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 ReformationListen 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 strange ideas. Many of those ideas are strangely 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.