my_research/why_no_religion.html

2025-10-09

Why am I not currently starting a religion around AI or similar topics?

Disclaimer

• Written for broader audience that is aware of the problem of AI extinction risk. Normally I just write for myself, but this time I want to be understood.
• I live in India. For safety reasons, I would avoid directly criticising any religion or political party here, and am careful about the wording.

Definitions

• Traditional religion - Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, etc
• New religion - typically for atheists - Nazism, Marxism, Nick Land's Accelerationism, Yudkowsky's Safety-focussed Longtermism, etc
• ASI - artificial superintelligence - AI that is better than all humans at all tasks humans care about
• HGE - human genetic engineering
• WBE - whole brain emulation

Summary

• Most suffering in the world today can be directly traced back to the nuclear world order decided after world war 2, which had religious drivers. I expect by default something similar will happen to the AI world order, even if ASI does not get built. If ASI gets built, the outcomes will be even more extreme.
• Traditional religions are good at building communities that solve life's problems, and at providing psychological coping mechanisms for difficulties in life's problems that can't be solved.
• However, they fail to solve this for people who want power. Traditional religions fail to ensure trustworthy people get power, even in their own communities.
• I am also interested in political power in order to fix the world, and traditional religion also fails to offer a lot of useful insights to me around this topic.
• Many of the technologies available in the near future, such as artificial superintelligence, human genetic engineering and so on, have new religious drivers that cause people to support them.
• I am not trying to start a religion because we might get artificial superintelligence in the next 5 or 10 years, which is not sufficient time to start a religion. I am also optimistic it will not be necessary, and we can pause AI without having to create any new religion or ideology.
• On a longer time scale such as 30 years, I think there should be more analysis on the religious dimensions of creating these technologies.

Motivation

Why was I motivated to read about traditional religion in the first place?

1. At a personal level, I noticed that I had prioritised my purpose in life and my desire for power, above any of my relationships. This seemed like the type of choice that I could later come to regret, so I wanted to think about it more deeply.
2. There has been and continues to be significant amounts of internal conflict in both the pro-AI and anti-AI factions. These conflicts are both due to the fight for power, and due to deeper ideological differences. I wanted to understand if the traditional religions had anything useful to say about how to fix this.
3. I was trying to process my fear of death, due to potential human extinction due to ASI in the next few years. I wanted to understand if the traditional religions had anything useful to say about the fear of death.

In this post I will write about 1 and 2, which I think are related, but not about 3.

Background - the nuclear world order

I see most suffering in the world today as directly downstream of religious conflict. Reading this background section is optional, but will give you deeper insight into how I personally look at religion.

• Geopolitics works primarily based on military and energy.
  • After the invention of nuclear weapons, the US govt under President Truman got an overwhelming military advantage, which they had to choose who to share with. They were also genuinely concerned about preventing further proliferation to a large number of countries.
  • Here are some videos of nuclear tests, to get a sense for what it felt like to be a political elite back then facing new questions about the world.
  • Energy politics has not changed all that much from the 1950s till fairly recently. Electricity today costs $0.10/kWh, and inflation-adjusted it did not cost a lot more back then. Electricity is primarily produced from fossil fuels (with some additional input from hydro). Efficiency of plants is not that far away from the theoretical limit, so the limiting input is just how much fossil fuel you burn.
  • Since fossil fuels on Earth are finite, the primary way to make your country rich (and increase standard of living) is to get other countries to give up their fossil fuels to you. You can either use your military to run a protection racket and bully them into giving their fossil fuels to you, or you can build other technology and trade it with them for their fossil fuels.
• Religion is a deeper underlying driver of geopolitics.
  • The US govt did both. Countries were generally offered the deal to give up their own desire to keep nukes and their own military, and in return get significant investment in the form of technical knowledge and infrastructure. The US also obviously got a lot of fossil fuels from such deals.
  • This plan was largely planned under Truman, Eisenhower and then Nixon as presidents who signed off on the decisions, with Allen Dulles and later Henry Kissinger as the leaders of intelligence who oversaw the actual execution.
  • For political reasons, such deals were overwhelming offered to countries with a significant Christian political faction.
    • Then-Christian countries that got nukes and allied with US - UK, France
    • Then-Jewish countries that got nukes and allied with US - Israel (received nukes under Henry Kissinger, who grew up Jewish)
    • No non-Christian/Jewish country was given nukes by the US.
    • Then-Christian countries that did not get nukes but got favourable tech and infra - Western Europe, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Brazil
    • Non-Christian countries that were not offered such favours - Mexico, India, China, Russia, most of middle East, most of west Asia
    • Exceptions - Japan (non-Christian but got infra anyway), Saudi Arabia (non-Christian but allied with US anyway, US needed atleast one ally in middle east)
    • Deemed too poor to be worth investing in - southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, etc), most of Africa.
      • (Side note - I think most aid to Africa is a waste until their politics is fixed, and there are industries besides mining built there.)
  • Disclaimer - I don't have deep understanding of history of every single country listed here, so there could be mistakes, but broad picture is this.
  • It does not matter whether Nixon or Truman or Dulles or Kissigner was a True Believer (TM) of Christianity or not, the fact is they found it politically convenient to make alliances with certain countries and not others, based on prevailing religious sentiments in both their elite circles and in the populations at large.
  • A lot of the slang from back then, such as Communist or Jihadi, is best understood in religious terms as atheist and muslim and so on.
  • I think religious leaders are also responsible for creating such conflict, if they help build mono-ideological communities which politicians can then use for such ends.
• India and geopolitics
  • I am writing about India separately because I live in India, and most of the personally relatable examples of human suffering I encounter are from here. It is possible you will care less if you don't live here, or that I would care less if I stopped living here for many years.
  • Indian govt was the first one to upset the whole nuclear world order that the US govt had planned. India managed to get nukes despite being a Hindu majority country, against their wishes. Indian govt repurposed tech that was intended for nuclear energy into nuclear weapons.
  • A side effect of this that is also relevant to the US is that it likely stopped the development of nuclear energy in the US. Once the US govt realised that repurposing nuclear weapons tech into energy tech was not hard, it became more politically questionable to use nuclear energy yourself but prevent other countries from using it at the same time. I am sympathetic to Peter Thiel's take on this.
  • Even today, India is the only country that does not cleanly fit into either nuclear power bloc, out of the total of nine countries that have nukes today.
    • Nuclear bloc 1 - US, UK, France, Israel
    • Nuclear bloc 2 - China, Russia, North Korea, Pakistan, India?
  • Since the US refused to provide India with infra and tech, Nehru made the IMO catastrophic blunder of not making India as capitalist as he should have. He also was sympathetic to Stalin, and wanted to appease the ideologies of both govts. Since Congress back then also contained a number of left-leaning people this tradition continued after his death.
  • The net result of both factors (India not getting help from US, and India not being capitalist enough themselves) is that India remained poor from 50s to 90s, and only after the (economic) liberalisation of the 90s has India seen significant economic growth.
  • Most of the suffering I see today, be it friend circles or in strangers I meet, comes from this fact. If you live in India, I recommend taking a moment to pause and remember some personal experiences from your life that are relevant here.
  • People's biggest complaints are usually not material complaints such as not having enough to eat or dying of diseases, but interpersonal conflict such as domestic violence from their spouse or authoritarian parenting or lack of women safety or risk of communal conflict and so on. A lot of this makes sense to me for a country whose last generation (from the 80s and 90s) had to worry about starving due to lack of food, but whose current generation does not. There are clear differences in psychology of people of last and current generation, that are obvious from a few conversations.
  • I could also write a whole separate section on Hindu-Muslim conflict, and why Nehru chose to accept Jinnah's Partition proposal, and why that has far-reaching consequences on Indian politics even today. I won't. The short version is that preventing mass violence between the two religious communities was an unsolved problem back then and remains an unsolved problem today, and this too has noticeable consequences on many aspects of life in India today.

Background - the AI world order

• Even if we do not build superintelligence, my default expectation is that AI is going affect the world order as dramatically as nuclear weapons did. Hence it is worth studying what are the deeper ideologies driving them, to figure out who the new alliances will be.
  • US and China are the two players with independent GPU supply chains and leading talent in the AI race. UK nominally has Deepmind but due to lack of independent supply chain, this lab too will more-or-less fall under US govt control.
  • US and China are also both significantly more atheist than they were in the 1950s. New atheist religions such as the quest for immortality via mind uploading are a driver of the AI race.
  • China is an ascending nuclear power whose political elites are explicitly atheist. This has significant geopolitical implications. (For example, this makes it less surprising to me why the first human genetic engineering experiment happened in China and not the US. Christians are more likely to be ideologically opposed to this.)
• If we do build superintelligence or get close to it, what comes before will be the Last Power Corridor at the End of Time, where the fight for power may be even more brutal than that of the Cold War.
  • If Allen Dulles was willing to drench the entire world in rivers of blood just to ensure a slightly better geopolitical position for the US, imagine what he would have done to get an immortal world dictatorship over quadrillions of digital slave races.
  • A lot of the usual incentives that keep power struggles in check, such as reputation built over a long time period, such as benefits from trade over conflict, such as military tit-for-tat, weaken when you are about to build such a decisive strategic advantage.
  • I will be completely unsurprised for example, if one of the AI lab CEOs personally imprisons and murders his entire C-suite, or initiates a genocide just to gain a minor ally, or blackmails US and Chinese politicians into threatening nuclear war on his behalf. I'm not saying these are the most likely outcomes or that I want these outcomes, but also, I will not be surprised.
• Some examples of power struggle in pro-AI faction we have already seen.
  • Shane Legg disagreeing with the general sentiment in the Singularity Summit and thinkers like Kurzweill and Yudkowsky, and choosing to start Deepmind.
  • Elon Musk disagreeing with Larry Page, and providing initial funding to OpenAI.
  • Dario Amodei disagreeing with Sam Altman, and starting Anthropic. SBF and Dustin Moskowitz providing initial funding, disagreeing with Yudkowsky.
  • Ilya Sutskever disagreeing with Sam Altman, and starting SSI.
• Notes
  • The full list is very long and I am not going to pretend above list is exhaustive.
  • Note that many of these conflicts are not just the decisions of individual people or just individuals seeking more power, but are representative of deeper ideological conflicts.
  • Connor Leahy has a good post on ideological drivers of AI race.
• Also starting to see power struggle and ideological differences in the anti-AI factions.
  • US left-leaning anti-AI factions vs factions that are anti-ASI in particular vs US right-leaning anti-AI people like Geoffrey Miller (and maybe Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson soon).
  • Stop AI (Guido Reichstader) vs Control AI (Connor Leahy) vs Pause AI (Joep Miendsertsma, Holly Ellmore) vs MIRI (Eliezer Yudkowsky) vs Lighthaven (Pace, Arnold, Habryka)
• Notes
  • I expect these power struggles will get worse as the anti-AI faction too starts building significant amounts of political power in the US.
  • I ended up paying special attention to Holly Ellmore's divorce as an example of the kind of personal damage one can hopefully avoid if they have better thought through the implications of how purpose and power intersect with one's relationships. Her husband was clearly more on Lighthaven's side than hers ideologically.
  • I also ended up paying special attention to many of Yudkowsky's followers who clearly still disagree with his decision to appear on news channels and generally get the public involved.
  • I might avoid commenting too directly on the conflicts, since I'm not a passive observer here, I actually probably want a bunch of these people to ally together.

What is traditional religion good at?

Traditional religion attempts to do a few different things

• Build communities, who can actually affect the real world and benefit people.
  • If you are in time of need, you can get benefits from religious communities including financial help, food, mental health counselling, peer group that emotionally supports you and so on.
  • Even if you are not in a time of need, you will probably be happier in life with a community where you actually feel they have your interests at heart, versus not having a community
• Provide psychological coping mechanisms, for things in the real world that they can't actually change.
  • For instance if you have anxiety about the future, they can provide ways to cope with that, or if you have fear of death, they can provide ways to cope with that, or if you have anxiety about relationship conflicts, they can provide ways to cope with that.
• Build trustworthy leadership for entire society
  • Leadership for societies is typically the output of a bitter struggle for power, where people sacrifice many of their values to win, so anything that improves this situation is useful.

Traditional religion is internal-facing and hence can't grab power

• The number one life goal for a deeply religious person is not to achieve a certain goal, but to become a certain type of person.
  • Typically this involves putting the needs of the community above their own.
  • Typically this involves thinking about topics like sex, morality, substance use, etc a certain way, and practising this way of living for many years.
  • Typically this also involves providing life advice to other members of the community. Typically this involves building a reputation in the community for being that type of person.
  • In Christianity and Islam the end goal is going to heaven. In Buddhism the end goal is Englightenment. In Hinduism the end goal is escaping reincarnation.
• The problem with the end goal being internal-facing not external-facing, is that such a community cannot quickly grab power in society.
  • As a matter of fact, the most ambitious projects that religious projects have organised in the real world are not that ambitious to me. Collecting resources to build a temple or feed the poor is not ambitious to me, in the way that landing rockets on the moon or genetically engineering a species is ambitious.
  • The only way such a group can build power is via the much slower process of converting people to their values.
  • I think I have fundamental disagreement with most religions on how much power you can build this way. IMO you can never convert 100% of society to your values.
  • As long as there is hard power (economic, military) up for grabs, there will be people who will make the sacrifices necessary to acquire that power. I think more religious people should read Meditations on Moloch by Scott Alexander.
  • Also, obviously there are competing religions which won't die out that easily either.
  • One way of looking at this is that you lost power in society and this is fine, atleast you were satisfied in life at the end. I am fairly confident I will never be satisfied in life this way, knowing that I voluntarily gave up power that could have fixed the world, in return for other things.
• Time deadline
  • Another way of looking at this is you are playing the long-term game, you don't have to grab power now if your community can eventually convert all people to it centuries later.
  • The main problem with this is we don't have forever, if artificial superintelligence gets built in the next 5 years, there is no forever, the human species may no longer exist.

Traditional religion does not know how to build trustworthy leadership

• Every traditional religion has the supposedly trustworthy leaders who were persecuted by society, and the current leaders who have power today but may be less universally trusted.
• Lots of members of traditional religions will openly admit that the centres of power within their own religious organisations have individuals who primarily seek power, and do not actually follow the tenets of the religion.
• If religious organisations can't even agree on trustworthy leaders for spiritual advice, they definitely can't agree on leaders who should be given vast amounts of political and economic power.
• Most traditional religions also use secrecy norms that can be used to cover up high rates of abuse IMO, be it the monastic lifestyle of Buddhist monks or Catholic priests who are trusted with confessionals and similar. Again, many members of the religions themselves admit this is a possibility.
• Learning this was a disappointment for me, because like I said my number one interest here is figuring out ideology and community for people at the Last Power Corridor at the End of Time.

Traditional religion is good at building communities, for people who don't want power

• Traditional religions emphasise building longterm marriages as a foundation, before building longterm communities on top. This makes sense to me as individual bonds alone can build the community.
• Traditional religions recommend avoiding desires of the ego and moral injury in your career, as both of these can affect your marriage and relationships with others in the community. Traditional religions recommend clear life priority orders that ensure there is less conflict.
• I think this is a large and genuine value add for most people who follow a traditional religion.
• However I also think this is what breeds conflict between religions. The fundamental source of conflict between average members of two traditional religions is usually not a metaphysical debate on the nature of God, but a practical conflict to poach people of the other community into your way of life. This could it via people marrying out of the community, via adult children who change values and leave, via economic and political competition between the communities, and so on.
• Connecting this back to the geopolitics discussed above, my guess is that the fundamental disagreement between the average American Christian and average Indian Hindu today is about what the right way to organise a community is. Same way there is disagreement what the average American and average Chinese believe about the right way to organise a community. This disagreement is likely more fundamental than purely a fight for more resources. This disagreement is fundamentally why politicians can morally justify to their population that even a risk of nuclear war is better than giving up resources or political power to the other side.

Traditional religion is good at providing psychological coping mechanisms

• For instance for anxiety about the future, about death, about relationships and so on.
• I have deliberately not chosen to talk about it in this post. Maybe later.

New religions and social dark matter

Okay so if traditional religions don't have the answer, can we create a new religion that does? It is worth first analysing why religions such as Yudkowsky's brand of longtermism have such a chokehold on people's values.

There are many lenses from which I can attempt to analyse this. The lens I prefer to discuss right now is social dark matter - whatever people are not willing to talk about in public is probably what is most important. Listed below are the common categories of social dark matter. I recommend memorising them by heart. This framework is as fundamental to my understanding of human behaviour as something like Maslow's hierarchy.

• death, sex, close relationship conflicts (includes parenting and marriage), morality and politics, money, physical and mental health (includes substance use)

Traditional religions on SDM

Summarised

• Death - Christianity and Islam say attain eternal life. Buddhism says attain englightenment. Hinduism says escape from reincarnation. Hence no fear of death
• Sex - Puritan sexual norms. Prioritise longterm marriage or else a vow of celibacy.
• Close relationship conflicts - Raise children in same religion, prioritise keeping relationships
• Morality and politics - Christianity and Buddhism never permit violence. Hinduism and Islam permit violence on the outgroup under certain restrictive circumstances (which are open to interpretation).
• Money - Not a life priority, keep enough to survive, donate to members of ingroup
• Physical and mental health - No substance use. Prioritise preserving health as instrumental goal.

There are lot of nuances here I haven't tried to understand or explain. If you actually believe a traditional religion, I am not your best source for knowledge on this.

Pro-ASI religion on SDM

Summarised

• Death - Immortality via mind uploading
• Sex - Infinite hedonism, optionally
• Close relationship conflicts - Make digital copies of yourself, not children. Also, maybe you don't need children for legacy if you're immortal yourself
• Morality and politics - Run simulations of various minds in various environments, and use these to solve morality and politics. Convert them both from social science problems into math problems of CEV and game theory respectively. Also absolute dictatorial mind control is now possible.
• Money - Colonise the entire universe to get more resources for yourself
• Physical and mental health - Perfect physical health, including optional upgrades. Infinite hedonism, optionally. Open questions on life's purpose, it's possible IMO that most beings have no purpose in such a world.

I am not sure which of these most motivates people today, but if I had to guess it is probably immortality via mind uploading. This explains for example why Sutton and Schmidhuber, who are both in their old age, are also the most pro-ASI.

Pro-human genetic engg (HGE) on SDM

It is obvious to me that this field is full of open questions, and if someone resolves a bunch of these questions, they can start a religion for HGE just like Yudkowsky started a religion for ASI. I don't want to start this religion myself because I'm not sure it will be good for the world if I do. Hence I would rather think more first.

Summarised

• Death
  • Open technical question if HGE can alter lifespan.
  • Open philosphical question how to think about this
• Sex
  • Open technical question if HGE can alter sex drive or neurocircuitry associated with sex.
  • Open philosophical question how to think about this.
• Close relationship conflicts
  • Open technical questions on what genes an either an idealist or a competitive parent can give their children.
  • Open philosophical questions on what genes they should give, and how to think about parenting as a result.
• Morality and politics
  • Open technical question if precursors to moral values can be genetically engineered, such as empathy for others, respect for authority, disgust and fear responses, etc.
  • Open philosophical question on if they should do this, if it is possible.
  • Open political question if HGE will get used by dictators to engineer their entire population or not. Open political question if there will be an arms race for HGE.
  • Open philosophical question on how to best to respond to an arms race or authoritarian action that someone else (who doesn't believe in your moral ideals) might have started.
• Money
  • Open technical and political question how much HGE will cost, and whether it will be commoditised in free market or monopolised by a few actors
  • Open philosophical question on how much should an individual or society spend on HGE
• Physical and mental health
  • Vast improvements to physical health
  • Open technical question how much improvement to mental health and altered mental states are possible, by editing genes for neurocircuitry.

Pro-cheap energy but no intelligence-enhacing tech

I mention this, because this is the stance I personally am most partial to right now. (Weak opinion)

• Focus on making energy cheap via solar and fusion for now. Philosophically I support both, but technically I am only optimistic on solar.
• Keep ASI, HGE and neuroscience WBE on pause until we can get guarantees that the political implications are not as bad as >100 year stable dictatorships or human extinction.

Summarised

• Death
  • Open technical question if aging gets solved biologically. (I am not optimistic on technical question being solved on short time horizon, on long horizon idk)
  • Open philosophical question how to think about this
• Sex
  • Maybe neuropharmacology can alter this, otherwise no change from present day
• Close relationship conflicts
  • No major changes from present day. Resource abundance will make parenting easier. Ideological conflicts will still exist in society, and will still show up in parenting.
• Morality and politics
  • People will still have fundamental ideological conflicts such as the best way to organise relationships and communities. Since the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy will be solved, this is what they'll try to solve next.
  • People will still have open philosophical questions on how to navigate these conflicts.
• Money
  • People will likely still accumulate excess resources they don't need, for leisure and for fighting the ideological conflicts above
  • Most people might be less willing to sacrifice their values for money, because they're less desparate for the money.
• Physical and mental health
  • Open technical question on if we find improvements to health biologically, at the slow pace we are progressing today.

Why not start a new religion?

There is a deadline here

• The primary reason I am not trying to start a new religion is lack of time.
• In next 5-10 years
  • We are possibly less than 5 years away from waking up the Machine God.
  • I am optimistic that Nick Landian Accelerationism has not yet infected a majority of either the US or the world population. If you could convince people that superintelligence was coming soon, and could risk human extinction, and if you could take a world referundum on it today, I am optimistic you will in fact get a supermajority voting for a pause.
  • Therefore my focus is on trying to empower this supermajority to actually exercise their will and enforce the pause they already want.
• In the next 30 years
  • Religions spread on the timescale of multiple generations, as they require people to detach from their family and friends in order to convert to the new religion, which is painful for most people.
  • On the timescale of 30 years or more, yes I do think someone trying to start a new religion would be good.
  • If the movement to build superintelligence was only about political power (like building nuclear weapons was), then building an opposing movement with greater political power would have been sufficient to stop it.
  • But, since the core of the pro-AI movement is religious in nature, the opposing movement will also have to be religious. Only a God can kill another God.
  • Otherwise, if you execute a pause now using political power alone, what will happen is that the pro-AI people will bide their time now, convert more followers to their cause, and eventually grab political power in atleast one country that can pull off build ASI.

What is my personal stance on morality, purpose, relationships?

• I am going to prioritise fulfilling my life's purpose over keeping my relationships. My life purpose is going to significantly revolve around acquiring power (likely political power) for myself or people aligned to my values.
  • I am aware I am signing up to a life of suffering, but atleast I want to do it eyes-wide-open. Preventing the deaths of millions, possibly billions of people, is more important to me than whether I get married or am happy in life. I will gladly die alone in an unmarked grave if that was what was necessary to actually fix AI extinction risk. I will gladly spend my life in prison if that was what was necessary.
  • Ideally I would like to have both power and relationships ofcourse, but if forced in a difficult choice like Holly Ellmore between keeping a relationship and fulfilling my purpose in life, I am going to pick purpose every single time. (Side note - there may be other relevant factors in this specific example, the specific example is not the point.)
• I expect I will have blood on my hands if I am successful in life.
  • If anything, me not having blood on my hands is an indication I did not achieve anything of value with my life.
  • All the great political leaders I respect, be it Nehru or Churchill or Lee Kuan Yew, have blood on their hands. They were great because they were less evil than their predecessors, and hence did more good than harm. They were not great because they did everything right.
  • This obviously doesn't mean all violence is fine, don't become Hitler. But it also means if I want to study acceptable uses of violence, the correct reading material is mostly politics, not philosophy or religion.
  • For example, from my reading of politics, whether you are waging war or doing terrorism depends basically on whether you have political power or not. I can support war if required, I don't support becoming a terrorist.
  • As a concrete example, I would be supportive of waging war (possibly even nuclear war) on a rogue govt that tries to build superintelligence in defiance of international treaties. I would do this with full knowledge that most citizens who are affected by the war may not deserve blame in the choices of their govt, and that a hundred years later they may still be affected by the consequences and correctly hate my group in response.

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