And if you thought the world had gotten crazy enough, then this story might push the limit for you. It seems that you could join an actual church that is focused on worshiping a God that is artificially intelligent.
This Church is Bonafide and Completely Legal
Engineer and former Google employee Anthony Levandowski actually submitted the paperwork and 2015 in the state of California 2015 to set up the Way of the Future, which is a religious corporation that is devoted to worshiping artificial intelligence. It also filed itself to be a nonprofit organization. The mission of the church is to promote and develop the existence of a Godhead that is based on artificial intelligence and worshiping and understanding this Godhead it will help build a better society.
The official documentation indicates that Levandowski is the CEO as well as President of Way of the Future. We understand that there is no High Priest.
Candi Cann, who is not there and a religious scholar that teaches religion at Baylor University, stated that Levandowski’s religious initiative is not necessarily all that odd if you consider a historical perspective.
“It strikes me that Levandowski’s idea reads like a quintessentially American religion,” she said. “LDS [The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints] and Scientology are both distinctly American traditions that focus on very forward-thinking religious viewpoints. LDS discusses other planets and extra-terrestrial life. Scientology has an emphasis on therapy and a psychological worldview, which is quite modern and forward-thinking.”
Worshiping AI May Not Be All that Crazy
The notion of worshiping and praying devotion to artificial intelligence might even have a particular resonance with many major world religions, Cann added.
“From a comparative religion perspective, I think it feels the most like Hinduism, in which there are avatars of deities found on Earth,” Cann stated. “In this way, I think AI can reflect the best of humans back to us, which are, in turn, worshiped.”
Levandowski was accused of ripping off proprietary documentation when he worked as an engineer at Google. They accuse him of using this documentation for his own start-up, which was purchased later by Uber at a price of $680 million. Uber has denied any knowledge of the allegations committed by Levandowski.
Levandowski’s proposal for this AI church has come in spite of apocalyptic warnings from other science and tech luminaries such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk as to the dangers and risks associated with artificial intelligence. Musk indicated a few years ago that he was investing big-time in artificial intelligence just to keep an eye on artificial intelligence, which he sees as a potential threat to humanity.
“With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon,” Musk has 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. It didn’t work out.”
A colleague and former friend of Levandowski provided some insight to everyone about the church leader’s would be visions about robots and artificial intelligence.
“He had this very weird motivation about robots taking over the world — like actually taking over, in a military sense,” said this unidentified engineer and former friend. “It was like [he wanted] to be able to control the world, and robots were the way to do that.”
Experts have stated that it is very important to not jump the gun and speculate about the motivations of Levandowski for Way of the Future because it is only based on one document and a mission statement.
