How Big Tech became the world’s most powerful ‘religion’ and why we need to become agnostic

Greg Epstein is the Humanist chaplain at Harvard University and at MIT, where he advises students, faculty, and staff members on ethical and existential concerns from a humanist perspective. He has served for over 20 years in elected and appointed interfaith leadership roles as an advisor for the non-religious. He himself is an atheist, agnostic, Humanist.

Tech has changed roles. It used to be a mere tool that people could use for bettering and strengthening humanity. Now, it has achieved a religiosity that threatens to make us the servant worshipers of a dangerous Big Tech agenda. We need to stop genuflecting to our black mirrors a hundred times a day and pull all that is digital down from the heavens, back into the toolbox.

Below, Epstein shares five key insights from his new book, Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation. Listen to the audio version—read by Epstein himself—in the Next Big Idea App.

1. Tech has come to play a role in our lives that surpasses any industry

Tech has come to look more like a religion. If you compare the mythological kingdom of Silicon Valley to the size and scope of other world religions today, it would now be the biggest.

We tend to say that tech is “an industry,” but that description makes no sense because there’s no longer any major industry that isn’t a tech industry. If a new religion of the traditional kind had emerged and acquired billions of devotees (and dollars) in the way that our current fervor for AI, social media, surveillance capitalism, and all things digital have, if everyone you knew suddenly started praying or worshiping at a traditional altar as often or as fervently as we genuflect before our stained glass black mirrors (at least 150 times a day, on average), then we would and should ask ourselves whether that new creed had taken on undue influence over our lives.

2. Big Tech is dominated by some weird ideas

Big Tech has become a basic feature of daily life, and it has come to be dominated by some extremely weird ideas. Many of those ideas are weirdly theological. Like Way of the Future (WOTF), a religion founded by Anthony Levandowski, a former Google and Uber AI engineer who made hundreds of millions before being convicted for IP theft against Google, avoiding jail when Donald Trump pardoned him. Levandowski, upon filing paperwork to found a new church, told the IRS that his new faith focused on, “The realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence, developed through computer hardware and software.” He believes humans are creating something that will soon be a god that, like the jealous one in the Bible, will be angry to discover that we didn’t start worshiping it sooner.

I wish my book research hadn’t turned up literally countless similar examples, like The Singularity. According to Ray Kurzweil, the AI legend who helped pioneer Google’s Gemini, The Singularity is the supposedly fast-approaching moment when tech allows us to overcome death, making human life meaningful. This contradicts thousands of years of secular and religious philosophy by implying that life hasn’t been meaningful until now.

3. A new traditional religion dominated by strange ideas would be questioned

We desperately need more critical thinking about why Big Tech is selling such grand ideas and lofty ideals. Many of the most important weird tech ideas I explore in Tech Agnostic directly influence the movement of billions of dollars.

Heaven is a genuinely beautiful and meaningful concept for many. I’m fine with that, even though I am among those who, like John Lennon, prefer to “Imagine” there’s no such thing. The problem is that in the hands of infallible extremists or absolute monarchs, the concept can justify almost anything: “Sure, society isn’t fair or equitable or safe, your family is suffering, and the future looks bleak. But stop complaining and obey my commands,” say such rulers. “If you do, you’ll go to paradise. If not, go to the other place.”

This classic theological trope appears in a 2003 essay, Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development, by Nick Bostrom, a former longtime Oxford professor who was among the world’s most decorated figures in AI until he was forced to close his Future of Humanity Institute in April 2024. In the piece, Bostrom argued that for every year that sufficiently advanced technology is not developed, and colonization of the universe is delayed, there is a “corresponding opportunity cost” of the trillions of hypothetical future digital lives that tech could bring to the universe.

In other words, if you don’t pump billions into the coffers of AI leaders now, you’re denying the birth of billions of AI “people” in a celestial tech future. By doing so, you might be committing genocide. The influential tech billionaire investor and founder Marc Andreessen makes the same case in his famous 2023 Techno-Optimist Manifesto. He writes: “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. [. . . ]Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.”

Yikes. Facing a claim like that, it’s harder to raise more earthly concerns like AI’s huge carbon footprint amid the global climate crisis or AI disinformation harming democracy. That’s precisely the agenda behind Big Beliefs like Tech Heaven.

4. We need a Renaissance of agnosticism

One of the biggest blessings skeptical Humanism can offer a world of tech-certainty, in which AI chatbots freely and frequently hallucinate garbage answers and advice (like Google Gemini’s suggestion to use glue to keep cheese from sliding off pizza), is that it’s honorable to admit not knowing an answer. Patient, thoughtful agnosticism may be slower, but it can help form better answers to life’s hardest questions, like “Is the theology I believe in true?” Or, “How to govern a diverse society?” Or, “Should I glue mozzarella and sauce to my pizza crust?” Okay, some questions do have easy answers.

Seriously though, our society needs to be more proud of what my friend Lesley Hazleton, author of Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, calls “a spirited delight in not knowing.”

5. Technology belongs as a tool—nothing more

There is a deep beauty worth fighting for: Acknowledging, even celebrating, our limitations, imperfections, and mortality. Our flawed yet resilient capacity to love is valuable. We need to return technology to the status of tools that are in service to our deep and common humanity.

This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.

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