We live in a technological age, and have embraced technological advance with abandon, creating what Neil Postman termed a “technopoly,” where technology of every kind is cheerfully granted sovereignty. Or, as Jacques Ellul has written, at least the process of technique designed to serve our ends. 

Is Google God?

Columnist Thomas Friedman posed this question in the New York Times in June of 2003. Quoting the vice president of a Wi-Fi provider, Friedman writes that: “Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too.”

More than two decades later, not many would ask if Google is God. However, they might wonder if AI is.

Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, sometimes referred to as the “Godfather of AI,” helped lay the foundation for the AI technology often used today. Concerned about what he had helped birth, in 2023 he left his job at Google where he had worked for more than a decade to sound a warning:

“It really is godlike.”

He’s not alone. Open AI CEO Sam Altman has referred to his company’s technology as a “magic intelligence in the sky.” Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has even argued that AI could help bring about the antichrist.

Whether warning about the existential threat the power of AI poses to humanity or arguing for a technological revelation that will usher in a new age of human evolution, it seems everyone is approaching it with a religious set of glasses.

Or even as a religion itself.

“Computer scientist and author Ray Kurzweil has been predicting since the 1990s that humans will one day merge with technology,” reports the Associated Press, “a concept often referred to as transhumanism.” When asked if he considers AI to be his religion, he eventually conceded, “Yes.” 

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