Is technology a religion, a godlike system promising salvation and threatening of damnation? Yes, says Greg Epstein, the Humanist chaplain at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, in his new book Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation (MIT, out now). He says "Tech" is the most significant mass conversion of believers since Constantine put a Christian symbol on his warriors' shields in 312 CE. Now, faith in "Tech" — as Epstein dubs this "religion" — may be today's tool for ruling the world.
PW talks with Epstein about Tech Agnostic, God and the charm of being "agnostic"
Isn't Silicon Valley, your umbrella term for titans of technology, obsessed with gods? Where do you, author of Good Without God (2009) and a humanist chaplain, stand on God?
I'm not a crusader against belief in God at all. I have warm, caring relationships with many sincere God believers. But every religion has gods they accept and gods they see as false. Tech Agnostic begins with Constantine choosing the Christian God because he believed it had operational power in a military victory. We have always had technology but starting in the late 1980s and 90s, technological tools are being seen like "gods" and "demigods' in this mythical place called Silicon Valley. Today, "Tech" is a religion with operational power.
So, these are "gods" of power and control, reward and punishment? What about the idea of one God of love and justice? Can faith in Tech be a force for that?
I want to see Silicon Valley's emerging leaders talk with people who sincerely and passionately preach God as love, than to have them turn to a largely secular gospel of optimization and techno-solutionism, using technology as an ultimate set of tools for dominating others. I'm not anti-technology. I see it has tremendous potential to help with our human efforts and desires to heal ourselves and our relationships. Think about the creation of medicine, the creation of transportation so we can see more and do more, of safe housing so we can enjoy a better quality of life.
Your book does point to some efforts by the technocrats to address ethical and responsible technology. What about (Amazon founder) Jeff Bezos' 100-million-dollar AI Climate Solution pledge?
Leah Stokes, a leading scholar on climate policy, told me there's a painful irony here: We already know how to get rid of 75% of our emissions right now. We don't need some sort of AI magic bullet or a magic solution. And AI is terrible for the environment, a huge source of the rise in carbon emissions. I'm not accusing all religious people of this mentality. But this is the trope that people are using to fund their data centers, to get their trillions of dollars of investment: "If you do not do this for me then you're going to be condemned." I quote an influential AI philosopher named Nick Bostrom who argues that there will be trillions of digital beings in the future but only if we act now to do all that we possibly can immediately to bring those digital beings into being. And if we don't, we are essentially murdering them.
You take a strong stand on Tech so but your book title is Tech Agnostic. Isn't "agnostic" a term for someone who can't make up their mind?
I thought so, too! But then I met (journalist and author) Leslie Hazelton, who says that to be agnostic—to say you don't know—is a joyful thing. It's wonderful to recognize that not everything is knowable. Ultimately, I self-define as a Humanist. Just as Humanism is about creating positive alternatives to religion for non-religious people, Tech Humanism is about the creation of technological tools to gain not just data-driven knowledge, but real, lasting, sustainable knowledge, including knowledge of how to be better, more loving human beings.