In AI We Trust
Artificial Intelligence looks less like a cult and more like an official state religion.
AI is a cult. You hear this claim thrown around so often that it has taken on the ring of a cliche or a truism. But like most truisms, the expression wouldn’t have caught on without there being more than a little truth behind it. Like most cults, AI culture is built around an end times narrative, an eschatology centering on the “singularity” (the pivotal point of recursive superintelligence when computers become better at building themselves than humans) that can skew either apocalyptic or utopian depending on one’s perspective. AI culture comes with its own myths and monsters, like Roko’s Basilisk, born out of a thought experiment positing that once a sufficiently powerful and conscious Artificial General Intelligence was birthed, it would punish or reward all human beings based on their previous efforts to either stifle or facilitate the rise of AI. The Zizians, a bizarre cult-like group allegedly responsible for a cross-country murder spree leaving six dead, originated in rationalist communities of programmers bitterly divided over whether AI was the salvation or damnation of humanity. The question of whether the Artificial Intelligence industry itself is a cult may still be open for debate, but the fact that AI can inspire cult-like thinking and behavior is beyond dispute.
Having lived in Silicon Valley for a decade and a half, I had a few firsthand run-ins with AI enthusiasts whose faith and fervor could be described as nothing less than religious. AI promised an inversion of traditional creation myths: imperfect humanity would now be the creator, not the creation of a perfect superintelligence. When I left Silicon Valley to return to my hometown of Pittsburgh in 2018, I would have wholeheartedly agreed with the statement that AI was a cult. Now I am not so sure.
Cults, by most definitions, are marginal communities, existing on the fringes of society, sequestered away in remote compounds and rural retreats. Cults have minimal interactions with cultural trends and economic systems, often maintaining their ritual purity and control over members by removing them from the day-to-day affairs of mainstream society. While cults can wield political power, they usually do so in communities that are themselves on the fringe of the broader national culture, e.g. Jim Jones’ People’s Temple in the extremely liberal 1970s Bay Area, or the Christian Identity Posse Comitatus movements in far-right Mountain West communities in the 1980s and 1990s. Cults survive and thrive on society’s cultural, economic, and political margins.
With the Artificial Intelligence Industry now firmly implanting itself within the center of America’s cultural, economic, and political mainstream, we need to rethink the common trope of describing AI as a cult. Describing it as a cult makes AI sound far more fringe, and therefore far less menacing, than it actually is. Culturally, the impending impact of AI is undeniable. On a daily basis, we see pieces written by illustrators, screenwriters, graphic designers, architects, and actors warning of AI’s potential to fundamentally alter artistic production. Politically, both major parties have tightly aligned with the AI industry, from AI Accelerationists like Mark Andreeson emerging as key figures in the new MAGA coalition that reinstalled Trump in the White House to the Abundance liberals promoting a Democratic economic policy that would push aggressive all-of-the-above energy production to feed AI’s insatiable thirst for electricity.
Of course, this political and cultural influence is a function of AI’s growing centrality within the American economy, especially the grotesquely outsized role AI investment will play in the long-term financial future of the country. Google “Top 10 most valuable companies by Market Cap” and then Google “Ten Best AI Companies.” You will find it hard to differentiate the two lists. Other than Saudi Aramco, all of the 10 most valuable companies in the world are deeply focused on AI. The most valuable company in the world, Microsoft, revived itself from a 90s has-been primarily through its exclusive early partnership with OpenAI inked in 2016. NVIDIA, a close second in market cap, is the world’s leading maker of GPUs needed to run the most advanced AI processors, fueling an over 10x growth in NVIDIA’s stock price since AI mania took off in 2022 with the unveiling of publicly accessible ChatGPT. To make matters much worse, the market cap of these most valuable companies dwarfs the value of smaller companies by a magnitude unprecedented in modern stock market history. The Top Ten most valuable stocks (nearly all heavily invested in AI) now account for 38% of the entire value of the S&P 500 - since 1880, the highest prior level of top-heavy concentration peaked at 28%. In other words, America has staked unprecedented amounts of our national wealth on the economic viability of a technology that even its developers admit to not truly understanding. Having wagered our cultural, political, and economic future on the uncertain emergence of Artificial General Intelligence, it is clear that AI has transcended its cult-like origins to become a force that more closely resembles an official state religion of 21st-century America.
By “official state religion” I am not talking about some repressive theocracy like Taliban Afghanistan or even the Islamic Republic of Iran (which Trump has committed American blood and treasure to attack), but rather something more along the lines of the Anglican Church of England in the UK or the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Finland. To be an official state religion, there need not be a coercive attempt to get the citizens to practice or even believe the faith, just special protections and privileges bestowed upon it by the ruling elite and significant financial support extracted from the general population. For today’s primarily secular Brits and Finns, official state religions may have no impact on their spiritual life while still influencing their nation’s culture, politics, and economy.
We see AI taking a similar role in the lives of millions of Americans who might have no meaningful opinion on a technology that seems poised to consume and subsume every element of their day-to-day life within years. Collective social spending (public and private combined) on AI in America dwarfs social spending on state religions in modern countries and is approaching the level of wealth ancient and medieval civilizations spent on their houses of worship and veneration. The Mesopotamian elites built Ziggurats. Ancient Egyptians built pyramids. Medieval Christendom built cathedrals. 21st-century Americans build endless stretches of server farms and power plants to sacrifice a warming planet in hopes that a benevolent or at least benign superintelligence will emerge to save us. Techno-optimists will scoff at such a comparison, claiming that these monumental building projects to create AI infrastructure are guided by science, not superstition. Yet with the very creators of AI like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei admitting, “People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work,” the line between faith and reason is becoming less and less easy to discern. This blind faith in AI development marks a critical inflection point where we have gone from a speculative economy to a speculative civilization, ruled by elites whose legitimacy is now dependent upon a technology they no longer understand. Like all societies committed to an official state religion, we are devoting enormous amounts of our social resources to accommodate a higher power beyond the control of mere mortals.
The fact that AI is morphing into a state religion does not necessarily mean it has shed all of its cult-like attributes. Cults can still grow and flourish within the protective shell of a state religion. Rasputin was a mystic cult leader whose influence was based in part on his reputation as a monk operating under the auspices of the Russian Orthodox Church, even if he held no formal position within the empire’s official state religion. Rasputin gained power over Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, by offering hopes for the future of the Romanov Dynasty, claiming to miraculously heal the hemophiliac czarevich Alexei. Over 100 years later, the cult-like svengalis of AI Acceleration are whispering in the ears of America’s political elite, offering a miraculous cure for an anemic economy beset by decades of stagnation and growing inequality. Without any clear plan of how to harness AI to protect humanity, how to deal with its impact on labor markets, or even an understanding of how and when Artificial General Intelligence will emerge, the AI accelerationists are the miracle faith healers of our ailing economy, offering a panacea to save our corporate and political elites from the failed trickled down promises of the neoliberal era.
Whether AI evangelists like Sam Altman or Mark Andreesen will damage Trump’s legitimacy in the same way Rasputin discredited Czar Nicholas II remains to be seen. What we do know is that the fate of our current elites hangs in the balance of how this all-in bet on AI cashes out. In the same way that World War I was the last gasp of the Old World aristocratic elites (who made themselves fabulously wealthy through colonialism while providing only modest benefits to their subjects), the rise or fall of AI will be the defining moment for the Wall Street and Silicon Valley elites (who have made themselves fabulously wealthy through financialization of an economy that has yielded very modest returns for the average American). If AI turns out to be the Mother of All financial bubbles, then we will witness the same level of elite wealth destruction not seen since the euthanasia of the rentier class triggered by World War I and World War II. This may result in greater wealth equality like America experienced from the period of 1945-1975, but not without wreaking havoc on the vast numbers of average Americans whose pensions, 401(k)s, and retirement savings are dangerously overinvested in companies exposed to the AI industry. Yet, the average American may be even worse off if the all-in bet on AI pays off and tens of millions of jobs are automated away at a time when our political leaders seem more interested in unraveling our social safety net rather than reinforcing it. Even if the monumental bet on AI pays off for the elites, the average American looks set to lose unless dramatic amendments are made to our social contract. All the Studio Ghibli image generators, shrimp Jesuses, and the other forms of AI Slop better prove to be a stronger “opiate of the people” than anything ever devised by a state religion. Otherwise, our elites and their AI false messiahs may join the Romanovs and Rasputin in the dustbin of history.