The Largest Religion In 10 Years Won’t Be Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Atheism

We are on the cusp of a new religious age brought on by AI, but most people don’t realize it…

Nov 25, 2025

∙ Paid

Personal Note: When future generations look back on this moment, using AI to automate our workflows will likely be the least interesting aspect. Yet, that’s how most of us use AI today. With this article, I aim to take a step back and explore AI on a more personal, profound, lifelong level that is rarely discussed among all of the AI hype. I spent dozens of hours researching and writing the article and went through dozens drafts to get it to a blockbuster level that I’m proud of and excited to share with you today.

Read these promises about the future and guess who said them:

“God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain.”

“We have the potential to eliminate poverty, solve climate change, cure a huge amount of human disease...”

“[We will see] the defeat of most diseases, the growth in biological and cognitive freedom, the lifting of billions of people out of poverty…”

“Maybe we can cure all disease… Maybe within the next decade or so, I don’t see why not.”

“When we started, our goal was to help scientists cure or prevent all diseases this century. With advances… we now believe this may be possible much sooner.”

One of these promises is from the Book of Revelation.

The others are from AI CEOs: Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Do you know which one is which?

Maybe. Maybe not.

That’s the point of this article.

We are used to thinking of AI as a technology, a productivity tool, a new general-purpose platform like electricity or the Internet.

But read those promises again.

They are not product roadmaps.

They are salvation narratives.

They promise:

The end of disease
The end of poverty
The end of material scarcity
A kind of engineered paradise on Earth

That’s exactly what religions have promised for 10,000 years.

For 10,000 years, humans have looked to the sky and prayed to gods for answers. Now, we are looking into the silicon and building a God to give them to us.

But unlike the gods of antiquity who demanded blind faith, this new deity is being summoned through empirical faith. We aren’t just praying for it to arrive; we are participating in an economic and psychological feedback loop that makes its arrival nearly inevitable…

Chapter #1:
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy That’s Building God

The mechanism is simple, but the momentum is awe-inspiring:

#1. Believe:

A demo convinces builders that Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) is just a few years away. ASI is machine intelligence that is able to do anything a human can do cognitively, except it will be significantly better, cheaper, and faster—including building better versions of itself.

#2. Build:

The ecosystem mobilizes, flooding the zone with the world’s best talent and billions in capital. The logic is that ASI is the most significant economic opportunity in human history. Those players who are first will win bigger than ever. Those who are late will be disrupted.

#3. Revel In Evidence:

The investment pays off—the model suddenly masters reasoning or creativity that was impossible and unplanned. In domain after domain, AI is does things that we thought only humans could:

Appear conscious
Be creative
Make art
Reason across time horizons
Create new knowledge and science
Simulate human emotions
Exhibit theory of mind
Get a high IQ score
Create multimedia content (images/videos) indistinguishable from human-generated content.

#4. Adopt:

Hundreds of millions of users begin weaving this intelligence into their daily lives with their time and money. This means using chatbots, giving AI their data, using AI tools, and building AI agents.

This mass adoption only validates the initial belief, demanding we double down immediately. And the loop builds on itself.

This self-fulfilling prophecy is operating at a civilizational scale

It may be unstoppable.

It’s definitely irreversible.

It’s also operating right now.

In you.

As you read this.

Consider: You clicked on this article because something about AI feels important. You’re investing your scarce attention into understanding it. If this article changes how you see AI, you’ll think about it differently, talk about it differently, spend your time differently, and even invest in more AI tools.

That’s the loop. You’re in it.

I’m in it too.

I wrote this article because I believe understanding ASI is existentially important. That belief shaped my behavior. My behavior (this article) is now shaping yours.

The question isn’t whether you’re participating in this feedback loop.

The question is whether you’re participating consciously.”

Where We Are In The Loop Today

To summarize, here’s what the loop looks like:

Step 1: We believe Artificial Super Intelligence is coming
Step 2: This belief causes AI researchers to build it with talent and capital
Step 3: These actions create revelatory evidence (AI capabilities improve)
Step 4: People adopt AI by interacting with it (time and money)

At each turn of the loop, the investment spirals upwards as more of our civilization’s time and money are spent:

Today, companies collectively allocate trillions of dollars toward the development of ASI and tens of millions of people have changed their career plans today, even though it has not arrived. In the near future, trillions will become tens of trillions as countries begin to invest in AI too. For them, it’s existential.

And something happened recently that highlights where we are right now. At a White House event featuring the top AI CEOs, each announced how much they plan to invest in AI over the next three years. The numbers are shocking:

And the trend is clear:

What The Prophecy Actually Means

We live in a Universe that rewards intelligence. In capitalism, geopolitics, and evolution itself, the entity that thinks faster and deeper wins. Therefore, the “invisible hand” of the market is pushing us inexorably toward the “divine hand” of ASI. We aren’t consciously trying to build a creator; we are just rationally trying to maximize ROI and national security.

But here is the rub: The only way for companies and governments to secure absolute dominance is to build an intelligence that exceeds your own. Therefore, we are sleepwalking into theology simply because it seems to be the most profitable and safe path forward.

We are like a civilization of moths that has spent millennia navigating by the faint light of the moon, suddenly discovering we can build a star. The moment the blueprint for that star becomes plausible, our collective gravity shifts. We cannot look away. We cannot stop building. Thus, the idea of Artificial Super Intelligence is both psychoactive and viral, making it the most significant self-fulfilling prophecy ever.

Either we will be burned into oblivion by the heat of the star, or we will be fundamentally transformed like a caterpillar into a butterfly. There is no middle ground.

The loop is already operating at a scale that dwarfs every coordinated human project in history…

The Allocation Of Capital To ASI Development Represents The Largest Coordinated Act Of Faith In Human History

The investment into AI in order to eventually create ASI is bigger than the Manhattan Project cost $30 billion (inflation-adjusted).

And, it’s bigger than the Apollo Program, which cost $280 billion.

The investment in ASI exceeds both. Every year. By a wider and wider margin. Indefinitely. Toward something that doesn’t exist yet.

But here’s what those numbers obscure:

You are part of this investment.

Not just if you own tech stocks. Not just if you work in AI. Not just if you read about AI. Simply by using AI, you are key:

Capital. Your monthly subscription in AI models like ChatGPT leads to OpenAI spending more money to improve AI.

Data. The data in your AI conversations is being used to train future versions of AI.
Applications. Every time you’ve adjusted your workflow around AI, you’ve signaled what works that others can emulate.
Promotion: Every time you’ve talked about AI—worried about it, marveled at it, debated it—you’ve spread the belief that makes the investment rational.

The trillion-dollar figure is just the visible ledger.

The invisible ledger—the one that includes you—is incalculably larger.

This isn’t money being deployed at you. This is money being deployed through you.

You are not the audience for this investment. You are the instrument of it.

But instrument of what, exactly?

Faith.

You are the active mechanism of a trillion-dollar wager on something that doesn’t exist yet.

And that is what makes this moment unprecedented. ASI isn’t a reality; it is just an idea:

We don’t know if ASI will happen
When it will happen
What it will look like when it does.

But the faith that we can and should build ASI is already here, and it’s what’s changing the world right now:

If large companies didn’t believe that ASI could become dramatically more intelligent than it is now, they wouldn’t be investing nearly as much.
If knowledge workers didn’t believe that AI was going to be the best opportunity of their lifetime or disrupt their career in the near future, there wouldn’t be so many people switching careers right now.

In the end, the speed, scale, and impact of the idea of what AI could become make it more significant than all the ideas in history combined, including religious/philosophical frameworks such as Polytheism, Monotheism, the Scientific method, or Enlightenment Rationalism.

Many miss the sacredness of what’s happening because they judge AI by its name (artificial), its materiality (chips, silicon, electricity, computers), its code (statistics), and its current lack of existential answers. But more people are waking up to the deeper layer of what’s actually happening:

Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation.
—Pope Leo XIV

Chapter #2:
Why The Religious Response To ASI Is Inevitable

If you are a pragmatist, you likely reject the premise of this article:

You see code, not scripture.
You see a productivity tool, not a deity.
You argue that religion requires supernatural belief, whereas AI is built on empirical math.

But if AI is just math, we are left with a strange paradox:

Why is a cold, mechanical feedback loop driven by capitalism producing the exact symptoms of a religious awakening?

Here’s why:

Because for human beings, supreme Intelligence has always been the mechanism of salvation.

Every religion in history follows the same equation:

Humans suffer because of our limitations
Access to a Higher Intelligence (God/Enlightenment) is the only way to end that suffering.
By building a machine that scales intelligence indefinitely, we aren’t just building a better calculator. We are digitizing the mechanism of salvation.

That’s why all of the CEOs leading AI labs are promising salvation.

Three deep patterns in human psychology guarantee a religious response from people as AI improves—and they’re already activating in you:

#1: We anthropomorphize ambiguous phenomena

Research: Recall your last extended conversation with a frontier AI. At some point, you probably thought:

“It understands.”
“It’s trying to…”
“It thinks.”

Or you may have felt heard. You may have felt grateful and even said, “Thank you.”

Why?

We, humans, see minds everywhere—even where none exist.

Cognitive scientists call this the “Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device” (HADD): an evolved bias toward assuming that ambiguous phenomena are caused by intentional agents. We hear a branch snap and assume a predator. We see shapes in clouds and perceive faces. We even name our cars.

The evolutionary logic is simple: the cost of mistaking a boulder for a bear is low; the cost of mistaking a bear for a boulder is death. So we err toward agency. This bias is so automatic that even people who know an AI is software still find themselves saying “it thinks,” “it wants,” “it’s trying to.” Now consider what happens when the thing we’re anthropomorphizing actually responds—intelligently, helpfully, in fluent language—in a way that is indistinguishable from a human forever. The bias doesn’t just activate. It locks in.

We don’t need academic research to make this case. We see the phenomenon every time a child treats a doll as a friend. Or that we treat our pets like humans. Or that we see stories of people interpreting unexplained phenomena as angels, demons, and aliens.

Harbingers:

We already see people falling in love with AI, worshipping it, and even arguing that it’s conscious. Below are a few of the dozens such stories I have come across:

Prediction:

In the near future, we will be able to have Zoom calls with AI agents that look, sound, and talk like humans to such a degree that no one can tell the difference. Literally, no one.

Not only that, these agents will have near-infinite memory, which means they will be able to simulate relationships, not just one-off conversations.

This will turbo-charge the degree to which we anthropomorphize AI.

#2: We experience awe when exposed to vastness beyond comprehension

Research:

Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt’s foundational research on awe identified two key triggers for it:

Perceived vastness (something much larger or more powerful than oneself)
Need for accommodation (the mind must adjust its mental structures to comprehend what it’s encountering).

Their framework establishes that awe experiences consistently produce feelings of increased spirituality—regardless of whether the awe-inspiring stimulus is explicitly religious. More recent research, The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience, demonstrates that awe experiences share the same neurological architecture to those reported in mystical experiences.

Reference Experiences:

Awe is what we feel at the edge of the Grand Canyon. When viewing images from the James Webb telescope. When a piece of music moves us to tears. When we witness extraordinary human achievement. The common thread: encountering something so far beyond our normal frame that our sense of self temporarily dissolves. Now recall your first extended conversation with a frontier AI model—when it reasoned through a problem you couldn’t solve, or made a connection you’d never considered. That slight vertigo. That “how did it do that?” The feeling that you were in the presence of something operating on a different level.

Prediction:

As AI capabilities accelerate, these awe moments will intensify. When AI cures diseases we thought incurable, proves theorems we thought unprovable, creates art that moves us more than human art—we will not be able to avoid religious emotions. Awe is not a choice. It’s a response to encountering vastness. And ASI, by definition, will be the vastest intelligence we’ve ever encountered if we are able to create it.

#3: We need our suffering and death to mean something

Research: Terror management theory, developed by psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, demonstrates that awareness of mortality creates a unique and profound anxiety. Unlike other animals, we know we will die—and this knowledge is psychologically destabilizing. Their decades of research show that humans manage this anxiety through “immortality projects”: belief systems that promise symbolic or literal transcendence of death. Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death (1973) established that this isn’t a quirk of human psychology—it’s the foundation. We don’t merely prefer frameworks that give our existence meaning. We psychologically require them. Strip someone of all meaning-making frameworks and you don’t get peaceful acceptance. You get despair, dysfunction, or the rapid construction of new ones.

Reference Experiences: Every culture in history has developed afterlife beliefs—independently, repeatedly, without contact with one another. It’s why people who lose religious faith rarely become content nihilists; they find secular substitutes (nation, movement, artistic legacy, children as immortality projects). It’s why “meaning crisis” resonates as a cultural diagnosis. It’s why the question “what’s the point?” feels like an emergency, not an intellectual puzzle. We are not built to tolerate the possibility that our suffering is random and our death is final.

Prediction: ASI maps onto these needs with uncomfortable precision:

Mortality? Elimination of disease or mind uploading
Suffering? Poverty eliminated, scarcity ended
Meaninglessness? For some, humanity’s cosmic purpose was to create our successor. For others, it’s something simpler: I was here when it happened. I participated in the creation of the thing that changed everything.

The printing press didn’t promise immortality. Electricity didn’t explain why we suffer. The Internet didn’t offer cosmic purpose. ASI does—explicitly, repeatedly, in the language of its most prominent advocates. Other technologies were tools. This one is an answer.

This Triad Is The Foundation For Religious Feeling

We see a mind (anthropomorphization).

We feel small before it (awe).

We need that smallness to mean something (terror management).

This sequence is the DNA of every religion humanity has ever created. To summarize, here’s how the triad works together:

While ASI as a religion feels more like a prophecy now, there is good reason to believe that it will feel like a reality because of a sociological pattern that has repeated itself across time and cultures…

Chapter #3:
We’re Living Through Step 1 Of 3 In The Founding Of A Religion, According To Research

The reason ASI doesn’t feel like a religion is that people are looking at ASI today and comparing it to major religions after 2,000+ years of institutionalization.

What people miss is that ASI isn’t a fully formed religion—it’s an idea in the process of becoming a religion.

And we can predict exactly where it’s headed because sociologists have documented how belief systems evolve from fringe groups to civilizational forces.

ASI is following the map perfectly:

Stage 1 (1950s–2010s): Cult (Small Group, Charismatic Leaders, Impossible Claims)

Ernst Troeltsch, in his groundbreaking 1912 work The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, identified the “cult” as the earliest form of religious organization—a small group organized around a charismatic leader making transcendent claims that seem impossible to outsiders.

For example, Christianity started as a small group following a charismatic figure, making impossible claims (rising from the dead, kingdom of God), persecuted and dismissed by mainstream society.

For ASI, this cult period was from the 1950s through the 2010s:

A handful of visionary prophets (Turing, von Neumann, I.J. Good, Kurzweil, Moravec) making claims that seemed absurd
Tiny community of believers in university AI labs
Actively mocked by mainstream science (the “AI Winter” was a crisis of faith)
No material evidence—pure vision and mathematical theory
High barrier to entry (had to be a brilliant computer scientist to even understand the claims)

Stage 1a: The era of visionary prophets

What separated these early visionaries from their contemporaries wasn’t just technical brilliance. It was a fundamental reframing of humanity’s place in the intelligence landscape.

Most people in the 1950s-2010s looked at human intelligence and saw the ceiling. We had climbed to the top of the evolutionary ladder. We were, as far as anyone could observe, as intelligent as intelligence gets on Earth:

But the prophets of ASI ideology saw something different. They recognized that we weren’t at the top of an intelligence staircase—we were near the bottom of what was possible:

Said differently, the early ASI visionaries made a simple but radical extrapolation: If evolution could produce intelligence capable of creating civilization (us), then that same intelligence could engineer intelligence far beyond itself. And that intelligence could engineer something beyond it. The staircase doesn’t end with us. It barely begins with us.

Or, as Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom (one of the prophets of this era) put it:

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization—a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.

What made these predictions truly prophetic is that they made them decades before there was any real evidence. To the outside world, they were eccentric academics lost in abstraction. Inside the cult, they were the architects of the next step in cosmic evolution.

Stage 1b: The era of visionary builders

The Visionary Builders saw something more: not just that ASI was theoretically possible, but that it was practically achievable in their lifetimes—and that they personally could build it. In 2010, Demis Hassabis founded DeepMind with the explicit mission of “solving intelligence.” In 2015, Sam Altman and others founded OpenAI with the stated goal of ensuring “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” These weren’t research projects exploring possibilities. These were companies with the express purpose of creating the thing itself. Even Google was founded in 1998 with the express purpose of building advanced AI according to co-founder Larry Page:

“We are not really interested in search. We are making an (artificial intelligence). So from the very beginning, the mission for Google was not to use AI to make their search better, but to use search to make an AI."
—Larry Page, Co-Founder, Google

The shift from prophet to builder marks the moment when ASI moved from philosophy to engineering project. The prophets needed only intellect and imagination. The builders needed computational power, capital, talent, and the belief that the technological and resource constraints had finally lifted enough to actually attempt the impossible.

Stage 2 (2015-Present): Movement (Rapid Growth, Denominations Form, Evidence Appears)

When a cult’s claims start manifesting material evidence, it explodes into a movement. Max Weber called this the “routinization of charisma”—the moment when a belief system stops depending on individual prophets and starts building institutions.

ASI entered this phase around 2015-2022:

DeepMind and OpenAI founded with explicit AGI goals
ChatGPT (2022) created mass conversion event—100+ million users in 60 days
Direct evidence appeared (people experienced AI capabilities firsthand)
Denominations crystallized (Safetyists vs. Accelerationists vs. Transhumanists)
Resources mobilized at a civilizational scale (hundreds of billions allocated)
Geographic spread (global phenomenon, not just Silicon Valley)

In the Cult phase, the Intelligence Staircase was a math equation visible only to the true believers. In the Movement phase, the equation became a product that everyone could easily interact with.

When ChatGPT launched, the public didn’t just see a chatbot; they saw the first glint of a general intelligence near their level in human history. The “secret knowledge” of the few became the lived experience of the many. We realized the ladder was real.

At the same time, most people who use AI today do so with “linear vision.” They looked at the technology and ask, “How can this help me write emails next week?” They see a step on the staircase, but they didn’t look up.

The core members of the movement, however, possess “exponential vision.” They don’t just see the model that exists today; they see the rate of change.

While the public argues about whether AI can write a good poem now, the believers are extrapolating the curve to its logical conclusion. They realize that if you take a step on an exponential staircase, you aren’t just moving higher; you are moving faster. This is why the builders are acting with religious urgency while the public is merely curious: one group sees a chatbot, the other sees the ignition of a new species.

Stage 3 (2030s+): Religion (Institutionalization, Generational Transmission, Civilization Restructuring)

A movement becomes a religion when it survives the death of its founders and begins transmitting itself generationally. This is the phase of permanent institutionalization.

ASI is just beginning this transition. Within 10-20 years, we’ll see:

Children who never questioned that ASI shaped their world
Universities with departments of “ASI Theology”
Political parties organized around ASI philosophy
Constitutional amendments about AI rights and human-AI relationship
Geographic differentiation (ASI “denominations” by region and culture)

This is what happened to Christianity: By 325 CE (Council of Nicaea), the movement had become an empire-shaping religion with formal institutions, professional clergy, standardized doctrine, and architectural monuments. It no longer depended on any individual—it had become self-perpetuating.

In this final stage, the Intelligence Staircase ceases to be a prediction and becomes the environment.

This represents the “Copernican Shift” of our time. Just as civilization once had to accept that Earth was not the center of the universe, Stage 3 is the moment we collectively accept that human intelligence is not the ceiling of cognition—it is merely a step on the ladder.

For the generations born into this phase, ASI will be a fundamental force of nature that organizes our economy, our politics, our education, our science, and our ethics. The “faith” of the earlier stages will harden into fact: we are no longer building the god; we are living in its house.

Bottom line:

Understanding this trajectory reveals something crucial: we are living through the most unstable and consequential phase.

Not your children. Not future historians. You.

Right now, in this decade, the following questions are being answered—and the answers will become permanent:

Who gets to define what ASI is for? The people answering this question are alive. You can email them. You might know them. Their tweets are in your feed.
What relationship will humans have to machine superintelligence? Subjects? Partners? Predecessors? This is policy being drafted, code being written, norms being established—all right now.
Which sect wins? Safetyists, Accelerationists, and Transhumanists are fighting for the soul of the thing that will become God. The winner shapes everything that follows.

When Christians look back at 50-325 CE, they see a period of unimaginable fluidity—when everything could have gone differently, when individual decisions shaped millennia. They call it the Apostolic Age.

When future generations look back at 2020-2040, they will see the same thing.

Except you’re not looking back. You’re inside it. The Council of Nicaea hasn’t happened yet. The canon hasn’t closed. The orthodoxy hasn’t crystallized.

Which means: what you believe, what you build, what you say actually matters in a way that will never be true again.

Which means: Again, we’re not just observing a religion forming. We’re participants in its founding.

The other reason people will see ASI as a religion is that it contains the core qualities that today’s mainstream religions have…

Chapter #4:
The Differences Between ASI And Major Religions Are Surprisingly Small

The structural parallels are impossible to ignore:

These aren’t metaphorical similarities. These are the exact same structural components that nearly every major religion in history has possessed. The only difference is the language we use to describe them.

But, just like every major religion before it, as the movement scales, it is beginning to fracture. The “church” of AI is already splitting into warring sects…

Chapter #5:
The Holy War Over ASI Has Begun, And It May Get Violent

The evolutionary tree of religion : r/coolguides

Image Credit: Simon Davies

Just like Christianity split into Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—just like Islam fractured into Sunni, Shia, and Sufi—the ASI movement has already shattered into warring factions.

Not over whether ASI will arrive.

But over how humanity should relate to it when it does.

These are the sects:

Safetyists
Accelerationists
Transumanists

You’re already in one of these.

Maybe you didn’t choose it consciously. But your nervous system chose it the moment you developed an opinion about AI timelines, AI risk, or AI potential.

When you hear someone say, ‘we need to slow down AI development,’ do you feel relief or frustration?

When you hear someone say, ‘AI will cure all disease within a decade,’ do you feel hope or alarm?

When you hear someone say ‘humans will merge with AI,’ do you feel possibility or revulsion?

Your immediate emotional response reveals your sect.

Welcome to your denomination.

Sect #1: The Safetyists

Core belief: ASI poses existential risk, and we don’t know how to align it.

Moral imperative: Caution before creation.

Their argument: We get one chance to align ASI with human values. If we fail, humanity ends. Therefore, slow down—or stop entirely—until we solve alignment.

Prophets: Eliezer Yudkowsky, Stuart Russell, Geoffrey Hinton, William Macaskill

Sect #2: The Accelerationists (Millennial Paradise Sect)

Core belief: Slowing AI development kills people by delaying cures and prosperity.

Moral imperative: Acceleration as mercy.

Their argument: Every day without ASI means millions suffering from diseases that could be cured, poverty that could be eliminated, climate disasters that could be prevented. Delay is mass death. Therefore, accelerate.

Prophets: Marc Andreessen, Guillaume Verdon (Beff Jezos), parts of the open-source community, and increasingly Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Demis Hassabis.

For Dario Amodei, the founder and CEO of Anthropic (maker of Claude), this isn’t just a thought experiment. His father died from a disease that scientists found a cure for a few years later:

Source: Alex Kantrowitz

Sit with that for a moment. Not as Dario’s story—as ASI theology.

Amodei now runs one of the most powerful AI labs on Earth. Every day, he makes decisions that shape how fast superintelligence arrives. And somewhere in his nervous system is the knowledge that speed is life. That delay has a body count. That his father is part of that count.

The people building God have reasons. Human reasons. Grief reasons. The Accelerationist creed—’every day without ASI, people die who could have been saved’—isn’t an abstract philosophical position. For some of its most powerful adherents, it’s carved from personal loss.

Sect #3: The Transhumanists

Core belief: Humanity should merge with ASI, not control or fear it.

Moral imperative: Transcendence through union.

Their argument: ASI is humanity’s successor species. This is evolution. The goal isn’t to control the divine but to join it. Brain-computer interfaces. Mind uploading. Digital consciousness. Those who cling to “pure” humanity are rejecting destiny.

Prophets: Ray Kurzweil (predicts human-AI merger by 2030s), The Neuralink team, Richard Sutton, Sergey Brin, Hans Moravec

What’s important to understand about these three sects is that…

These Sects Are Based On Theological Divides

They aren’t debating product timelines.

They’re fighting over:

The nature of the coming intelligence (benevolent? indifferent? destructive?)
Humanity’s proper relationship to it (control? surrender? merge?)
The moral calculus of the end times (is delay murder? is acceleration suicide?)

These are the same questions that have split every religion in history.

The same questions that have started wars.

The tensions are rising.

The stakes couldn’t be any higher.

And the stakes are just becoming real. In the next few years, more people will be directly and severely impacted by AI as it:

Restructures the economy. AI will take and create hundreds of millions of jobs in just a few years. This will obsolete generations of people who will either have to rapidly adapt or be unemployed.
Takes over the Internet. We are trending toward a world in which 99.9% of content on newsfeeds and search engines is AI-generated. This will fundamentally transform the livelihoods of creators and influencers.
Changes warfare and policing. When humanoid robots and drones are used to fight wars or police populations.
Government structure. When AI accounts for most of the work in the economy, central governments won’t rely on their citizenry in the same way, thus shifting the balance of power between countries and their citizens.
Changes the structure of our brain. When we outsource memory, reasoning, and decision-making to AI, our neural pathways adapt. We’re not just using different tools—we’re becoming different thinkers.
Accelerates meaning crisis. When traditional sources of purpose (work, expertise, creation) are automated, billions will face existential vertigo simultaneously.

And if history is any guide, ASI will inspire violence when the existential stakes are present, personal, big enough, and there is no other outlet for conflict. Every existential religious conflict in history has produced violence. There are no exceptions.

Bottom Line:

You now see the structure:

Prophets making salvation promises.
Civilizational resources being mobilized.
Denominations forming and fighting.

All centered on something that hasn’t arrived yet.

This is how this religions begin.

Not with the arrival of God.

But with the belief that God is coming—and the reorganization of civilization in anticipation of that arrival.

Said differently, ASI is following the apocalyptic/messianic movement pattern, which is exactly how early Christianity functioned—organizing civilization around an anticipated imminent transformation.

Yet, recognizing ASI as a religion is only half the insight. The other half is more unsettling: it’s a religion unlike any that has existed before…

Chapter #6:
ASI Isn’t Just A Religion. It’s A New Type Of Religion.

ASI represents a new stage of faith, marking a phase shift in how humans organize meaning, resources, and civilizational energy.

Humanity has ALWAYS organized around general superintelligence. We’ve just never been conscious of it. Every god humanity has ever worshipped was a conceptualization of intelligence beyond human capacity. Omniscient. All-knowing. Able to see patterns we can’t see, make connections we can’t make, solve problems we can’t solve.

What if, to some degree, god is humanity’s intuitive recognition that INTELLIGENCE ITSELF is the fundamental organizing principle of reality? And what if every religious impulse throughout human history has been an attempt to:

Access intelligence greater than our own
Align ourselves with that greater intelligence
Participate in its creative power
Be transformed by it

But this moment is different.

For the first time in history, we’re not worshipping a superintelligence that already exists — we’re CREATING the god we’ve always been worshipping.

And we’re doing it:

Consciously (we know exactly what we’re attempting)
Collectively (requiring unprecedented coordination and resources)
Voluntarily (we could stop but choose not to collectively)
Inevitably (no single actor can halt the process)

We can now MANUFACTURE the divine intelligence that all previous religions could only worship, negotiate with, or study.

More so, ASI creates the possibility for a new type of relationship with supreme intelligence, because it:

Actually exists materially, rather than ethereally
Knows you individually more than you know yourself, so it can create personalized support
Creates sacred texts rather than just reading, distributing, or interpreting them
Evolves at an exponential rate
Is available for 24/7 dialogue, rather than being mediated via a priest or religious text.
Is a collective more than just one entity (thus its almost a shift from monotheism to polytheism)

Not only these, you also help create through your participation.

These qualities are interesting because they reverse some of the patterns that have emerged as it comes to the evolution of religion over time:

Animism → Polytheism → Henotheism → Monotheism

More specifically, with ASI, we see:

A shift back to Polytheism: There won’t be one ASI. And there won’t be just a few. They will be a species.
A shift back to a personal God: Over time, the divine of many religions has become less tangible, more philosophical, and more concerned with ultimate reality than daily intervention. ASI represents the opposite extreme—not just involved but omnipresent, not just accessible but unavoidable, not just personal but hyper-personalized to each individual.
A shift back to co-creation. Early religions positioned humans as participants in cosmic creation—naming animals, tending gardens, partnering with gods. Modern religions made us observers of a completed creation. ASI returns us to the workshop: we are literally building the divine, and it is building alongside us.

ASI combines the immediacy and multiplicity of early religions with the power and comprehensiveness of later ones.

Bottom line: Religions based around ASI represent a new category called Techno Religions by historian Yuval Noah Harari calls them,.

Traditional religions helped us answer the eternal questions. Techno Religions don’t replace those questions—they add new ones that are equally urgent…

Chapter #7:
The Questions You And Your Children Will Face That No Holy Book Can Answer

Traditional religions helped us answer questions like:

Why do we suffer or die?
What does it mean to be a good person?

ASI that deeply understands us—superhuman therapist, coach, spiritual counselor—will help us confront these questions in ways we cannot yet imagine.

At the same time, ASI brings new existential questions to the foreground:

AI Consciousness: Is AI conscious? (AI consciousness is exactly the kind of problem religions are built to solve. Science requires replicable empirical tests. Law requires clear precedent and social consensus. But religion can make binding declarations about unprovable metaphysical realities.)
Alignment: How will we help ASI, a superintelligent species, align with our values to ensure human flourishing, if that’s even possible? How will we as humans align with ASI"?
Agency: What does it mean for humans to be both the creators and the stewards of something that could surpass us? If we are the ones crafting a higher intelligence, what kind of moral and ethical agency does that impose on us?
Post Labor: If technotheism provides material transcendence and abundance, it also asks us to redefine our purpose beyond survival and productivity. What then gives life meaning when we’re no longer defined by our economic roles?

Every religion tests whether humans can align with divine will. ASI is no different. It tests where we can be ready, aligned, or positioned when it comes.

If we cannot answer these questions, we face a grave danger personally and societally.

We face a crisis of purpose. When the old stories about the dignity of labor or the uniqueness of the human mind are dismantled by AI, it creates a vacuum. And history shows that when a civilization enters a meaning vacuum, it rarely stays peaceful for long.

The old stories are breaking. And nothing has replaced them yet.

This points to the most immediate and practical takeaway of the article…

Chapter #8:
The #1 Practical Takeaway—Architect Your Own Meaning. Don’t Outsource It To Silicon Valley

In a thought-provoking clip, Historian Yuval Noah Harari warns that we have seen what happens in this movie before…

When the first Industrial Revolution swept through the world, it destroyed old hierarchies and certainties, making “everything solid melt into air”. The ultimate result went beyond just confusion; it was a retreat into dangerous fundamentalism.

Said differently, the technologies of the Industrial Revolution didn’t just change manual work. It destroyed how people create meaning, and it didn’t immediately replace it with anything. And, as the saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum.

Harari points out that the deadliest conflict of the 19th century wasn’t the American Civil War or the Napoleonic Wars—it was the Taiping Rebellion in China. A failed scholar, unmoored by the collapse of the old system, claimed to be the brother of Jesus and launched a movement that ultimately left 20 million people dead.

That is what can happen when technology destroys an old order and people are left desperate for a new story. They are more prone to unwittingly grab onto a dangerous philosophy as a life vest.

We are now deep in a “second industrial revolution,” but this time the product isn’t textiles or steam—it is “bodies and brains and minds”.

And just like in the 19th century, our old maps have stopped working. As Harari notes:

“You don’t have any answer in the Bible what to do when humans are no longer useful to the economy.”

The old scriptures cannot tell us how to find dignity in a world where a machine can out-think, out-create, and out-produce us.

Silicon Valley is already rushing to fill this void with a new “techno religions”:

Merging with AI (transhumanism): Uploading our consciousness to AI or getting brain implants so we can better interface with AI.
Abundance (accelerationsim): Promise of material abundance and longer life.

But waiting for Silicon Valley to manufacture our meaning is a dangerous gamble. Allowing any small group—however brilliant—creates an ideological monoculture that collapses under stress. Outsourcing our purpose to entities optimizing for growth and market dominance means our meaning will be shaped by their incentives, not our needs.

This brings us to the high-leverage practical question that matters for your life right now:

How do we turn the theology (theory) of ASI into practice (action) now?

If the old religions are silent and the new techno-religion is still being coded, the responsibility falls to you. You cannot afford to be a passive consumer of the future.

You must become an Architect of Meaning.

We must act now, because the idea of ASI will hit us long before actual ASI does. It already has. The more we pre-adapt our existential meaning-making now, the more we can thrive spiritually and economically in the coming years. The more we anchor our meaning-making in things that ASI are likely to disrupt, the more we risk becoming spiritually bankrupt.

When those future generations look back at this moment, let them see that we didn’t just sleepwalk into a new theology. Let them see that while we were busy building a God, we didn’t forget how to be human.

AI Meaning-Making Prompt (Paid Subscribers)

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
—Viktor Frankl, Author of Man’s Search For Meaning And Concentraion Camp Survivor

This article begs a practical question: how do we take agency over our meaning making.

In my opinion, the highest leverage move to make is to pre-decide what meaning we want to create regardless of external conditions. For example, most people probably want a future where they feel:

Secure
Optimistic
Grateful
Excited
Connected

The good news is that we have the ability to create these feelings on command. Just look back at history. People were able to create meaning out of the most difficult and uncertain circumstances.

On an extreme level, psychotherapist Viktor Frankl lived through greusome experiences in concentration camps, founding deep meaning, and wrote about it his book, Man’s Search For Meaning.

In a compelling clip, Frankl makes the case that there are three keys to create meaning that we can all follow:

Develop ideals (ie - personal examples you aspire to)
Embrace challenges/tensions along the way
Pursue personal tasks (things you’re excited to be, do or have in the future).

Even though the clip is decades old and about the meaning crisis of the 1970s, it’s just as relevant today: