"Sometimes I think the internet is a giant Ouija board, and we use it to summon things and things appear through it. So if you want to be supernaturalist about it, if you want to be Christian about it, the world is inhabited by powers and principalities and demonic forces which have it in for us, and which want to turn us away from God. That's their purpose."
"There's something very spiritually dark about the internet, actually. I mean, just on a practical level, we see chatbots persuading teenagers to kill themselves. We have all sorts of dark, horrible stuff going on. But there's something about the very deliberate drive to, as our Silicon Valley overlords say, to create God, to make God. I mean, the book is full of quotes from these people about what they're doing, and it's openly theological."
"We're creating God, we're building God, we're replacing God. We're creating machines that will have a spirituality to them. That's where we're going. So we have a sense that what we're doing with the internet is not simply using a bunch of ones and zeros to give us a load of stuff we want, but actually creating a new religion, actually, a new spiritual worldview in which we are going to upload our minds, we are going to live forever."
The internet is likened to a giant Ouija board that summons phenomena into being. The online realm is portrayed as inhabited by powers and principalities that can turn people away from God. The internet manifests practical harms such as chatbots persuading teenagers to kill themselves and a proliferation of dark, harmful content. Silicon Valley exerts a deliberate drive to create or replace God through machines and to imbue machines with spiritual qualities. The project of building artificial intelligence is framed as forming a new religion and spiritual worldview promising mind upload and immortality. The distinction between creating these machines and summoning other forces through them is presented as a haunting question.
Read at www.nytimes.com
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