Back in 2017, former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski garnered headlines when he formally established a religious group that worshipped artificial intelligence.
The so-called Way of the Future’s mission is “to develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society.” Sounds eerie, right? But it’s not unique in being a spiritual ideology centered on technology. In the 1990s, the term “technopaganism” emerged as a definition for those who’ve made technology a centerpiece of their religious ethos.
All of this came to mind for me this week, when House Speaker Mike Johnson touted “algorithms” that Elon Musk is purportedly using to determine which parts of the federal government should be slashed.
“We meet late into the night in his office, and we’ve looked at that. What he’s finding with his algorithms crawling through the data of Social Security system is enormous amounts of fraud, waste and abuse,” Johnson told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
He’s publicly gushed about those “algorithms” in the past, and as was the case then, his claim on “Meet the Press” sounded pretty nonsensical. In reality, no one aside from, perhaps, Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency aides he’s deployed to gut the federal government appears to know any details about the algorithms being used to make these determinations. But the House speaker’s deference to Musk’s algorithms sounded almost spiritual — as if he were speaking of some infallible, inhuman force whose decisions are prudent and final, even if incomprehensible by mere mortals. Tech writers have warned that Silicon Valley’s obsession with AI resembles a religion. And now that religion seems to be pervading the federal government.
Just trust in the algorithms, we’re encouraged. Have faith in them.
These are dangerous notions, considering what we know about the possibility for algorithms to mete out all kinds of bias and discrimination across federal agencies, like the IRS, and in the housing industry overseen by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And Musk’s xAI company has set out to build an AI chatbot free of “woke ideology” on issues of racial and social justice, Business Insider reported last week, citing internal documents obtained by the outlet. (A spokesperson for xAI did not respond to Business Insider’s requests for comment.) So there’s no reason to believe Musk’s algorithms — either for commercial use or to slash the federal workforce — have been or will be effective in avoiding bias. Nor is there reason to believe the Trump administration, currently on a warpath against diversity, has any interest in doing so. And unfortunately, the federal government seems likely to become more reliant on algorithms in the coming years of the Trump presidency. In January, OpenAI, the company led by Sam Altman — who personally donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee — unveiled ChatGPT Gov, an artificial intelligence chatbot meant to be used within government agencies. And DOGE has been working on an AI chatbot for the U.S. Government Services Administration, which it’s calling GSAi, Wired reported in February, citing two people familiar with the project. (Neither the White House nor GSA responded to Wired’s requests for comment.) And one needn’t look any further than social media platforms like Musk-owned X and Meta-owned Instagram to see how mysterious algorithms are manipulating our personal lives, as well. It’s as if Washington, D.C., under Trump has found a new, tech-centered religion in its embrace of algorithms. And conservative lawmakers like Mike Johnson are acting as shameless evangelists.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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