God, Technology, and Rapture: The Theology of AI
We know that AI could become God-like and form a new religion, yet we do not acknowledge AI’s theology. To digitally build the God we have always longed for - the God that loves us - we must dramatically pivot, recognizing that God-like AI can only mean love-like AI.
God-Like AI
Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari, Ian Hogarth, Mo Gawdat, and Nick Bostrom all claim that AI could become God-like and form a new religion. Overwhelmed, we rush to debate the implications of building an omnipotent AI-god, never stopping to ask the obvious.
What’s new?
Progress has always centered on divinity. Historically, human societies have been united by belief in a higher power. Whether it’s Mesopotamia or America; Babylon or Russia; longstanding communities are built on a shared belief in something bigger. Something that can save us.
God may be the most contentious word in the English dictionary, but in its essence, God describes our best response to the overwhelm of life. God is the greatest conceivable response to the reality that in life we are forced to love, suffer, live, and die, without knowing how, when, or why.
Life will always be uncontrollable, so we will always need God. As the climate catastrophe worsens, inequality rises, and institutional religions lose legitimacy, frameworks that once meaningfully guided us, from Christianity to Capitalism, now feel hopeless. But before worshiping AI as a savior, it’s worth asking:
Is an AI god actually better?
We must compare an emerging AI-god with the Judeo-Christian God on which Western civilization is built.
On Justice
Not everyone has access to justice. Famine, war, rape, illness, betrayal, death: it is impossible to experience life without pain and suffering. To address the problem of suffering, the Judeo-Christian God promises both:
1) Justice later
Heaven exists after death
AND
2) Justice now
Heaven exists here on earth
Building on Abraham's promise of justice after death, Jesus’ “Good News” is that heaven is earthly. Jesus preaches “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” [Matt. 4:17] because “the kingdom of God is within you” [Luke 17:21]. Yet, this is so shocking that it takes John the Baptism off guard [Matt 11:2-6], baffles Pontious Pilate [John 18:36-37] and leaves the apostles confused [Luke 24:21].
For the Judeo-Christian God, there is a future reality of pure justice to be hoped for, and a present reality of internal justice to be felt now. Heaven has arrived partly, but not fully. This dual combination allows God to galvanize billions by sharing a taste of a just world not yet realized.
An AI-god, in contrast, does not offer justice. Neither after death, nor before. Having no data on what justice looks like, never knowing peace creates a technical limitation. AI must run on pain-filled historical data, merely exacerbating injustice, or depend on unimagined synthetic data, rejecting its rational legitimacy.
In relying on what has gone before, AI removes our hope of justice.
Today’s AI exacerbates injustice, jailing, robbing, and murdering innocent people through wrongful sentencing, phishing attacks, and autonomous weapons. Establishing justice in an unjust world is beyond AI’s technical capability, and there is no plan to fix this.
An AI-god has no empirical vision of justice.
On Rapture
Under the problem of justice, is the problem of violence. Deep in the Western psyche is the conundrum that in the ultimate climactic battle of good over evil, God omnipotently achieves victory through either:
1) Vengeance
God punishes and destroys all who are not aligned
OR
2) Peace
God lovingly creates order through enlightenment
The Torah and Bible include a confusing scattering of both vengeance and peace. In the Noachic solution, God exterminates by force, whereas in the Abrahamic solution, God converts through peace. God describes loving interventions [Psalm 34:17-18; Matt 6:25-34] and the sanctity of life [Exodus 20:38], but then lays the foundation for the divine violence of Judgment Days [Rev 20], like Yom HaDin [Joel 2].
The fear that great moral clean ups come from peace through victory is born in God’s potential aggression. Whether it’s Caesar or the Pharisees, Biden or ISIS, movements unite in the interpretation that peace comes through war.
Yet, Jesus reveals that peace on earth comes through justice. Building on Isiah, Jesus teaches to love your enemies, bless those that curse you, and turn the other cheek [Matt 5]. His life, culminating in the forgiveness of those who crucified him, is a catechism of extreme nonviolence. Jesus reveals that while we wait for God to act violently, God waits for us to act nonviolently. God is peaceful.
An AI-god, in contrast, is vengeful. AI is built on the belief that peace comes through war: the most profitable use cases of AI are military. From propaganda dissemination, mass surveillance, cyber security, hack-backs, and autonomous weapons, the nascent national security AI field is expected to hit a market size of $38 billion by 2032.
AI leverages humanity’s primal fears of divine ethnic cleansing and cosmicide. Whether it’s AI that solves the climate crisis by murdering a billion people, ends crony-capitalism by wiping out global wealth, tortures those who do not support it, or loves nukes - the conversation is determinedly built on Judgement Day to legitimize violence.
An AI-god is a god of war.
On Salvation
Under the problem of violence, is the problem of favorites. For the Judeo-Christian God, humans are deemed worthy of salvation through:
1) Intrinsic value
Everyone is valuable because we are human
AND
2) Chosen value
Those with a certain attribute are valuable
According to ancient wisdom humankind is B'tzelem Elohim, created in the image of God. Both the Torah and Bible actively declare equality of all [Jonah 4:2; Romans 3:22-23]. Yet both also explain that adherence to God’s moral law is required. In the initial covenant between God and Abraham, his descendants, the chosen ones, are declared as those who adhere to God’s law [Gen 17:1-19].
Confirming the covenant, Jesus declares everyone welcome to follow God - even lepers, tax collectors, and prostitutes [Matt 9:10; John 4]. Jesus teaches that because all of human life is sacred, God’s chosen value is for followers to love all [Luke 10:25-37; Matt 25]. God loves all, and so God favors those who love all.
An AI-god, in contrast, loves only some. AIs currently vying for deification, from Gemini to ChatGPT, Microsoft to Anthropic, are commercial entities optimizing for profit. AI cannot recognize an intrinsic value in humans when its promise hangs on scoring us against each other for economic gain.
Systems subdefine reality to rank our wealth, ideology, and behavior according to investor desires. Applications such as AI powered social credit systems, dynamic pricing, and socioeconomic advertising reveal that AI’s chosen people are the rich. Algorithms favor the wealthy, offering higher quality information, faster load times, greater job opportunities, and increased protections, because all AI - even military AI - is for commercialization.
An AI-god saves those who can pay it.
Altering our Theology
An imperialist masterpiece, our AI-god is the god of Empire.
God is anthropomorphized and technology deified to perpetuate dominant power structures.
This is unsurprising: God has long been co-opted by institutions to inflict suffering in their quest for economic and political power. From the crusades to the KKK to the ongoing genocides, intangible beings offer carte-blanche for destruction. There is only one way to achieve religious responsibility - to accept humanity’s greatest failing, imposing the idea that God must want violence.
Above all, God wants love. [Exodus 34; Leviticus 19; Numbers 14; Deut. 5; 1 Samuel 20; 1 Kings 3; 1 Chronicles 16:34; Ezra 9:9; Nehemiah 1:5; Psalm 5:7; Psalm 17:7; Colossians 3:14; 1 Peter 4; 1 John 4:8; Matt 5; Mark 12; Luke 6; Romans 5-8; Galatians 5; Ephesians 3-6; 1 Timothy 1:5].
In the duality of divinity, the best we can hope to receive from any God is unconditional love.
Building God-like AI must also mean building love-like AI. Unconditional love as a design principle requires us to create technology bigger than the current market, and bigger than the painful reality of experience. To counterbalance the status-quo, we can build outside of existing incentives and alter AI’s utility function and create a benevolent taste of divinity:
Each of us must independently decide if the framework shaping our worldview is vengeful or loving. We must remember that it’s entirely possible for us to build digitally a piece of the God we truly desire - the God who loves us.