{"id":119943,"date":"2025-08-30T03:42:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T03:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/119943\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T03:42:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T03:42:08","slug":"how-silicon-valley-is-using-religious-language-to-talk-about-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/119943\/","title":{"rendered":"How Silicon Valley is using religious language to talk about AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

TORONTO \u2014 As the rapid, unregulated development of artificial intelligence<\/a> continues, the language people in Silicon Valley use to describe it is becoming increasingly religious.<\/p>\n

From predicting the potential destruction of humanity to a transhumanist apocalypse where people merge with AI, here\u2019s what some of the key players are saying.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

\u201cI think religion will be in trouble if we create other beings. Once we start creating beings that can think for themselves and do things for themselves, maybe even have bodies if they\u2019re robots, we may start realizing we\u2019re less special than we thought. And the idea that we\u2019re very special and we were made in the image of God, that idea may go out the window.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton,<\/a> often dubbed the \u201cGodfather of AI\u201d for his pioneering work on deep learning and neural networks.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

\u201cBy 2045, which is only 20 years from now, we\u2019ll be a million times more powerful. And we\u2019ll be able to have expertise in every field.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 author and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, who believes humans will merge with AI.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

\u201cThere certainly are dimensions of the technology that have become extremely powerful in the last century or two that have an apocalyptic dimension. And perhaps it\u2019s strange not to try to relate it to the biblical tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel<\/a> speaking to the Hoover Institution<\/a> at Stanford University.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel that the four big AI CEOs in the U.S. are modern-day prophets with four different versions of the Gospel and they\u2019re all telling the same basic story that this is so dangerous and so scary that I have to do it and nobody else.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Max Tegmark, a physicist and machine learning researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.<\/a><\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen people in the tech industry talk about building this one true AI, it\u2019s almost as if they think they\u2019re creating God or something.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg<\/a> on a podcast<\/a> promoting his company\u2019s own venture<\/a> into AI.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone (including AI companies!) will need to do their part both to prevent risks and to fully realize the benefits. But it is a world worth fighting for. If all of this really does happen over 5 to 10 years \u2014 the defeat of most diseases, the growth in biological and cognitive freedom, the lifting of billions of people out of poverty to share in the new technologies, a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights \u2014 I suspect everyone watching it will be surprised by the effect it has on them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in his essay,<\/a> \u201cMachines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

\u201cYou and I are living through this once-in-human-history transition where humans go from being the smartest thing on planet Earth to not the smartest thing on planet Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during an interview<\/a> for TED Talks.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

\u201cThese really big, scary problems that are complex and challenging to address \u2014 it\u2019s so easy to gravitate towards fantastical thinking and wanting a one-size-fits-all global solution. I think it\u2019s the reason that so many people turn to cults and all sorts of really out there beliefs when the future feels scary and uncertain. I think this is not different than that. They just have billions of dollars to actually enact their ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Dylan Baker, lead research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TORONTO \u2014 As the rapid, unregulated development of artificial intelligence continues, the language people in Silicon Valley use…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":119944,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-119943","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119943\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}