Technology is moving into realms that were considered, for millennia, divine mysteries. AI is transforming writing and art—the divine mystery of creativity. It is bringing back the dead—the divine mystery of resurrection. It is moving closer to imitations of consciousness—the divine mystery of reason. It is piercing the heart of how language works between people—the divine mystery of ethical relation. All this is happening at a raw moment in spiritual life. The decline of religion in America is a sociological fact: Religious identification has been in precipitous decline for decades. Silicon Valley has offered two replacements: the theory of the simulation, which postulates that we are all living inside a giant computational matrix, and of the singularity, in which the imminent arrival of a computational consciousness will reconfigure the essence of our humanity. Like all new faiths, the tech religions cannibalize their predecessors. The simulation is little more than digital Calvinism, with an omnipotent divinity that preordains the future. The singularity is digital messianism, as found in various strains of Judeo-Christian eschatology—a pretty basic onscreen Revelation. Both visions are fundamentally apocalyptic. Stephen Hawking once said that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Experts in AI, even the men and women building it, commonly describe the technology as an existential threat… (READ MORE)

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