Creating A 'God' From AI With A Religious Corporation Called 'Way Of The Future'

10/09/2015

Billions of people interact with Artificial Intelligence (AI) on a daily basis. We trust computers to do things for us, and in many of of the modern's tech and infrastructure, there is at least an AI that works with them.

As computers become faster and more useful, the "leap of faith" bloomed in saying what AI can do anything even remotely close to what a God or religion does.

Anthony Levandowski is an engineer and an entrepreneur that made a name for himself in 2004, when he constructed an autonomous motorcycle for the DARPA Grand Challenge.

He was then the co-founder of autonomous trucking company Otto, which Uber bought in 2016. He was fired from Uber amid allegations that he had stolen trade secrets from Google to develop Otto’s self-driving technology.

At the center of a legal battle between Uber and Google’s Waymo, he was seeing something others have never thought of: creating a god based on AI to make society better, by establishing a nonprofit religious corporation called 'Way of the Future'.

In September 2017, the documents were uncovered and published by Wired. They were filed to the state of California in September 2015, and names Levandowski as CEO and president of the company.

According to state filings, Way of the Future’s startling mission:

"To develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society."

Silicon Valley which is seen as something that stands in the center of the tech world, has sought solace in technology and has developed quasi-religious concepts including the "singularity", the hypothesis that machines will eventually be so smart that they will outperform all human capabilities.

In theory, advances of AI can lead to intelligence that will be more sophisticated for humans; incomprehensible to our brain.

For example, when the time actually comes, computers will be able to tell us everything we need to know about the complete overview of our species’ knowledge and self. Through AI we will gain the ability to see ourselves as, we might imagine, a God would.

This is something that Stephen Hawkings, Bill Gates and the likes of Elon Musk feared. AI to them, pose an existential threat to humanity.

"With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon," Musk once said. "In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like – yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out."

Many scientific experts warned that our current love and dependencies with AI could get us all killed. They pointed at one problem arising from the technological advancements such as AI and bioengineering: what are we going to do if artificial intelligence outperforms us? Will we continue to rely on our own abilities or will we blindly put our faith in a machine, no matter how smart it might be?

Some argued and criticized. For example, by saying that the advanced AI is compatible with the current religions. It's just another technology that humans have created under guidance from God that can be used for good or evil.

Some has even said that there are similarities between how a machine learns a task and how the Bible teaches through recurring metaphors. This is because humanity has invested more faith, and believe in things based on what they don't know or don't understand.

To those that have similar thoughts to Anthony Levandowski, they believe that traditional religions don’t have the answer, AI - or at least the promise of AI - is alluring.

Here, AI is the god, and Levandowski is its messenger,