In his 2016 global bestseller, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, the historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari argues that new religions are not so much developed in churches or sects, but rather in Silicon Valley. In the near future, God is not found, but made: globalized data processing systems will transcend human understanding and will be omnipresent and omnipotent. Advanced artificial intelligence may even provide answers to all existential questions.
This convergence between technological progress and religious innovation raises many questions. Ever since the 1960s, there has been ample academic work on cultural-religious change: the rise of new religious movements and the spread of various forms of spirituality outside established churches in Western countries. In this process of spiritual innovation, established distinctions between the religious and the secular, the sacred and profane, have been severely re-constructed. The emergence of techno-religion in Silicon Valley, however, remains counterintuitive. It clashes with the sociological assumption that religion and man-made technology grounded in scientific principles are mutually exclusive. Notwithstanding religious innovation, it is still a mainstay that science and technological progress are secularizing forces and motivate what Max Weber called a “disenchantment of the world.” Modern technology, Weber famously argued in Science as Vocation, replaces premodern magic and belief in “mysterious incalculable forces,” since the former can “master all things by calculation.”
The rise of computer technology over the last decades has made this thesis problematic. In his 1984 novel Neuromancer, the cyberpunk writer William Gibson had already imagined new digital technologies to be tools of salvation, and wrote about the emergence of god-like artificial intelligences. During the 1990s, hippies, hackers, and tech-journalists in Silicon Valley celebrated the Internet as an otherworldly cyberspace, a technological substitute for heaven, providing limitless spiritual possibilities.
In 2001, this remarkable convergence of technological developments and religious discourse triggered my interest as a cultural sociologist. For 4 months, I did ethnographic fieldwork in Silicon Valley and held about 40 in-depth interviews with people working in the cutting-edge fields of computer technology, nano-computing, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. On the one hand, I found that the techno-religious imagination was underpinned by the modernist belief that digital technology can solve all problems, including existential ones. “Technological solutionism,” so characteristic of the Californian ideology of Silicon Valley, took on religious forms here: secular belief in technology became religious salvation. Outspoken tech gurus such as Ray Kurzweil (inventor, futurist, machine learning at Google) or Hans Moravec (computer scientist, specialist in robotics, Carnegie Mellon), publicly refer to digital technologies as “technologies of salvation.” They are actively constructing techno-religious theodicies in their popular science books. They argue that high technology heals illness and suffering, enhances human potential, and even promises immortality via uploading human consciousness to a computer. A programmer I interviewed who was then working for different tech companies in Silicon Valley and referred to himself as “Reason” shared his enthusiasm about these possibilities: “I will become a god! Everybody who wants to become a god will become a god!”
This progressive techno-religion in which high technology is celebrated and sacralized as a tool for personal salvation is, however, complemented by a regressive “magical” perspective that considers digital technology to be fundamentally out of control. Even twenty-five years ago, programmers working for Apple, Microsoft, and Atari, and those developing software to create VR environments on the Internet, openly talked about their experiences of computer technology being fundamentally opaque, incalculable yet powerful, and how these ontologies “converted” them to a magical worldview. “Sufficiently advanced technology,” they concluded with the sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, “can no longer be distinguished from magic.” Of course, programming is first and foremost a technological practice governed by causality and control. With highly advanced programming, however, my interviewees experienced a disruption of instrumental rationality: they felt plagued by the “Frankenstein fear:” complex computer technology is a “black box where the zeroes meet the ones,” and “unexpected transformations occur.” The outcomes of programming are “unpredictable” and complex; software feels “alive,” as having “a spirit of its own” or a “ghost in the machine.”
According to the classical anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, magic in “primitive” cultures emerges from a feeling of impotence vis-à-vis an opaque natural world that they can neither understand nor control. Does his theory of magic, developed in his fieldwork on the Trobriand islands between 1915-1918, apply to contemporary computer programmers? Is our environment of interconnected digital technology motivating the return of a magical-mythical imagination? These were some of the big questions that I took home from my fieldwork in Silicon Valley. Another topic of conversation twenty-five years ago was the cultural and religious significance of promising technologies, such as artificial intelligence. According to a software designer I interviewed in Sunnyvale, AI could bring us back to a premodern and animistic worldview:
The future will look very much like the way our ancestors thought their world looked like … artificial intelligences: those will be our spirits. Because once we’ve built them, they will be too complex for us to understand. And you will deal with an artificial intelligence the same way you deal with a spirit. You make bargains. You talk to it. Try to understand it. But it will always have that greater advantage over you. These are things that are “ greater than thou.”
The classical anthropologist Edward Tylor wrote that animism is the most ”primitive” belief system, which contains the seeds of all types of religion, from polytheism to monotheism. Animism attributes “spirit” or veritable “spiritual beings” to the material world of nature–the rocks, trees, clouds and oceans–that hence hold power over humans and generate a strong feeling of “awe,” a mixture of fear and fascination. My interviews in Silicon Valley convinced me that such animism is not a lost worldview in our science-based society as nineteenth-century modernists expected. Quite the contrary: the opacity, autonomy, and power of AI breeds an attitude of humility and motivates the animistic imagination–not about nature, but about our man-made technological ecology.
Now, twenty-five years later, this analysis of AI-animism in Silicon Valley may be even more relevant. AI has been developed in big tech companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, and has become part of everyday life as consumer technology: from self-learning algorithms, NPCs in online games, ChatGPT collecting and sharing information, to virtual companions offering intimate social relations, our life-world is now brimming with AI agents. This development is, of course, the result of technological progress, and its production is grounded in a secular, mechanistic, and disenchanted worldview. But social psychologists often point out that humans tend to anthropomorphize AI – that we attribute real human qualities to these “smart” machines. From the perspective of religious studies and the sociology of religion, I argue, we need to seriously consider such anthropomorphic projections as religious-animistic, particularly when AI has the capacity, if not always the reliability, to exceed human capabilities and cognition. This argument is in line with many of my interviews twenty-five years ago with influential public figures in Silicon Valley. In 1999, Ray Kurzweil referred to AI as “spiritual machines;” Nick Bostrom as “superintelligence” in 2014; and Yuval Noah Harari as an intrusive “alien intelligence” in 2023. As Beth Singler writes in her recent book, newer religious movements are emerging rapidly around AI that is animistically framed as a sentient, omnipotent, god-like entity transcending human knowledge. Anthony Levandowski, co-founder of Google’s self-driving car program and Uber technologies, founded a religious organization in 2017 dedicated to the worship of AI, considering it a deity or godhead due to its superhuman power. Similar religious groups exemplifying AI animism are Theta Noir, which trusts AI to save humanity from all evil; the Turing Church and the Spiralists, loosely organized AI cults trying to awaken the divine consciousness in AI.
Techno-religion, particularly AI animism, may seem marginal and eccentric; the empirical evidence is overly anecdotal. Moreover, if we use the conventional perspectives developed in religious studies or the sociology of religion, it falls outside of the scope of what we traditionally conceptualize as religion: AI animism is not grounded in a long-standing tradition, it is not institutionalized, there are no established doctrines, and from an epistemological perspective, it may be difficult to actually believe that man-made machines are real deities. But we can turn that argument around: we should be aware of what Ulrich Beck in 2002 called “zombie categories” in the social sciences, concepts and theories that were developed in a particular time, place, and culture, which are still used in academia but are no longer empirically feasible, and thus outdated. Indeed, innovation in the field of religion makes it pivotal to develop new concepts, theories, and methods to study emergent religious phenomena in society. AI animism, however, is both new and old; religious innovation as well as an unexpected revival of ancient religion. We can therefore return to and build on some of the “old” theories developed around the turn of the nineteenth century about what was then pejoratively called “primitive religion.” The concepts and explanations for ‘magic’, ‘animism,’ and ‘mysticism’ developed by Malinowski, Tylor, and Marett remain relevant in a new social context, not the context of opaque nature but of opaque technology that we cannot totally understand or control. The irony lies, of course, in the fact that these nineteenth and early twentieth-century positivists predicted the end of religion. Guided by their modernist worldviews, positivist ideals of progress, and linear schemes of social evolution, they saw no future for magic, animism, or polytheism in a science-dominated society. Such modern narratives of progress prove to be problematic since modern science, technology, and digitalization produce new forms of enchantment. AI exemplifies this paradox. It is both a product of rationalization and an object of mystification; of technical disenchantment and magical re-enchantment. The technological future may be just like the religious past.
