Even a scientifically inclined atheist has philosophical ideas grounding their world view. The idea that the universe exists as an objective absolute with immutable laws of nature is a metaphysical idea. The idea that nature can be observed and that reason is a valid tool for acquiring knowledge about nature is an epistemological idea. Ethics is another field of philosophy and it would be a mistake to assume a universal system of ethics that has been constant throughout all cultures across all of human history.

So while I certainly agree that there is a very common hand-wave of "look the atheists have just replaced God with a new 'god' by a different name", you don't have to focus on religion, theology and faith based belief systems to identify different categories of philosophical ideas and how they have shaped different cultures, their beliefs and behaviours throughout history.

A student of philosophy would identify the concept of "my truth" as being an idea put forward by Emmanuel Kant, for example, even though the person saying that doesn't know that that's the root of the idea that reality is subjective. Similarly, the empirically grounded scientist would be recognized as following in the footsteps of Aristotle. The pious bible thumper parroting ideas published by Plato.

The point is that philosophy is not the same thing as religion and philosophy directly shapes how people think, what they believe and therefore how they act and behave. And it's kind of uncanny how an understanding of philosophy can place historical events in context and what kinds of predictive capabilities it has when it comes to human behaviour in the aggregate.

I think you can also see this in the intensification of political discussion, which has a similar intensity to religious discussions 100-200+ years ago (i.e. Protestant reformation). Indicating that this "religious hardware" has shifted domains to the realm of politics. I believe this shift can also be seen through the intense actions and rhetoric we saw in the mid-20th century.

You can also look at all of these new age "religions" (spiritualism, horoscopes, etc.) as that religious hardware searching for something to operate on in the absence of traditional religion.

Max Stirner said that after the Enlightenment and the growth of liberalism, which is still very much in vogue to this day, all we’ve done is replace the idea of God with the idea of Man.

The object might be different, but it is still the unshakable belief in an idealised and subjective truth, with its own rituals and ministers i.e a religion.

I guess the Silicon Valley hyper-technological optimism of the past years is yet another shift from Man to religious belief in the Machine.

AI isn't a worldview; it's an extremely powerful tool which some people happen to be stronger at using than others, like computers or fighter jets. For people who empirically observe that they've been successful at extracting massive amounts of value from the tool, it's easy to predict a future in which aggregate economic output in their field by those who are similarly successful will dwarf that of those who aren't. For others, it's understandable that their mismatched experience would lead to skepticism of the former group, if not outright comfort in the idea that such productivity claims are dishonest or delusional. And then of course there are certainly those who are actually lying or deluded about fitting in the former group.

Every major technology or other popular thing has some subset of its fandom which goes too far in promotion of the thing to a degree that borders on evangelical (operating systems, text editors, video game consoles, TV shows, diets, companies, etc.), but that really has nothing to do with the thing itself.

Speaking for myself, anecdotally, I've recently been able to deliver a product end-to-end on a timeline and level of quality/completeness/maturity that would have been totally impossible just a few years ago. The fact that something has been brought into existence in substantially less time and at orders of magnitude lower cost than would have been required a few years ago is an undeniable observation of the reality in front of me, not theological dogma.

It is, however, a much more cognitively intense way to build a product — with AI performing all the menial labor parts of development, you're boxed into focusing on the complex parts in a far more concentrated time period than would otherwise be required. In other words, you no longer get the "break" of manually coding out all the things you've decided need to be done and making every single granular decision involved. You're working at a higher level of abstraction and your written output for prompting is far more information-dense than code. The skills required are also a superset of those required for manual development; you could be the strongest pre-LLM programmer in the world, but if you're lacking in areas like human language/communication, project/product management, the ability to build an intuition for "AI psychology", or thinking outside the box in how you use your tools, adapting to AI is going to be a struggle.

It's like an industry full of mechanics building artisan vehicles by hand suddenly finding themselves foisted with budgets to design and implement assembly lines; they still need to know how to build cars, but the nature of the job has now fundamentally changed, so it's unsurprising that many or even most who'd signed up for the original job would fail to excel in the new job and rationalize that by deciding the old ways are the best. It's not fair, and it's not anyone's fault, but it's important for us all to be honest and clear-eyed about what's really happening here. Society as a whole will ultimately enjoy some degree of greater abundance of resources, but in the process a lot of people are going to lose income and find hard-won skills devalued. The next generation's version of coal miners being told to "learn to code" will be coders being told to "learn to pilot AI".

Or we can just refuse this future and act as a society to prevent it from happening. We absolutely have that power, if we choose to organize and use it.

If we were to consider that, then to what end? If you accept my framing of the long-term implications of LLMs on the industry, then what you're suggesting is effectively that we should deprive society of greater prosperity for the benefit of a small minority. Personally, I'd rather improve democratization of entrepreneurship (among other things) than artificially prop up software engineering salaries.

And let's say the US did all that. What then? We neuter our economy and expect our adversaries to just follow suit? More likely it hobbles our ability to compete and ultimately ushers in an era of global hegemony under the CCP.

This already exactly the case. AI won't bring jackshit to anyone except those who're already sitting on too much wealth than any human should deserve.

At best, AI will slightly increase average global misery by virtue of producing too much garbage that pollutes the digital landscape.

The industrial revolution didn't bring prosperity to anyone except the capital owners, who forced their employees (physical force) to work many long hours, in gruesome environment, for pathetic wages.

When the Society's Elites promise something, the common man must be wary, those elites didn't reach their spots by being kind.

This is simply not true. Compare life of common man of today, to one from 3 centuries before. Quality of life increased tenfold, medicine, knowledge access, world travelability, life expentancy, political representation etc. Of course capital owners get richer even still, but suggesting we were better of without inudstrail revolution is just disingenous.

Once it exists, anywhere, the job market is toast - banning it in the US just means outsourcing all the economic benefits to China. We have a long history of technological revolutions to demonstrate this: the un-industrialized nations fared a lot worse than the ones at the frontier of technology.

As far as the industrial revolution, your take is ahistorical. We're clearly more prosperous now than we were before industrialization. Let's not forget that the pre-industrial American economy relied on literal enslavement of 15 - 20% of the population.

The fact that rich people get richer is exactly the goal of the US' economic system, not an accident. Despite the abolition of slavery, the US remains extremely hostile to the poor. its lower-than-livable wages forcing its people to be more miserable than medieval surfs.

So, no, the industrial revolution did not bring prosperity, what brought prosperity was the blood shed by common men daring to keep a portion of the fruits of their labour. The history of unionization on the US and the plight of miners clearly shows how much prosperity was brought by technological innovation.

For Europe's part, the continent was physically developed over millennia on the backs of imperial slaves and feudal serfs, while its wealth was the product of atrocities comparable to those of the US. They certainly don't get a pass here.

If we're looking to the past for guidance, the historical precedent is clear: greater efficiency increases prosperity, and greater prosperity increases liberty. The first industrial revolution heralded the end of actual slavery; the AI industrial revolution could herald the end of "wage slavery". If some rich people happen to get richer at the same time, I say good for them. Rather than cutting off our nose to spite our face, we should look at concepts like UBI or universal educational stipends as an ultimate offramp from mandatory employment.

It leads me to the question, "Is it really 'religious hardware' or the same ol' 'make meaning out of patterns' hardware we've had for millenia that has allowed us to make shared language, make social constructs, mutually believe legal fictions that hold together massive societies, etc.?"

They are the same thing. Call it "religion" or "meaning making," both activities can be subsumed by the more encompassing concept and less-loaded term of "psycho-technology," [0] or non-physical tools for the mind.

Language is such a psycho-technology, as are social constructs such as law; legal fictions are given memorable names and personified into "religious" figures, such as Libra from astrology or Themis/Lady Justice from Greek mythology.

Ancient shamans and priests were proto-wetware engineers, designing software for your brain and providing tools for making meaning out of the world. In modern day we now have psychologists, "social commentators" (for lack of a better term and interpreted as broadly as possible), and, yes, software engineers, amongst other disciplines, playing a similar role.

[0] https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-1-introduction/

None of these assumptions can be proven, yet like the ancients looking at the sky and seeing a moving sun but missing a larger bit of the big picture you now have a 'theory of mind' that satisfies your rational impluses given a poor diet of facts and knowledge. But hey, once you manage to 'get into orbit' you get access to more facts and then the old 'installed hardware' theory of yours starts breaking down.

The rational position regarding these matters is to admit "we do not have sufficient information and knowledge to make conclusive determinations based on reason alone". Who knows, one day Humanity may make it to the orbit and realize the 'simple and self apparent idea' of "everything revoles around the Earth" is false.

Do you assume that someone will stumble into creating a person, but with unlimited memory and computational power?

Otherwise, if we are able to create this person using our knowledge, we will most certainly be able to augment humans with those capabilities.

And it’s the atheists who continuously do it, claiming they don’t believe in God just markets or ai etc.

It’s an irony of ironies.

1. Omniscience: Google's AI, at any rate, wins this by default. The others are at a disadvantage.

2. Omnipresence: Several major tech companies have stated that the OS of the future will be an AI. You won't use apps, the AI will use them for you. Today they're already shoving it into everything.

3. Omnipotence: This part is a work in progress ;) The "embodiment" lags behind.

As for Benevolence... well, they removed "don't be evil", so you'll have to ask them about that one...

(Also "fun" fact: Musk claims that OpenAI was specifically founded in response to a conversation with Sergei Brin where he pledged allegiance to the machines, not the humans.)

The notion that history is just on some inevitable pre-planned path is not a new idea, except now the actor has changed from God to technology.

This is a more nuanced sentence.

YOU come off as poorly read, so I wouldn't trust your judgement on this one, champ. "common trope" lmfao.

I mean the lack of self awareness you have here is amazing.

In Adam Curtis‘s all watched over by machines of loving Grace, he makes a pretty long and complete argument that humanity has a rich history of turning over its decision-making to inanimate objects in a desire to discover ideologies we can’t form ourselves in growing complexity of our interconnectivity.

He tells a history of them constantly failing because the core ideology of “cybernetics” is underlying them all and fails to be adaptive enough to match our DNA/Body/mind combined cognitive system. Especially when scaled to large groups.

He makes the second point that humanity and many thinkers constantly also resort to the false notion of “naturalism” as the ideal state of humanity, when in reality there is no natural state of anything, except maybe complexity and chaos.

Giving yourself up to something. Specially something that doesn’t work is very much “believing in a false god.”

I'm addressing this point at you personally because we can all see your comments: being nasty to atheists on the internet will never be a substitute for hard evidence for your ideology.

To be fair, we shouldn't bundle Augustine and Thomas Aquinas with John MacArthur and Joel Osteen. Meaning that some religious thought is more philosophically robust than other religious thought.