alt Hacker NewsIf you replace "AI" with "Adonai" in EY's framing, it reduces to biblical parables from his childhood about arguing with God to negotiate a new covenant.
He's clearly a bright guy, but a lot of his work seems to be trying to reconcile Old Testament narrative patterns with atheism, and simply slotting an omnipotent AI in as a replacement.
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Charles Stross has a very pithy version of this too, Singularity mania as 'duck-typed Evangelicalism'. It's really telling that if you go to China, Japan or even Europe there's virtually nothing of this. I don't think there's genuine atheists in America, as soon as they lose institutional religion they project the same kind of patterns onto tech or politics.
Brian Johnson is also an interesting case of this with his longevity / immortality obsession and his Mormon background who have this whole thing about genealogy and eternal families etc.
I once heard TESCREAL/EA/etc. called "Calvinism for programmers".
Having been raised substantially by a Calvinist grandmother, oh yeah.
It's a super weird religion.