BecomeMe

This is the best summary I could come up with:

“Sometimes I think a lot of the breathless enthusiasm for AGI is misplaced religious impulses from people brought up in a secular culture,” Jack Clark, co-founder of the AI safety company Anthropic, mused on Twitter in March.

Mostly, though, the figures spouting a vision of AGI as a kind of techno-eschatology — from Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, to Elon Musk, who wants to link your brain to computers — express their ideas in secular language.

There’s a reason why some say the Catholic Church was the Silicon Valley of the Middle Ages: It was responsible for everything from “metallurgy, mills, and musical notation to the wide-scale adoption of clocks and the printing press,” as I noted in a 2018 Atlantic article.

“The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems … and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future,” wrote Kurzweil in his 1999 national bestseller The Age of Spiritual Machines.

Yet EA actually mirrors religion in many ways: functionally (it brings together a community built around a shared vision of moral life), structurally (it’s got a hierarchy of prophet-leaders, canonical texts, holidays, and rituals), and aesthetically (it promotes tithing and favors asceticism).

Another fellow traveler in EA, Holden Karnofsky, likewise argues that we’re living at the “hinge of history” or the “most important century” — a singular time in the story of humanity when we could either flourish like never before or bring about our own extinction.

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