Faith Venture

I don’t write these posts to motivate you to go to church somewhere. Hopefully you will gravitate to a community of people who encourage spiritual practices and service.

I try also to explain philosophy, if I even broach the subject, in the simplest possible terms. Following are thoughts on philosophy which are reflected in what you read. The topic is artificial intelligence leading to artificial general intelligence (computers become human or even God).

The arguments that follow stem from a “religion” called Rationalism followed by many (most?) leaders in Silicon Valley. They continue the lineage of René Descartes, who separated thinking from spirit.

I am a contemplative. Spirituality for me is not a logical argument but an experience. When people think they can replace God, they are on a fool’s errand. But, they are scary. Check out the story of the Grand Inquisitor from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

Let’s begin with reporting from John Ellis News Items.

When Pope Leo XIV presented a 42,300-word open letter to the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics on Monday, calling for protections against the rise of artificial intelligence, he was joined by Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, which is one of the tech industry’s leading A.I. companies.

As Leo urged corporate executives, government regulators and other citizens of the world to safeguard humanity from the dangers of A.I., he included Mr. Olah as a symbol of the dialogue he hopes to foster between the leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.

Human or Not?

But for Jeremy Nixon, Monday’s gathering at the Vatican showed that those two worlds are far from aligned. While the pope said that A.I. was fundamentally not human, Mr. Nixon, a well-connected figure in the Bay Area’s frenetic A.I. scene, argued that Mr. Olah’s remarks seemed to hint at the opposite.

More than most, Mr. Nixon understands the technology emerging from Silicon Valley and the attitudes of the people building it. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, when Silicon Valley started developing the technologies that power chatbots, Mr. Nixon worked in Google’s central A.I. lab. Later, he founded A.G.I. House with Andrej Karpathy, who was an early employee at OpenAI, oversaw self-driving tech at Tesla and recently joined Anthropic.

Mr. Nixon said the papal encyclical might mean something to the world’s Catholics, but he doubted that it would have an effect on Silicon Valley. The only reason that Silicon Valley even paid attention to the event, he said, was that Leo invited Mr. Olah to speak.

God or Not?

Mr. Nixon is now founder and chief executive of a start-up called the Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute, which is trying to automate the creation of A.I.

Mr. Nixon said he has met a generation of scientists who shunned traditional religion in favor of technology. After growing up with books like “The God Delusion” — in which the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins painted God as a false belief contradicted by empirical evidence — he and his peers saw A.I. as an alternative that was more real and far more powerful.

This is an increasingly common belief among researchers in Silicon Valley. They insist they are on their way to building a more powerful species — or even a new God.

“People are matter-of-factly saying that they are looking to build a machine God,” said Rayan Krishnan, the chief executive of Vals AI, a San Francisco company that tracks the performance of the latest A.I. technologies. “They are not saying that ironically or in jest. They are saying it as a matter of fact.”

Something for spiritually inclined people to reflect on.