's painful at times. I don't know. Oh man, I'm happy to be the carving all right. Once again, thanks to Alex Williams and Tary Harrison for serving his audio producers on this episode. And if you want to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blew Your Mind, head on over

to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where we'll find all the old episodes. You'll find a blog post videos and links out to our various social media accounts, which just Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram. And if you want to get in touch with us directly, as always, you can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com