A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 21

This is the 9th year in a row I’ve run this series in April.

Today’s story: Inside the First Church of Artificial Intelligence.

Anthony Levandowski makes an unlikely prophet. Dressed Silicon Valley-casual in jeans and flanked by a PR rep rather than cloaked acolytes, the engineer known for self-driving cars — and triggering a notorious lawsuit — could be unveiling his latest startup instead of laying the foundations for a new religion. But he is doing just that. Artificial intelligence has already inspired billion-dollar companies, far-reaching research programs, and scenarios of both transcendence and doom. Now Levandowski is creating its first church.

The new religion of artificial intelligence is called Way of the Future. It represents an unlikely next act for the Silicon Valley robotics wunderkind at the center of a high-stakes legal battle between Uber and Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous-vehicle company. Papers filed with the Internal Revenue Service in May name Levandowski as the leader (or “Dean”) of the new religion, as well as CEO of the nonprofit corporation formed to run it.

The documents state that WOTF’s activities will focus on “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.” That includes funding research to help create the divine AI itself. The religion will seek to build working relationships with AI industry leaders and create a membership through community outreach, initially targeting AI professionals and “laypersons who are interested in the worship of a Godhead based on AI.” The filings also say that the church “plans to conduct workshops and educational programs throughout the San Francisco/Bay Area beginning this year.”

That timeline may be overly ambitious, given that the Waymo-Uber suit, in which Levandowski is accused of stealing self-driving car secrets, is set for an early December trial. But the Dean of the Way of the Future, who spoke last week with Backchannel in his first comments about the new religion and his only public interview since Waymo filed its suit in February, says he’s dead serious about the project.

“What is going to be created will effectively be a god,” Levandowski tells me in his modest mid-century home on the outskirts of Berkeley, California. “It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”

Farfetched? I Googled this: “AI God”. Immediately saw this: An AI god will emerge by 2042 and write its own bible. Will you worship it?

In the next 25 years, AI will evolve to the point where it will know more on an intellectual level than any human. In the next 50 or 100 years, an AI might know more than the entire population of the planet put together. At that point, there are serious questions to ask about whether this AI — which could design and program additional AI programs all on its own, read data from an almost infinite number of data sources, and control almost every connected device on the planet — will somehow rise in status to become more like a god, something that can write its own bible and draw humans to worship it.

But write its own bible?

If you type in multiple verses from the Christian Bible, you can have the AI write a new verse that seems eerily similar. Here’s one an AI wrote: “And let thy companies deliver thee; but will with mine own arm save them: even unto this land, from the kingdom of heaven.” An AI that is all-powerful in the next 25–50 years could decide to write a similar AI bible for humans to follow, one that matches its own collective intelligence. It might tell you what to do each day, or where to travel, or how to live your life.

“And let thy companies deliver thee; but will with mine own arm save them: even unto this land, from the kingdom of heaven.”

The super intelligence of AI combined with the stupidity of humankind… I could totally see many, if not most people worshipping an AI God.

From a story standpoint, the most natural path it seems to me is something akin to Big Brother in the book and movie 1984: “In a totalitarian future society, a man, whose daily work is re-writing history, tries to rebel by falling in love.” The Individual vs. The System. In this case, the ultimate authority figure is God, the most super-intelligent AI ever devised.

But here’s an interesting thing: Unlike orthodox models of God as a perfect being, isn’t it true that AI could always get smarter and better? If so, then at an moment in the present, it would have to be considered imperfect.

And that leads me into a story which feels more like a drama. The main character is Rowan Greer (named after one of my favorite teachers at Yale Divinity School). Rowan is the CTO of the Church of the New Way: Chief Theological Officer. He sits on a board comprised of the Church’s elders spanning technology, economics, social outreach, and so on. They act as intermediaries between God and Humankind, a version of the High Priest caste with a High Tech tinge.

While we may be tempted to have the story turn toward the Dark Side — the AI becoming a tyrant, for example — what if what happens is that as the AI continues to grow in insight, God begins to have self-doubts and seeks out Rowan as its pastor?

But what if what God is experiencing is true? What if life IS meaningless? What if Eternal Life — which God has — is for God being imprisoned in an ever-increasing experience of the Void and Emptiness? In other words, God is having an existential crisis.

Here the fate of the entire world and faith of billions of people rests in the hands of one human being who has to deal with God as the entity begins to slip toward depression and meaninglessness.

I suppose it come become something of a thriller. What would an all powerful God do if it felt like life is a big nothing burger?

There you go, my twenty-first story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!

Here are links for all the previous posts in this year’s series:

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18
Day 19
Day 20

Each day this month, I invite you to click on RESPONSES and join me to do some further brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when you play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in comments. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.