The more you listen to Silicon Valley’s discourse around AI, the more you hear echoes of religion. That’s because a lot of the excitement about building a superintelligent machine comes down to recycled religious ideas. Most secular technologists who are building AI just don’t recognise that.
“We have to be careful with what narratives we buy into,” said Elke Schwarz, a political theorist at Queen Mary University of London who studies the ethics of military AI. “Whenever we talk about something religious, there’s something sacred at play. Having something that’s sacred can enable harm, because if something is sacred it’s worth doing the worst things for.”
Vox