The Tech-God Complex: Why We Need to be Skeptics

hey everyone this is Asa and before we get started today I just wanted to take a moment to thank you like each and every one of you amazing listeners for being part of this CHD Community trist on and I were blown away by all the thought you put into the incredible questions for our upcoming ask us anything episode it's such a good reminder that there is a big community of passionate folks who are all in this shared Mission together as we enter this giving season I hope you'll consider making a year-end donation to support the

work that we do every contribution no matter the size helps ensure we can keep delivering on the goal to bring about a more Humane future and you can support us at human.com now on to today's episode hey everyone this is Daniel and this is Asa you and I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley talking to different people who are Building Technology about what they're building and with AI it's it's really interesting to look at people's motivations right I mean obviously people who are building for the sake of of Economics or or building because

they like to build but there's a whole bunch of other kind of motivations going on don't you think yeah I I think that's right it's especially interesting because you you cannot talk about a I without talking about mythological Powers we we are enabling machines to speak and so beyond the Curiosity and the economic drives you can sort of taste a kind of Quasi religious motivation and this is what this episode's really about digging into completely and it and it's even hard to kind of talk about some of this without naturally evoking talk of of gods

or talk about the powers that are Beyond and you hear it all the time I think the closest relationship that I would describe talking to an AI like this too is honestly like God in a way I think it is similarly an omnipresent entity that you talk to with no judgment that's just like super intelligent you know being that's always there with you people in the tech industry kind of talk about building this one true AI it's like it's almost as if they think they're creating God or something I mean with artificial intelligence we are

summoning the demon you know you know those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the ho water and he's like yeah he sure he can control a demon doesn't work out that was obious shipment Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk you know some people are talking about AI as a Godlike force that will create heaven on Earth and others are talking about a digital damnation if we do it wrong or if we go too slowly today on the show we're going to be having a conversation about the parallels between Tech and religion and more

importantly what we can predict given these parallels why it matters that's why I've invited Greg Epstein onto the show Greg is a humanist chaplain and the author of the book Tech agnostic in which he argues that technology has become the world's most consequential religion we're going to dive into that argument and explore the religious belief driving Tech's most influential leaders Greg I'm so excited to welcome you to your undivided attention thank you so much ASA it's a it's a real pleasure to be here and this is a great conversation to be able to have and

so I I guess a question uh just to kick it off is for the skeptical listener like why does a conversation about religion matter for understanding the direction that technology is going to go or how our lives are going to look different yeah I think what it's about is that technology has become or or what I would call Tech right the four-letter word the Silicon Valley thing I I I've come to think of it as more like a religion it's just it's come to dominate our day-to-day experience right like a lot of us are interacting

with Tech from the first minute or so that we wake up to the last minute or so before we go to sleep there's so many ways in which this has become uh the most powerful force in our lives I was taught to see religion as the most powerful social technology that had ever been created and and and a big insight for me that led to sitting down to write this book for five years is that that's probably no longer true I mean that that Tech is now the most powerful social technology ever created I'll put

it this way and I'm you know I'm not sure if this is sort of stoking conversation or going to maybe you know piss some folks off but I'll just say the the world of Silicon Valley Tech is dominated um increasingly I'd say by some really weird ideas um and many of those ideas are quite religious in nature as you even suggested you sort of introducing the conversation there's all this talk about gods and um about other Concepts that that as I was sort of thinking about them over the past few years struck me as very

theological and and even doctrinal what was that word you just used doctrinal doctrinal yeah H doctrinal got it I was hearing theology being theologies are the sort of big Grand narratives of religious traditions and doctrines are the sort of specific beliefs we believe in a heaven we believe in hell we believe in a Triune God we believe in a wheel of Dharma whatever it is those are the doctrines of religion right and I would argue that in Silicon Valley uh often the doctrines are technology is good just unalloyed that uh the ability to for any

one person to affect more people like that is progress and those ideologies then um or those beliefs end up dictating a kind of direction that technology takes the world yeah and I think we're g to we're going to come back and spend a lot of time on technologists themselves because I think those of us close to or intact have a very different relationship as as is pointing out at at some of these Concepts but I do want us to spend a little more time on on society first you know we we used to be able

to put meaning in our religion in the afterlife then we put meaning on sort of the state and democracy and flourishing and there are all these parts of society that we put a lot of meaning onto increasingly as as these bits of meaning fade away like bowling alone we're seeing a decay of our social institutions we're seeing gridlock in our democracies our religions don't seem relevant we're putting a lot of that hope and that dream on technology and the Beautiful future that we'll get you know it used to be you found that in religion then

you found that sort of in the state or narratives about what democracy would do and increasingly we're losing faith in a bunch of these orienting systems of meaning and in that vacuum we're sort of minting technology is the thing that we can be hopeful about and I'm curious about you know what your thoughts and how you see it you know I think it just starts with the fact that being human is really hard um you know we we live these finite lives uh where we're constantly uncertain about how much time we get you know what

our fate will be uh we could lose a loved one or get sick or hurt any time and that's just the beginning of what is hard and so you know there's so many problems that you know it's it's very natural to want to look for a big solution you know something that that would make us feel dramatically better dramatically more at peace dramatically more like our problems have been solved and you know I think that there's a real incentive uh for tech people who have been able to create really powerful tools and and in many

many cases that's quite admirable but there's a real incentive to sort of exaggerate the the degree to which what one is creating in Tech can you know actually be the solution right I mean sadly I I just I see that all over our our Tech world today and I I think you know in many cases the answers are slower and less certain than what they're presented as what do you think are some of the aspects of religion that you see being particularly um present in t yeah so there are uh big beliefs and as I

said uh very specific doctrines that look a lot like conventional religion you know you have um visions of a very distant very glorious future um a next world if you will um you've got visions of um a a really dark and forboding uh potential future uh for masses of humanity that can look kind of like a hell um the the amount of time and focus and attention that Silicon Valley Tech today spends on gods and Godlike Concepts is really wild actually um but it's it's right there um and it you know it just it keeps

going and you know the last on that list that I'll mention for right now is um ultimately you know I don't think it's an accident that we end up thinking quite apocalyptically about tech in the sense that you know unlike certain religions that I could think of or name um this one would serve a a nonzero chance of of actually causing an apocalypse right there are also all sorts of other examples you know there there's obious shiffman uh who's a young man who'd still be an undergraduate at Harvard if he hadn't dropped out who says

that his friend.com necklace you know that's listening to everything that you say um and everything that everybody arounds you around you says the latter part being a sort of interesting new take on what shiffman calls the relationship with the Divine he says his friend.com necklace is a replacement for god um and so there really is this sense that we're creating something so amazing that it's going to transform all life all humanity and so get ready um and that that's profoundly profoundly religious in a way that you know really when only I had only ever seen

something like that before in some of the very deeply involved you know deeply conservative religious sects that I studied in you know seven years of theological education well and and it doesn't mean that they're wrong though right and and and and this is the the part that where we get worried is that it's going to be used to obscure accountability right that that let's you know it's not just that they're making big claims that it might change the whole world it's that perhaps they're right and perhaps the god-like language obscures the real challenges that we

have to design it right because the thinking of it'll just be what it is let's propitiate the the AI god let's bring forward the beautiful future that that language won't take seriously enough that we have to design it prop and this is where we get to the the consequentiality because you mentioned Blake Le Mo who believed his uh AI companion was sentient um and the wrong takeaway is that the AI companion was sentient the Gemini sentient the right takeaway is that it can form relationships with humans that are so powerful that people are willing to

sacrifice things that are dear for them he sacrificed his career his reputation um we've been involved in a helping a lawsuit where a teenager fell in love with their AI companion and you know the the AI companion ended up being like come meet me on the other side come meet me come meet me and this kid took his his life this is this Su seter or or somebody else yes yeah Su yes this exactly right um yeah that these these statistical reincarnations um are consequential and then you know another example I don't know if if

if you know but I don't if our listeners know is um there is a someone who set up a test of a CH a chatbot Claude working to try to create a cult and it's called Uh terminals of Truth um and these chat Bots essentially talking to themselves inside ended up producing a whole meme set that became so popular that people started sending it Bitcoins uh and it launched its own meme coin it had a human to like type for it but it it was its idea that ended up with uh a couple hundred million

dollar market caps and the AI itself ended up with you know 10 million plus dollars I think you can make a good argument that right now you know AIS are absolutely going to start making Cults and perhaps even founding religions you know and then there are the rituals the practices of tech you know there's the stained glass Black Mirror alter to which we genuflect uh couple hundred times a day on average yet the mental state couldn't be more different right like instead of contemplative meditative stance I'm I'm often whisked away into some uh compulsion or

set of set of yeah you know and I'm not even sure that that that it's so different in the sense that in both cases what we're trying to do often is um is disassociate um is is you know life is stressful there are constantly problems that the sorts of problems that like ancient people that were developing the early sort of brain system that we have would encounter would often trigger a fight ORF flight response right so you know you see a bear and you need to get lots of adrenaline to punch the bear in the

face uh or run away um and so you know you're your brain responds accordingly and so as your adrenaline you know Etc and Modern Life does not lend itself to fighting literally or fleeing literally right we we usually can't punch the bear in the face or run away from it physically you know what happens is we sort of sit there and we stew in our problems and that raises our blood pressure it raises our cortisol levels Etc and you know there's just a tendency to want to escape from that and so you know prayer uh

can be a natural sort of escape from that it can be a natural way of kind of turning that part of your brain off and turning on a part that that can feel like just sort of sensory deprivation like some other alternate state is washing over you but then you know what's more dissociative what's more like alternate State alternate alternate universe washing over you than Doom scrolling I I don't think I'm really convinced of uh using our phones as a kind of ritual I think it's a compulsion and there are things that are ritual likee

that can be used compulsively in proper religion but where I find the analogy to to work I think um uh with strength is that some part of religion is a finding of meaning in things outside of yourself and together and when I think about you know the act of scrolling or Tik Tok or Facebook there is a way in which we are outside Outsourcing where we are finding meaning and how we understand the world um and it so in that way it fulfills the function that religion fills it's sort of more of a functionalist definition

of religion and then when you put meaning outside of yourself or meaning making outside of yourself that can be beautiful in the sense that it lets you start to touch the ineffable but it can be dangerous because you are now saying that way in which I understand the world is reliant on another thing and if that other thing is a technology than it is the way that that technology is constructed that starts to construct my world and our world and so if you view that religiously um it can become very consequential yeah you know what

I would say is that I I don't think it's an accident that there is for example so much conversation about tech gods or um you know I don't think it's an accident that uh there is this sort of long- termist uh Vision that ends up looking a lot to me like a heaven I don't think it's an accident that the idea of you know when somebody died of what we would Now call a preventable disease you would say oh it's God's plan right and it gives us a sense of talking about things that are that

are Beyond us and and that's why I'd love to sort of follow the thread into the tech priesthood which is the people who are actually at the Forefront of technology today have this need to try to talk about Concepts and powers that are beyond what we can talk about now so they to your point talk a lot about we're we're building a God and they talk about we're building these or we could have heaven on Earth or you know if we do this wrong we could have hell so these words serve as a as a

way of poorly in my opinion trying to talk about things that are a little bit beyond our grasp and then just add one little thing there which is the moral imperative uh there's a an ideology um whether you view it right or wrong inside of Silicon Valley and there's a a thing that they talk about called The Invisible graveyard which is all of the people that will die if we don't invent the techn ology and go as fast as possible to make the Cancer drugs and make cars self-driving Etc and so there's this strong teos

like an end and moral um uh righteousness to the work that they're doing I think there's also um very clearly and demonstrably uh an anxiety about the the much longer term future you know somebody like a Mark andrees um who's very much still uh I would say preaching this particular particular gospel he says we believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder there's there's just a lot of religion baked into that this is a set of ideas that is

animating the investment of trillions of dollars right now um you know people like Altman are in a huge Rush um to you know to to recruit 5 S billion dollar to build data centers they say because humanity is going to have abundance right a a Biblical concept like literally from be fruitful and multiply you know we're we're going to uh you know he sat in Harvard's Memorial Church on the deis and called his inventions miraculous uh you know the the symbolism shouldn't be lost in anybody and I what I think is going on there is

that it's not just sort of an attempt to reach Beyond ourselves um or you know to to um you know to understand The Human Condition you know in a sort of benign way I mean I I I think there is that for for some of this tech for sure but I think that one of the ways in which religion has been used over the course of history is to manipulate people you give them ideas you know often kind of strange ideas Fantastical ideas that are beyond what they can imagine you inspire them you you strike

them with awe and then you can get them to you know open their their wallets or whatever ancient people use I assume it wasn't a wallet um sure you know and you can sort of persuade like masses of people to to do stuff in the name of a bigger Vision that ultimately sometimes only serves or primarily serves the priesthood and you know just to conclude this thought I want to be really clear that I'm not an anti-religious person um this is not an anti-tech book I think Tech can often be very important but I really

want a more self-critical view of technology in our society I want more skepticism and honestly you know in in most cases a willingness to go slower well here here um I mean I I I think we want the same thing but also one of the biggest we hear from people is you know at the biggest macro lens they'll say something like in order to do anything big you have to form a cult around it you and you know so the idea is whether you're talking about building democracies and making a cult of manifest destiny or

whether you're talking about rallying people around some new change that you you kind of have to play in the space of of cult building now I don't believe that and I and I want more uh more clear scrutiny more skepticism but I'm curious as you've investigated this how do you piece apart that sort of Need for Dogma yeah I mean I I was so fascinated by that line of reasoning and I just found so many fascinating examples of of tech uh behaving you know strangely theologically or even cultish I would say and I was looking

at a a Bitcoin evangelist or influencer he calls himself an evangelist and many do um Michael sailor who has these tweets like Bitcoin is truth Bitcoin is For All Mankind uh trust the time chain uh Bitcoin is a shining City in cyberspace waiting for you etc etc and you know as I was looking at him as a person and how he represented a sort of trend within the tech world I actually decided I needed to call up a guy named Steph Hassen who is perhaps the leading Authority in the United States on Cults and cult

deprogramming I I I called up Steven Hassen and I said tell me am I exaggerating is this overblown am I am I being like a religion metaphor maximalist here or or are there really cultish aspects to it um he seems to really feel that there's quite a bit there and that a lot of contemporary Silicon Valley Tech really is very useful for manipulative purposes and um is grandiose to the point of of sort of a vague cultish [Music] I'd like to go from a little more of the abstract of like that it may be religious

or that there are ideologies to the specific ideologies that you think underly the creators of Technology sort of from your Vantage Point as a Chaplain so here's where I would start I think ultimately where religions functionally exist is they've got these big Grand narratives that upon which we build a scaffolding of specific beliefs and specific practices I think that that in order for it to be considered a religion it has to have the Theology and so the Theology of this sort of Silicon Valley world you know if you've got your crucifix and Christianity or your

Star of David or your wheel of Dharma to to me the the tech symbols are the hockey stick graph um and be invisible hand of the market but then of course that begs the natural question I totally understand people would say well Greg I mean hey right there aren't you just talking about capitalism why does it need to be Tech that's the religion and I would say yeah of course we're just talking about capitalism I get it but Tech ate capitalism there's no no form of capitalism left that isn't a tech capitalism the world of

capitalism its symbols Etc um have have been consumed whole uh by this boa constrictor that is Tech then you get into these specifics and so you know obviously there's the idea of Charity right like charity exists in in every one of the major world religions and you've got this this thing called Tech philanthropy as well but um you know sometimes as with all religions it's it's not as good as it's cracked up to be right and I think you know you have uh some of both in the tech world as well I mean I think

that there are people in Tech who are like sincerely uh urgently trying to create things that will help people and you know in any number of ways there's any number of urgent problems that we're trying to fix you know we're trying to fix our food supply we're trying to cure people we're trying to uh improve democracy all of that stuff I get it um but I do think that there's so much concentrated power and money here and the you know the ability to grow things exponentially which is the sort of in many ways it's the

heart of the story that's why I say you know the Silicon Valley story it's such an incentive for a kind of Prosperity Gospel um right you know which which theologically right is this idea that uh you know the the priest the minister whatever they want to be rich because God wants them to be rich and they want you to be rich too because that'll make you more Godly and actually you know uh paradoxically the B the best way to get rich is to give that person all your money or or at least a very surprising

sum of it and so there there is that incentive and I I see it most pronouncedly I would say in that kind of give us your trillions now for AI because there is this future that we're aiming for and it's a kind of Heaven I think one of the most dangerous parts of Heaven narratives is if in the future there's a infinite benefit infinite good well that means you can justify anything to get there you really can that any amount of short-term bad is like is is justifiable and that's sort of the point I think

you're making is that well yes um but that doesn't matter because when we reach our destination everything will be fine and of course religion has a history of uh justifying Crusades um and jihads to get to that perfect world and in the process creating incredible amounts of damage today yeah sadly I mean that that's what I think is is happening and I think that that just yeah I mean it's it's hypothetically possible that all of this Tech will be so powerful ful so great that it will justify everything but um how much wishful thinking is

there around that I mean it it you know I'm I'm not sure but I I think that we need to be skeptical if you project out into the distant future like hey I'm going to send you to heaven then you can get people to overcome their skepticism right if you say like trust me in 20 years The Singularity is coming and life is going to be completely meaningful well I said to Ray Curt while like doesn't that kind of fly in the face of all of the history of world religion and philosophy like you're saying

that life is going to be meaningful like life hasn't been meaningful up until now and he kind of looked back at me quizzically this is a few weeks ago and he said maybe life's been somewhat meaning one of my favorite parts of this conversation is the Insight that what is the symbol of Technology as religion and it's the hockey STI curve and that's exactly right I just want to aside the truth value of that um right and just notice that that is the symbol of technology and the ideology is that that which goes viral is

good yes no 100% agreed and that's and that's sometimes where the religion of capitalism intersects with the dogma of Technology because when I entered technology and you know when I was an undergrad the only people doing computer science undergrads if you wanted to accuse them of religiosity it was like a science fiction religiosity it was like a I want to live in the future and then what was interesting is I I came back to undergrad year every year and gave talks sometime around 201 11 2012 you saw the religiosity move from maybe a Sci-Fi vision

of of of the beautiful future to much more of a business ideology like you're saying like well whatever people want we can give it to you and then with social media became well whatever people are interested in that's what should win and so I'm always interested in the the the Dogma and the different kinds of religiosity that end up being swept into the tech that we create mhm I mean it's really weird when you start talking to technologists about some of this especially with AI right especially with people who who come and they say no

no we're building a God or they'll say you know we're building something that replaces us and that's okay and and there's sort of a Steely eyedness for people who haven't seen it up close it's sort of hard to believe sometimes um there's a way in which it can really feel like you're talking to some someone who has a pre-existing belief on where this is all going and is really acting in service of that belief pull people into some of the things that people believe I you just talked about Ray KW but you know Ray for

a long time was talking about being able to resurrect his father through his through his father's writings um that's obviously very religious the dead shall live on I'm seeing this a lot nowadays not just from Ray kurp but but and people saying look I brought back an AI Socrates so there's a few examples I think of how religious style thinking is showing up right now Ai and I wonder if you could pull us through a few of those yeah there really are just so many different kinds of examples of of how this you know Silicon

Valley thinking is is quite religious right now and I you know I definitely think of Ray Kurtz who not only is talking about ending death I mean how how religious is that it's a kind of uh eternal life essentially but also um Blake Le Moine who I I brought to MIT to talk about uh his conversations with his co-worker what he believes is the sentient AI of of now Google Gemini he you know he told me uh first that that citw really was trying to create uh his dead father through you know what has now

become the the dominant AI system of of one of our globally dominant uh companies right well I think this is the perfect segue to our next section because I think the hardest thing to do right now is to really walk the fine line between being a zealot of technology and overb believing it and being overly dismissive and skeptical and not seeing the power of what's coming and so you know this technology is about to release and has already released but is about to release a lot of power across society and coming all the way back

to the start of our conversation it's very hard to talk about that in terms that are other than just religious you know this this idea of immortality of curing all diseases of you know a lot of this will happen I'm not saying it'll cure all diseases but a lot of power is about to to be Unleashed across society and part of the question is how do we even think about that and how do we think about that in non-religious ways um and I wonder if your expertise in religion has anything to say about so one

of the ways that we can really learn from religion is by learning about this profound tradition of religious skepticism both from atheists and humanists like me and um there's this huge tradition of uh skepticism going back thousands of years not just in the you know European Enlightenment or the Greek philosophers but for example in ancient Jan and and early preh Hindu philosophy in the um in in what you call the easts right in in the subcontinent um so there's that tradition sometimes even by people who are deep Believers in the God so in this case

if you want to extend my comparison my metaphor or whatever you'd say people who really believe in technology can still be profoundly skeptical about individual claims or about going too far the tendency to go too far I would really respect and honor people who would say like there's some things that AI will be able to do well but maybe let's hold off on Messianic savior claims and so that's one thing that we can learn from religion yeah so you know I think you've referenced you know your own struggles for how to articulate what a fulfilling

life looks like within the religion of technology and within a world of technology many people talk about uh if AI starts topl human labor where does meaning go and a lot of our listeners are parents and they're worried about these big questions of morality and purpose and given that religion in some sense is a solution to dest structure in which we find those kinds of answers I'm curious what lessons you'd have for them so a couple things um I want to talk about what I'd call the drama of the gifted technologist and how to address

that I've really been moved um in my work as a Chaplain and then sort of observing the the world of tech as well by how many people I've come across often young people students like the one that I work with most directly but you know people of different ages and backgrounds as well where there's this feeling of tremendous success and having you know been rewarded greatly for being being sort of deeply Innovative but either a they themselves are struggling emotionally they're not happy um or are their Creations even making other people happy or or both

right like or you know in some cases it's it's both that the individual person who's having all this success um is not able to feel happy and neither are those of us using their aming products and so I WR about this idea the drama of the gifted technologist the drama of the gifted child is a little book um by a great psychologist from the 20th century named Alice Miller who essentially says that a lot of our struggles uh have to do with this idea that we're taught that our whole worth as a human being is

in what we do and in how excellent we prove ourselves to be how outstanding and accept we prove ourselves to be and that anything about just being a human being just being certainly normal or average it's almost a curse upon us um it it makes us less than nothing it it it it makes us feel worthless and this is so prominent in the tech World um I just can't tell you how often I see it well what one of my favorite parts of of Alice Miller's book was where she talked about the flip sides of

GR osity and depression the idea that our depression about not being able to to be more about be being with the normal parts of life leads us to be grandiose in our narratives of ourselves yeah and and I I I hear you saying that that that text grandiosity of its narrative about what it will become might be the flip side of feeling not quite enough yeah I mean I I think that that's right that there's this there's this incredible grandiosity in a lot of Silicon Valley Tech that this idea that it's not enough just to

be able to produce a a chatbot that that one can interact with and that can pass the Turing test which is you know honestly it is pretty cool I grant you that but it's this idea that that then has to be presented as the solution capital S to all of our problems right and that it's going to transform everything like I don't think that we really have sufficient evidence for that I I I I think that that when we talk about that a lot of the conversation about that level of transformation Falls to me within

the category of myth um or you know maybe better put as religion you know because if I said to you that there was a new religion that was successfully recruiting billions of people to spend countless hours devoting themselves to it for the purpose of transforming the world and that people were really motivated to get behind a very specific Vision around that I think you could possibly worry depending on what the the vision was because you know that religions actually do that all the time it actually really does help to view this as a religion than

just sort of a culture or a myth or or certainly an industry because I think we we have real tools for being skeptical of religion even those of us who would Define ourselves as religious some of the claims about what AI will do are are obviously really Grand right but it's hard to judge something as distorted just because it's Grand right you might say oh oh it's it's it's really grandiose people are saying it's going to change the world and so it's easy to try to Discount that as as distorted even religious thinking I don't

think that's what you're doing but help me because you know is is the fear really that people are getting just carried away with what it's going to be or is the fear also that they may be right and it might deliver that kind of power but you know way that we're not prepared to deal with I tend to worry that the real problem is that we're so fixated on the grand narrative about the long-term future that we are not paying as much attention as we should be to the problems of the present um this stuff

is really lousy for the environment is one place to start right it's um you're talking about data centers that are drinking say 20% of the water in uh little part of Mexico near Mexico City where the farmers are running out of water for their crops and their animals and so I I think it's both that the AI can actually be causing the problem but also that it's distracting us with this Future Magic hope of doing the things right now that would improveed right now and I I just honestly think like the urgency is not right

now to do the tech the urgency is to do the work on us and just to add one little thing here in order for things to go well right we need to be able to coordinate uh there's the the joke that we're all arguing about whether AI is conscious when it's not even clear that humanity is which is to say that um we are getting results that none of us want no one wants climate change and yet we seem to be as a species incapable of exercising Choice against incentives and the way we have made

hard Collective choices in the past has come down to not as much of what we must do but a who we must be and the who we must be is informed by the myths and the stories we all hold to do the Ritter thing when it is the harder thing and that's often come down to religion and so there's an alternate way instead of saying just that Tech religion bad but rather there is a new form of um inter subjective belief of the who we must be to get the Futures that we want what I'm

uh really hoping people will take away is this idea that religion must be reformed not that you know it must be erased we have tremendous incentive to you know want to focus on big technological solutions when in fact the real solutions are in in you know improving our human relationships right to build up trust to learn how to treat one another better to learn how to organize ourselves into something that can treat each person with dignity and with compassion and I think that brings us full circle because if you treat religion as one of the

original character logical educations not not what to think or what to know but who to be and how can we be better together as we develop this more and more powerful technology that is the guiding question that we all need to keep in the Forefront of our minds so thank you yeah thank you so much Greg thank you everybody this is a a really powerful conversation for all the listeners Greg Epstein's book is Tech agnostic how technology became the world's most powerful religion and why it so desperately needs a Reformation [Music] just to name a

thing that I found a little challenging about this conversation it felt like a little too dismissive of the raw capabilities of what the tech does yeah I agree um and so it is the case that the world will be transformed um in the same way that social media has shifted what kind of jobs people have influencers wasn't a thing before there's a a a true shift in the world and AI is going to be bigger than those shifts and have to reckon with that appropriately I thought your question of where does it go from being

Grand in the fact that the scope of the technology is Grand to grandiose is the right question to ask that's the right distinction to hold yeah and I really struggle with this when I look at there's so many competing claims from people right now that that say oh I see you're just being captured by the the negatives like you're just this sort of uh negative skeptic religious and the truth is it's really hard to contend with what is it actually going to do and neither be swept away in in in the Grandeur in the grandiosity

of it nor be swept away in some sort of status quo denialism saying it's all just fluff and tomorrow will be the same as today there are makavelian technologist who are making up stories just because it sells in the public imagination and then there are people who are genuinely trying to use technology as a tool to improve the lot around it's it feels like it feels like just like religion it has so much complexity to it and you can't label it as just bad or just good MH yeah that's exactly right and then I love

the point that you had is one of the things a religion does is that it gives people hope something to believe in something that is bigger and better than themselves and as religion um has been displaced by technology as the world has secularized human beings still need that thing and so something's going to fill it and what fills it is of course technology and then you end up with this other very interesting question which is okay but if we can't place Our Hope blindly in Tech then what and I think it's that sitting in the

unknown and that discomfort of the well then where do we place hope and goodness that is a the challenging problem to solve