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.








