The neon god

AI, “Religion 2.0” and where we might find God

A few weeks ago I was sitting in my parked car, waiting to pick up one or another of my family members from some appointment, idly scrolling through my phone while listening to my Spotify playlist. On Substack, I came across an article by consultant and strategist Pranath Fernando with the ambitious title “AI God is Nonsense—But Do We Have An AI Demigod Already?” Intrigued, I began reading because up until then I had not given any thought to the effect of AI on religion. Fernando summarizes a number of arguments for the idea of AI being (or becoming) a new religion and rebuts some of these while leaving the possibility open—he quickly softens his “Nonsense” comment from his title, limiting it only to the state of AI as we know it today.

As I read on, by some strange (divine?) coincidence, my playlist served up Simon and Garfunkel’s 1960s folk classic “The Sound of Silence.” Somehow, songwriter Paul Simon must have anticipated the internet, social media and AI—the juxtaposition of his brilliant lyrics with all the arguments and counterarguments I was reading just seemed perfect.

Fernando’s article linked to another, and some YouTube videos as well, all offering different takes on the idea of AI as religion. Suffice to say, the most enthusiastic proponents of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) are making the case that, beyond being indistinguishable from human intelligence, AGI can become a new, even improved, God and displace traditional religions with a better one—complete with a new, better sacred text. Naturally, this notion of “Religion 2.0” is causing some consternation among fundamentalists of every stripe while more moderate technology experts are trying, at least half-heartedly, to calm the conversation.

I was asked recently if I were a man of faith—and I answered that I am, although not in the old-fashioned heaven-and-hell sense. More on that as we continue, but my understanding of spirituality, developed over nearly six decades on this earth, leads me to believe that AI will not start a new religion nor become any kind of deity. However, some aspects of AI might imitate some human, superhuman or even godlike qualities; in the popular perception this could have serious consequences.

A vision softly creeping
The proponents of AI as a God (or, for starters, demigod) begin with Nietzsche’s famous aphorism that “God is dead”—meaning that our modern, humanist and scientific society has left no place for the divine. This void needs to be filled and technology, specifically AI, it is argued, is uniquely up to the task. The problem with this is that it’s a pretty reductionist view of religion and misses the point of spirituality in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Let me explain.

I remember a joke printed in a church bulletin from several decades ago. A minister had sent out invitations to the whole congregation for the church picnic, which was to take place the following Sunday afternoon, except he had forgotten one staunch little old lady. Embarrassed, he phoned the woman later to offer her a personal invitation, to which she answered drily “You’re too late, I’ve already prayed for rain.”

Another Substack author quoted by Fernando claims that “when people can use technology to predict the weather, diagnose and treat illness, and manufacture resources, they may rely less on religious beliefs and practices for these specific problems.” I suggest that this reductionism is a straw-man argument and—per the joke I cited above—mainstream religions have long ago moved far beyond praying for such things as a cure for disease or a good harvest.

If this is all that the Religion 2.0 proponents have to offer, then religion will be just fine without AI. I grew up in the Presbyterian Church in Canada, and my own thinking on religion has evolved considerably as the church itself has also modernized. The chaplain at my son’s high school once told us at a parent-teacher event “Just remember, God is love and all the rest is window dressing.” He’s right—and an interventionist God, artificial or otherwise, who makes real-time adjustments to human affairs in response to our requests is not necessary to the contemporary religious experience.

But of course, this isn’t all there is to Religion 2.0.

Talking without speaking, hearing without listening
Another argument for AI-based religion is that it offers, in Fernando’s words, a “more direct, personalized connection with God.” He goes on to suggest that an AI god “allows for more tailored guidance and insights” so that we may dispense with what he sees as the generic rituals and beliefs of established religions. An AI god, Fernando would have us believe, is one who “can help you with your day-to-day life in practical ways, a God that might be able to know you better than you know yourself.”

Well, I spent a large part of my career selling IBM’s WebSphere Commerce software platform to retail and B2B clients across Canada. Such language reminds me of nothing so much as the marketing copy the company produced to promote our product. We had a pretty good personalization and recommendation engine built into the software and it still works well, but it’s not worthy of worship. Even now, personalization algorithms are by no means perfect—Amazon and other e-Commerce giants still send me e-mails telling me to look at products I’ve already bought.

A few months ago, I had lunch with a friend and former colleague I hadn’t seen in a while. We ended up having a fascinating and deep conversation on many topics both technical and philosophical. My companion was a great conversationalist, asking thoughtful questions and taking time to really listen to and understand the answers before moving on. I can only hope and believe that I kept up. (It was in this same conversation, by the way, that I was asked about being a man of faith.)

What strikes me in retrospect is the profound difference between such a personal interaction, and what passes for conversations online—in social media, forums and even with generative AI. I like Facebook and Instagram in that they help me stay in touch with friends from my childhood and relatives back in Europe. But too often, outside of those basic connections, all I see in the comments sections of my feed is complete strangers having the most superficial, puerile arguments over irrelevant topics. The online world, for whatever reason, just doesn’t lend itself to the kind of deep personal connection you can make face to face.

If I consider AI, the very name ChatGPT is suggestive of the same shortcoming. It’s a chatbot—it can chat but it can’t converse. An AI system that might tell me it’s a good idea to bring an umbrella if I go outside today as the weather app on my iPhone does, or recommend me the latest novel by Kazuo Ishiguro because my browsing history reveals a taste for a certain genre of fiction—sure, that can be helpful, but it’s not exactly the technological equivalent of St. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus.

For myself, I feel that it’s possible to have a personal connection to God based on love, humility, wonder and especially curiosity—much like, or even better than, a good conversation with a close friend. This is a very special experience and it’s far removed from tailored advice on what to wear, buy or read. AI can be good for one of those things, but it’s completely out of its depth when it comes to the other.

The people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made
Fernando argues that AI already exhibits in large measure if not yet completely two of the traits normally attributed to God: omnipresence and omniscience.[1] Omnipresence is manifested in AI’s pervasiveness across cloud computing, internet-enabled devices and pretty much all commercial software we use on a daily basis. I’ll let that one go for now, but I will just point out that it’s not nearly the same as the religious notion of a God who transcends space and time.

AI omniscience, however, bears closer examination. Fernando suggests that “AI systems possess knowledge and understanding that far surpasses any human” and that AI can therefore provide superhuman guidance and wisdom, which may be “appealing to many in a world where trust in human institutions, and indeed trust in our fellow humans generally, seems waning.” On the theme of trust, he also points out that an AI religion may be more reliable and free of corruption than human-led religious institutions.

All this kind of reminds me of the Old Testament story of the golden calf. If you don’t know or remember it and want to look it up, it’s in Exodus 32 but the essence of the story is this: The people of Israel, having just been liberated from slavery in Egypt, were waiting for Moses to come down from his meeting with God atop Mount Sinai that would result in the delivery of the Ten Commandments. Moses’ divine conference ran long and the people grew impatient, looking for a new leader and a new God to take them forward. Moses’ brother Aaron stepped up and collected the people’s gold, melting it down and fashioning it into an idol in the shape of a calf, which they promptly began to worship. When God got wind of this development, he was furious and ready to destroy the entire nation. After Moses pleaded for mercy, God reduced the punishment to civil war and plague before the caravan could move on in its migration to the promised land.

We don’t have to believe literally in a God who is so petty and jealous as to be threatened by an inanimate object—but I think the point of the story is that if humans put blind faith and trust into something that is artificially made, it usually doesn’t go well. I like Paul Simon’s term—AI is a “neon god,” a bright and shiny object that I fear will distract us from the very real task of solving our own problems. I’m not saying AI isn’t useful, but it’s a tool that can help us, not a God that will lead us.

It's true that religious institutions are often corrupt and fallible, but the institution is not the same as the religion itself. It’s also true that governments and secular institutions have fallen short of the trust they ask of us. And, yes, our own interpersonal relationships need a lot of work for us to be able to trust and respect one another. But putting our faith blindly into AI or Religion 2.0 won’t get us to the promised land. AI is a human creation and its knowledge is only as good or bad as the data we feed it—data which we ourselves also created. Viewed this way, Religion 2.0 begins to look like self-worship, an egotism that is unproductive at best and destructive at worst.

Personal integrity, honest dialogue, common sense and goodwill combined with the judicious application of technology where we can be confident of its benefit—these are and always have been the keys to the success and progress of our human institutions. Our relationship with God is manifested not in the data but in our relationships with each other: the gospel of Matthew tells us “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”

The words of the prophets
I’ve referred a few times now to the Christian Bible. It’s the one I’m most familiar with but every religion comes with its own sacred text(s). Fernando embeds a YouTube video in which the historian Yuval Noah Harari propounds the idea that because AI (unlike the printing press) can generate new ideas, it will, sooner rather than later, write us a new bible. Harari argues that because each religion claims special divine status for its own scripture, an AI bible will therefore transcend all of them. OK, the cynic in me will say, given AI’s well-documented failings of bias, error and hallucination, its bible likely wouldn’t be much different from the holy book we already have—and cynicism aside I continue to take issue with the notion of AI generating original ideas.

This is another area where modern mainstream religion has evolved, and Harari’s arguments about sacred scripture betray the same reductionist fallacy I’ve discussed above. A belief in the Bible as the direct, literally and indisputably true “Word of God” leads to all kinds of obvious problems. Paul Simon tells us that “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls,” but I’m not sure I’d go so far as to make the Bible some kind of holy graffiti. However, admittedly fallible and humanly written, though perhaps in some way divinely inspired, this magnificent collection of myths, legends, poems and parables has withstood the test of time. Its stories help frame my thinking about humanity’s place in the cosmos, our relationship to the divine, and our purpose in life.

The sound of silence
There’s no doubt that AI has had a seismic impact on the technology industry, business and society. But the Old Testament tells us the story of Elijah, who went up a mountaintop in search of God. There was an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake. There was also a fire, and a storm, but neither was God in the fire or the storm. Finally, God was revealed in the still, small voice that came after everything had quieted down. 

Religion 2.0, I’m afraid, is a hollow shell. It may display some outward trappings of religious behaviour, but it lacks that still, small voice at the core. Therefore, I don’t need a Religion 2.0 or a computer-generated bible to help me along my path. And it will be a long time, if ever, before any AI system comes up with something better than the succinctly beautiful words of the 8^th century BC prophet Micah:

And what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

That’s the best of Religion 1.0—and that’s all I need.

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[1] The other two attributes of God are omnipotence and omnibenevolence. Whether AI might achieve these is very much an open question.