Serendipity35

Scientists talk about science. They don't often talk about religion. Even famous scientists in history - Newton, Darwin, Einstein - were careful about what they said on the subject of religion. When Albert Einstein said that "God does not play dice with the universe," that god was not necessarily the God that people speak of in religious terms.

Two things I recently encountered brought this to mind. One is Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About , a 2001 book of the annotated transcripts of six public lectures given by Donald E. Knuth at MIT. (read an excerpt) Knuth is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University probably best known as an author for the multi-volume The Art of Computer Programming. The lectures move between religion and science (particularly computer science) and Knuth gives credence to the concept of divinity. 

The second thing I stumbled on recently came in an article about Anthony Levandowski in Wired magazine. It portrays him as an unlikely prophet bridging artificial intelligence and religion. He was/is known as an engineer working on self-driving cars. But his newest "startup"i sthe launch of a new religion of artificial intelligence. It is called Way of the Future.

Way of the Future (WOTF) is about creating a peaceful transition about who is in charge of the planet as we move from people in charge to people and machines being in charge. And perhaps even a future when machines are in charge of the humans? 

That future of the singularity seems closer than we might imagine being that technology has already surpassed human abilities in some instances. Of course, beating humans at chess and Go and making faster calculations and predictions or being better at sorting items in a warehouse isn't the same thing as "running the world."

WOTF wants the future transition to be smoother and believes progress shouldn't be feared or prevented. It means that we need machines need to have "rights" too. 

Does Levandowkski really intend WOTF to be a "religion?" Is he willing to abandon the battle of the robotics tech and legal battles between Uber and Waymo for autonomous-vehicle dominance? It turns out that in papers filed with the Internal Revenue Service last year, Levandowski is listed as the “Dean” of the new religion, as also as the CEO of the nonprofit corporation formed to run it.

Those documents certainly sound like a new religion. Their listed activities will focus on “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.”

The divine AI will target AI professionals and “laypersons who are interested in the worship of a Godhead based on AI.” The church - and they do call it a church in their filings, probably for tax reasons - has been doing workshops and educational programs in the San Francisco/Bay Area.

A September 2017 article in Wired is titles "God is a Bot and Anthony Levandowski Is His Messenger." We will see about that.