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Confusing Religion and Technology
“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” — Abraham Maslow
There’s this idea that’s been floated in several places, and not just the article that really got really got me back on this train of thought (I’ll get to it in a moment). Here’s the idea: somehow, all this obsession with AI development, with technology in general, and of course, the idea that technology will somehow make our lives better and help us live longer, is, according to some people at least, just a new form of religion.
To be clear, there have been some obvious intersections of AI technology and religion. One of my personal favorites is AI Jesus, who streams 24/7 on Twitch. If you have a Twitch account, you can partake of his synthetic wisdom (based on the Bible, we’re told). Ask him questions and he may choose yours to answer. God, at your disposal, 24 hours a day. There have been pastors playing with sermons written by ChatGPT and just last summer, on June 9th, 2023, ChatGPT took its place in the pulpit and started preaching to a packed assembly at St. Paul’s Lutheran church in the Bavarian town of Fuerth, in Germany using AI-generated avatars that preached the word, with voices generated using ElevenLabs.
In those cases, people are pointing out the obvious intersection of faith and tech, in much the same way as church services migrated to…
