AI Jesus and other heresies from Silicon Valley

Ray Kurzweil is famous for a number of things, but recently he’s famously taken the term “singularity” from physics and applied it to artificial intelligence.

In physics, the term often refers to black holes—a phenomenon so powerful that not even light escapes its gravitational force. Information goes in but doesn’t come out. It’s the mystery of what becomes of things once they enter the point of no return that Kurzweil is alluding to when he uses it. In a world with artificial superintelligence, what will life be like? We simply don’t know. Will it be Star Trek or The Matrix? It’s anyone’s guess.

Artificial intelligence is already changing the world in unexpected ways. For instance, out of the blue, nuclear power is being brought back to feed AI’s voracious appetite for electricity. (Three Mile Island’s infamous reactor in Pennsylvania may be coming back online in 2028 simply to power Microsoft’s AI project.) Recently, the bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission proposed “a Manhattan Project–style initiative to fund the development of AI systems that will be as smart or smarter than humans, amid intensifying competition with China over advanced technologies.”

Why is there an AI arms race in the first place? Because “knowledge is power,” and AI is scary smart.

Oddly, AI is the biggest thing Christians aren’t talking about. But that needs to change. What’s at stake isn’t just national defense or a reengineered economy—what’s at stake is the reengineering of the human race. The people who put the matter this way don’t wear tinfoil hats. They work at places like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, where billions of dollars are being poured into artificial intelligence.

For those who go before AI to prepare the way (such as Kurzweil—and he’s not alone), the technology doesn’t merely promise to upgrade productivity, it is a secular eschaton, an apocalypse that will end an old order and institute a new one. A select few may even merge with artificial intelligence and (according to these prophets) potentially live for thousands of years, while the rest of us will likely be deemed “economically useless” and be relegated to life on the dole (aka UBI—“universal basic income”).

If you’re the sort of person who believes this is a crazy and unlikely scenario, I’m with you. But don’t forget that communism promised all sorts of things it never delivered, but this hasn’t stopped people from believing in it. Pascal said, “The heart has its reasons that the reason does not know,” and sometimes those reasons are stupid.

What we’re up against isn’t merely new technology. We’re up against a new vision of the future, a secular utopia in which sheep and goats will be separated and assigned to their respective rewards and punishments—the “creatives” smart enough to justify their existence will inherit the closest thing to eternal life AI can generate, while the rest of us are consigned to the outer darkness. And just like any other prophetic vision, there is the prospect of syncretism in which some erstwhile Christians pick up on a trend and blend it in with the Christian faith, whether doing so makes sense or not.

As an example of what I mean, a Swiss church is using AI to simulate the personality of Jesus as part of an art project called Deus in Machina (God in a Machine). The AI simulacrum of Jesus offers spiritual guidance to anyone who asks.

My, what could go wrong? Why would anyone think this is a good idea? And where does this lead?

You might assume I’m entirely negative about the new technology, but I’m not. Instead, I believe we face some very challenging choices, and we might be looking at some very promising developments. We need to think hard about this, and simplistic solutions won’t help. Early adopters have enjoyed experimenting with chatbots like Chat GPT-3, but I think these chatbots are the radium toys phase of AI. (In the early 1950s, there was an educational toy that came with radium!) At the same time, AI’s potential for good is almost impossible to fathom. Already, it is producing scientific breakthroughs that are practically impossible without it—for example, AlphaFold, an AI developed by DeepMind (Google’s AI). It identified the 200 million ways proteins can fold. This resulted in a Nobel Prize for its developers. And who knows what new medicines and therapies will come from this discovery?

If anything, we need our own Manhattan Project to think through the promises and perils of the future that we’re rushing into. And if theologians and ministers think they can leave this to the scientists, they’re naïve. If we do, our people might come under the spell of AI evangelists like Ray Kurzweil, and if that happens, an AI Jesus will look harmless by comparison.