Good Faith Tech?

The discourse surrounding AI has always been religious: Peter Thiel barnstorms lectures on the Apocalypse and the Antichrist. Marc Andreessen maintains a techno-saviorist view in his lectures and writing on AI, asserting that technology can liberate the human soul and spirit while scorning the search for AGI as a search for God. Sam Altman quips that the most successful founders set out to establish a religion, not merely a company. Garry Tan advocates that Christianity can provide the spiritual and moral tenets to right the wayward technoculture of Silicon Valley. It is a perfect rhetorical setup: powerful machines, extreme claims, and apocalyptic angst.

Our project will study the religious convictions at the heart of this phenomenon, using (1) a mixed-methods analysis of dominant AI discourses and (2) ethnographic field work with communities of AI users. We will begin with an exploration of the legitimating power of religious language regarding AI, asking: what cultural work does religious language perform for proponents and critics of AI alike? We will follow up this discourse analysis with ethnographic investigations across four fieldwork sites to understand how users' experiences with AI fit with its public-facing religious rhetoric.

Focusing on users will hone our understanding of how religious language and concepts translate into users' experiences and, perhaps more importantly, how they do not. This comparison of AI's public representation and private logics will provide key insights into the pervasiveness of its deep religious discourse. It will help explain how religious thinking fuels impressions of the technology's power to shape the real and imagined worlds of users, reveal the limitations and risks of endowing technology with divine power, and illuminate a path to a more ethical AI.