Anthony Levandowski Started A Religion To Worship Robot Overlords, Not A Joke

When employees in Silicon Valley get fired from a company, the natural response would be to either look for another job or create their own startup. In the case of former Uber executive and alleged tech thief Anthony Levandowski, however, the response is to start a church. Not just any church either. Levandowski’s new religious organization is meant to worship super-intelligent machines.

While it may be tempting to dismiss this news as a trivial matter, it’s worth pointing out that the Church of Scientology was started by a science fiction writer only a few decades ago. With that in mind, a multi-millionaire who is also an expert in machine learning technology starting a religious movement around robot overlords suddenly doesn’t sound so silly. This is exactly what Levandowski did, WIRED reports.

The former Google engineer actually started his church, which he calls “Way of the Future” back in 2015. This was before the legal kerfuffle between Uber and Waymo, which Levandowski caused. The idea behind the religion is simple; “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence”.

No official documents have been filed with the Internal Revenue Service yet, but according to WIRED’s investigations, Levandowski lists himself as the President and CEO of the church. Considering just how much of an influence the engineer has had in the development of AI, including the self-driving truck startup Otto, Waymo’s driverless car technology, and even autonomous drones, the religious head has done much to make the Singularity inevitable.

While many AI experts do believe that machine intelligence can benefit humanity and the world, no other notable tech figure has built a church around the concept. What’s more, many religious scholars and even tech industry revolutionaries have expressed concern about the development of AI, The Verge notes.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is particularly cautious of superintelligent machines and holds the opposite opinion of Levandowski. The billionaire has been warning that AI could actually lead to the extinction of humans.