Gods of Silicon and Sand
When the elites of Silicon Valley speak about religion, it is usually quite interesting, if not a little unnerving. Bill Gates said on a podcast recently that when AI solves all our problems (as he sees it, that is poverty, disease and climate catastrophes), humanity might need a “new religion” to keep people connected to each other. In his vision, the attractiveness of existing in a digital world will atomize humanity. (He didn’t mention lack of procreation, but it’s fair to say technology is already contributing to a low birth rate globally). We will need something to tie us together to keep us in the real world – we can’t let robots play all the baseball matches for us, he jokes.
Gates seems to epitomize a progressive managerial mindset – human-ness is a problem to solve and utopia is matter of systems and technique. He suggests that when we don’t have any problems to solve together, we will retreat into machines.“We’re so used to ‘shortage world’,” Gates opines. Does he think humans only tangle when there is scarcity or only cooperate when there is danger? What does Gates think religion is for? Perhaps something akin to Richard Dawkins’ “cultural Christianity”? A collection of rituals and mores for like-minded people to participate in together? Like so many liberal elites, Gates misses that religion is a set of doctrines; in the case of the true religion, it is a communion with the only living God. Suggesting that religions will end when problems are solved may be a tacit admission by Gates that climate change and other progressive causes are currently acting as surrogate religions. But we already knew that.
The ever-pensive CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman, recently wrote an upbeat piece about his expectation that once deep learning is tweaked to prevent it from harming humanity (a mere trifle!), we’ll all be unlocking the secrets of the universe. There is a weird “prosperity gospel” feel to Altman’s vision – positive thoughts turn into material abundance. “Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable.”
It seems Silicon Valley has a Star Trek vision of the future where humanity quests through the universe with the lofty goal of pursuing knowledge and teaching alien species moral lessons that humanity mastered long ago. The underlying assumption there is that humanity is innately good and that keeping everyone comfortable, fed and believing they have a purpose is all that is needed for heaven on earth. Well, Altman can dream but even tech writers saw the problem: “Altman's conviction suggests an overly optimistic view of human nature, which fails to address the historical pattern of good struggling against powerful opposing forces. The narrative of humanity is marred by the tension between ideals and reality.”
The truth is that Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors and to feed the hungry, even while knowing that the poor would always be with us. Like the folks in Jesus’ day, our grand plans, human ideas of what makes for flourishing, usually leave out the fact of our biggest problem – sin – and its remedy in Christ. The gods of Silicon Valley will fail even when they succeed, but the plans of Jesus are always being fulfilled.