A running joke at Bay Area parties is that AI researchers are “building God.” This, of course, sounds wildly grandiose. No one I have met means it literally—nobody thinks they are making something supernatural or divine. To try to decode: The speaker is gesturing at how powerful this technology could become—even, eventually, functionally omniscient or omnipotent. They are trying to distinguish this invention from, say, social media, or even the internet. They do not mean the current model, but whatever comes after these systems start improving themselves and become far smarter than we are. They are reaching for a shorthand equal to what they expect, and I think that honesty is good for the world, whether or not the prediction holds.
From outside San Francisco, the joke is sometimes heard as a reflection of spiritual lacking—that the pursuit of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a stand-in for a God-shaped hole, that clever technologists who reasoned their way out of the old faith are now building an idol to fill the vacancy. I do not think that is quite what is happening. People need meaning, and intense, world-shaping work is one of the oldest ways to find it; that part is not new and often not sinister. What is different here is that this particular work sits so close to the old questions—what are we, where did this come from, what comes after—that you cannot do it long without staring into them. They are not building God because they miss Him. They are building something that has brought them, unexpectedly, to the edge of where He would be.
AI workers tend to be less religious than the rest of the U.S. population. They are mostly lapsed in their faith, or were never religious to begin with. Perhaps they were circumcised or baptized; now they may occasionally meditate. This is, for the most part, a materialist lot—by which I mean people for whom the world is atoms and physical laws with nothing supernatural left over, and for whom morality is something worked out from intuition or from philosophy, rather than received from outside the world.
Their work is fascinating and all-consuming. Some are exhausted, and some do fear what they are making—loss of control, misuse, the economic disruption it may bring—but largely, their days are good and full. By any ordinary measure, there is little here to search for.
