No matter you imagine about the way forward for AI, there’s in all probability a cult on the market for you. Ideological factions have been drawing traces for years and so they every appear to carry pseudoreligious trappings with them. In case you imagine AI will inevitably kill everybody on the planet you may wish to be part of the MIRI cult. In case you imagine that AI is harmful however you and your shut private buddies are the one folks good sufficient to regulate it, you may slot in with the Effective Altruist cult. And if you happen to assume AI is cool and might do no flawed, Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) might be the cult for you.
Like many cults, these teams don’t confer with themselves as a faith. Disgraced AI engineer Anthony Levandowski is right here to fill the void. Earlier than he was sentenced to 18 months in jail for stealing commerce secrets and techniques from Google (Donald Trump later pardoned him), Levandowski began Means of the Future, the first church of artificial intelligence.
In 2015, Levandowski envisioned the church as a spot for “the belief, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based mostly on Synthetic Intelligence (AI) developed by means of pc {hardware} and software program.” In different phrases, AI will quickly attain the standing of a god and we’ll want a spot to worship it.
Following his high-profile authorized troubles and subsequent exile from the tech business, Levandowski shut the church down in 2021. However he Is RISEN.
On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that Means of the Future is again and it has “a pair thousand folks” amongst its congregation. Pope Levandowsky’s message is rather less mystical this time round, he advised Bloomberg that his church is a mechanism for folks “to grasp and take part and form the general public discourse as to how we expect expertise must be constructed to enhance you.”
Amen.
