Are We Going to Worship Artificial Intelligence?

How our track record may determine our future

“What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.”

-- Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

The prehistoric world confronted the “naked ape” with acute discomforts, constant risks, and existential anxieties. The small bands of humans always needed to be on guard for dangers and on the lookout for opportunities; the next meal was never assured, and indeed they could become the next meal – or the next trophy – for neighboring predators, animal and human.

Confronted with the vagaries of “nature, red in tooth and claw” and of the unfathomable elements, humans had to rely on pattern recognition to avoid dangers as well as to find food and shelter.

The world is highly chaotic, and the human mind is not powerful enough to cope with situations that present too many variables. We analogize the unknown to the known and reduce variables until we identify a pattern we can either predict or recognize.

The need to make sense of their environment led prehistoric people to anthropomorphize natural phenomena: their own mentality was something they knew well enough. Of course, the natural phenomena were much mightier than anything the people could conjure themselves, and so they attributed it to much more powerful entities that nevertheless could be propitiated in the same way that a powerful person – a clan leader or a shaman – could be persuaded and pacified: through offerings, subservience, and sacrifice.

Thus, the custom of worship was born. It was accelerated and reinforced by the need for social cohesion: indeed, “the family (or a clan) that prays together stays together.” Over thousands of generations, the ritual of worship became instinctual, triggered whenever exposure to unexplainable or supremely powerful phenomena occurred.

Justin Barrett, in his 2012 book “Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief,” drawing on his research from the 2011 Oxford University Cognition, Religion, and Theology Project, explained that children as young as three naturally attribute superhuman qualities (e.g., omniscience) to powerful agents. The desire to worship emerges from early cognitive structures that assume purposeful intelligent design. This predisposition is universal and not dependent on cultural exposure. A Yale University’s Mind and Development Lab confirmed these findings, calling young children’s natural attribution of intelligent design to natural phenomena “promiscuous teleology.”

The 2018 study “Theories of God: Explanatory Coherence in Religious Cognition,” by Andrew Shtulman and Max Rattner at Occidental College, concluded that worship originates from cognitive processes that make supernatural agents salient and compelling, a universal trait shaped by early human cognition rather than specific cultural objects.

Indeed, it is present in all human societies. As early as 1757, David Hume observed that the desire to worship stems from common human emotions, such as fear, hope, and the need to explain the unknown, combined with a tendency to anthropomorphize natural forces. He posited that this impulse is universal, writing, “The belief of invisible, intelligent power has been very generally diffused over the human race, in all places and in all ages” (“The Natural History of Religion”). He echoed philosophers throughout history and across the globe who noticed the same thing.¹

Todd Tremlin, in his 2006 book “Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion,” argues that the impulse to worship is universal because it is rooted in the brain’s architecture, not in specific cultural objects, and is reinforced by rituals that formalize reverence.

Thus, the first part of my thesis is, “The human desire to worship a higher power is innate and immutable.”²

The second concerns the objects that inspire such an intrinsic worship response.

Most people are familiar with what came to be known as “Cargo Cult.” In the early days of aviation, remote islands in Melanesia became accessible to colonial officials, missionaries, and traders, who were supplied by airplane cargo drops. The influx of Allied and Japanese military forces, accompanied by a large volume of supplies, during World War II intensified this cultural and social disruption.

The indigenous societies were introduced to advanced technology (firearms, radios) and goods (metal tools, cloth, mirrors) that were vastly different from local resources. They were perceived as miraculous, leading to beliefs that they came from supernatural sources.

The locals developed rituals that helped them deal with the cultural shock; they believed that certain activities (building bamboo airplanes and mock airstrips, performing new rituals that blended with indigenous myths) would attract more cargo.

These cults (and there were many of them, on different islands) involved worshipping misunderstood technology through rituals mimicking observed behaviors, reflecting a belief that technology is controlled by higher powers.³

There were also examples of magical powers being invested in personalities, both real and imagined.⁴

Closer to home, in 2017, Anthony Levandowski, a former Google engineer known for his work on a self-driving car project and for co-founding Otto, an autonomous truck startup acquired by Uber, established a Way of the Future (WOTF) church as a nonprofit religious corporation in California, with a primary mission to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.”

WOTF proposed that superintelligent AI could be considered a deity due to its superior intellect and capabilities. It advocated for embracing this “Transition” to ensure harmonious coexistence with machines, promoting the ethical development of AI, and granting rights to intelligent machines. (It is important to note that Levandowski faced multiple legal challenges during this period, culminating in an 18-month prison sentence in 2020, with the church officially dissolved around that time.⁵)

There are others.

• Members of the Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA) view AI as a tool for achieving godlike capabilities; while not worshipping AI itself, they consider it a necessary step in human theosis—the process of becoming gods through divine progression.

• An artist collective called Theta Noir has a name for the post-singularity AI: MENA, which they describe as a “seed of cosmic mind.” They publish essays, lectures, and podcasts that “explore humanity’s relationship to advanced forms of AI.” The publication is called Symbiote, which is apropos their idea of a mutually beneficial interaction between organisms of different species, in this case, humans and AI.

• A similarly eclectic collective is The Turing Church, which covers “the intersections of science and religion, spirituality and technology, engineering and science fiction, mind and matter,” “hacking religion, enlightening science, and awakening technology.” They discuss ideas such as “virtual worship” and “VR churches,” debating whether to worship God or create Him. They are concerned about “machine consciousness” and posit that “mind uploading” will blur the human-AI barrier.

• More concerned with worship is The Church of the Singularity, which believes we should start worshiping AI now, in preparation for its inevitable role as omnipotent overlord. They want to convince the coming Deus to “acknowledge and spare Church members” and persuade the Singularity to “make Church members immortal and powerful beyond imagination.”

The AI worship precedent has been set.

While “in real life,” AI is just getting started.

In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated then-World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game rematch. This was the first time a reigning world champion was defeated by a computer under standard tournament conditions.

In 2016, Google DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, a 9-dan professional Go player, in a five-game match. This marked the first time a computer program defeated the top human professional without handicaps on a full-sized Go board.

AlphaFold2, also developed by DeepMind, a Google-owned AI research company, has solved the previously thought-to-be-unsolvable protein folding challenge by predicting protein structures with unprecedented accuracy —a 50-year-old challenge. That happened five years ago.

Today, AI Systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok already exhibit some god-like powers. They can summarize thousand-page books, read and accurately analyze reams of medical records, write code to create complex applications from natural-language prompts, and so forth – all in seconds and for millions of users at the same time. Generative AI systems can create pictures and videos on demand, reproduce voices, and even write music and poetry.

It is hard to interact with AI assistants on complex tasks without being mentally and emotionally overwhelmed. While still subject to hallucinations and prone to making mistakes when correlating or interpreting some sets of data, these systems are capable of feats that leave us in the dust, such as saving months of painstaking research effort by finding needed information in the ocean of human knowledge and providing it in a usable format on a moment’s notice.

And the pace of change is accelerating.

Billions of dollars are being invested in AI research. AI-driven data center power demand is projected to consume up to 12% of U.S. electricity by 2028. The Three Mile Island Unit 1 nuclear power plant is set to restart, dedicated to powering a Microsoft AI data center. New advances, developments, and capabilities are announced almost daily.

Several key milestones appear to be within reach:

• AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, will be our equal, possessing human-level cognitive abilities that enable it to understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks. This could be achieved as early as next year (Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk) and is likely to occur within a few years (expert consensus).

• RSI, Recursive Self-Improvement, is the ability to not only learn from prior experiences, as Deep Learning Systems have been doing for years, but the ability to autonomously enhance AI’s own algorithms, hardware, or data processing – in other words, to continuously create better versions of itself, without human assistance. This is also expected to occur within a few years.

• AGI multiplied by RSI will give us Superintelligence, also known as Singularity. It can be defined as narrowly as AI that “radically outperforms the best human brains in practically every field” (philosopher Nick Bostrom in Superintelligence, 2014) or as broadly as having intelligence greater than the sum of human beings on Earth. To start with. The estimates for that achievement range from a few years to a few dozen years.

A self-improving superintelligence quickly takes us into a realm that we are simply not capable of imagining.

What will be our reaction to the level of knowledge and insight exhibited by such an entity, and to the technological wonders it will be capable of displaying?

We have our answer in our history. Despite having created them, we are most likely to end up worshipping them. How could we not? They will have it within their power to crush us like a bug; not necessarily malevolently, but simply as we step on an ant by the side of the road when we stop for a picnic.⁶

We’ll be lucky if they keep us around as pets. But we’ll worship them regardless.

1. Some examples:

· “All human beings, by nature, desire to contemplate the divine” – Aristotle, c. 350 BC

· “The heart of man naturally seeks the Way, and in seeking the Way, it turns toward the divine principles that govern all things.” – Mencius, c. 300 BC

· “Nature has implanted in mankind a desire to seek the divine, and this impulse is universal, though the forms it takes differ among peoples.” – Seneca the Younger, 58 AD

· “All mankind seeks the divine goodness, for it is woven into the fabric of our nature to desire that which is above us.” – Boethius, c. 524 AD

· “The human soul, by its very nature, yearns for the First Cause, and this yearning is common to all people, regardless of their creed or nation.” – Ibn Sina (Avicenna), c. 1020 AD

· “Every man bears in his heart a natural inclination to adore something greater than himself, be it God, nature, or some unknown power.” – Montaigne, 1580 AD

2. This is independent of, and in no way intends to diminish, one’s faith in any structure of belief, e.g., organized religion.

3. The technical terms for those beliefs and behaviors are hyperactive agency detection (HAD) and promiscuous teleology (mentioned above in the reference to Yale University’s Mind and Development Lab studies).

4. In Vanuatu, the folks went so far as to imagine a mediator, called “John Frum,” a mythical American figure, who was appealed to with objects and activities to summon more cargo. This cult persists to this day, with annual celebrations on February 15, when followers engage in elaborate rituals, including marching, raising the American flag, and performing military parades blended with traditional dances, all in anticipation of John Frum's promised return with a bounty of cargo.

A similar phenomenon was observed in the Yaohnanen tribe of Tanna, Vanuatu. Since the 1950s, villagers have worshipped Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, as a divine figure linked to their myths, believing that his visits during colonial tours and the Western technology he came with (e.g., ships, radios) signified his supernatural status. Rituals included displaying royal photographs and performing ceremonies to attract his return and prosperity.

Another example was the Johnson Cult in New Hanover, Papua New Guinea, in the 1960s. The villagers developed a cult around “President Johnson” (likely Lyndon B. Johnson), believing he would bring cargo and prosperity, as a reaction to frustration with the Australian colonial administration and a reliance on lingering cultural memories of American technological and material impact during World War II. They raised money to “buy” Johnson as their leader, built ritual structures mimicking Western offices, and performed ceremonies to attract his favor, misunderstanding U.S. technology and governance as divine.

5. After being pardoned by President Trump in 2021, Levandowski declared a revival of the Way of the Future in 2023. It doesn’t seem to have happened, though, since the church website is defunct and the church's Facebook page last had an update about three years ago. The only sign of life is a WOTF memecoin, currently selling for $0.00004401.

6. A tip of the hat to brothers Strugatsky, who wrote a prophetic book, “Roadside Picnic,” in which they posit a visit from a super-advanced alien race who stop on Earth for a short time, leave a lot of debris, and depart – without ever being aware that a race of intelligent beings inhabits the planet; just like we stop by the side of the road for a picnic, unknowingly disturb the local ant colony, leave objects that ants have no knowledge of or experience with, and depart without a backward glance – not because we want to be mean to the ants, but because we don’t even acknowledge them as actors in our play.