The Current - Is technology becoming the world's most powerful religion?

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

Our daily interactions with technology are looking more and more like a religious act, according to Greg Epstein, a humanist chaplain at Harvard University and author of Tech Agnostic. In an interview from December, he discusses whether the tech that surrounds us is worthy of our faith.

When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. There's a man living in this address in the name of a deceased. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers are finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he? I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncovered, available now.

This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, it's Mark Kelly here. You might know me from my regular gig as co-host of the CBC's The Fifth Estate. You'll be hearing more from me when I fill in for Matt as he crosses the country talking to Canadians about the election. I hope you tune in and please enjoy the current podcast. If you listen to the titans of the tech industry, all the technology they're building is changing the world for the better. I think we are heading into the greatest period of abundance that humanity has ever seen. I think the two main drivers of that are AI and energy.

So I think we're going to live in a world where there are going to be hundreds of millions and billions of different AI agents, eventually probably more AI agents than there are people in the world. world. The good future of AI is one of immense prosperity where there is an age of abundance, no shortage of goods and services. Everyone will be able to have anything they want. In my view, that's probably 80% likely. Look on the bright side. While tech CEOs Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk preach about the promise of

technology the rest of us are arguably show our faith in it every day by logging on to social media, by tracking our kids using an Apple AirTag or by using chat GPT to find us a good recipe or a great line. Well for Greg Epstein, the way we interact with technology is looking more and more like a religious act. He's a humanist chaplain at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his book, he argues that tech is in fact,

become the world's most powerful religion, and we should be asking more questions about whether it's worthy of our faith. The book is called Tech Agnostic, and I spoke with Greg Epstein in December. Here's our conversation. You know, let's define our terms. When we talk about religion, I think about this obedience to faith in the hope for salvation. How do you define what religion is for you? Matthew 14.10 Religion has so many definitions. There's no one thing that you can identify as, you know,

religion is this and this only. And, you know, that comes from me studying religion and working in and around it for almost 30 years. But in order to write this book, I also spoke to a wide variety of scholars of religion who talk about how it can be sort of a term of art. But the idea that all of these things that we call religion are alike is a Christian notion. It comes from scholars of Christianity and Christian theologians at the beginning of sort of the modern era who said, oh, you know, we're going to categorize all these different things that we see around the world according to our terminology, according to our framework for living. You know, and the tech religion can look quite a bit like

a Christian conception of religion as well. So how does it fit? How do you explain that to me? How tech fits into that definition of religion? Well, you know, if you really want to look structurally, some of the things that do really seem to be in common across what we call religious traditions around the world are a sort of narrative story that shapes people's lives and helps them to derive meaning in life, a set of practices and rituals that

help connect them to who they think they are, who they're trying to be, to their community, and then community institutions, even congregations that bind people together and give them a shared sense of meaning. The funny thing is tech today, Silicon Valley today really has all of those things. That's what I dove into in researching this book for the last six years when I started to realize, oh, I had been organizing a kind of alternative congregation. And I realized that the real alternative congregation was Facebook, or social media writ large when Mark Zuckerberg in 2017 started talking about bringing the world closer together. He rewrote the Facebook mission statement and it sounded like a congregation

leaders manifesto. Jared Liesveld You have a great line in the book where you say, technology is the water in which we swim, whether or not we notice we are fish. Did you want, by making this, you know, linking this idea of religion and technology, do you want this to be a wake up call to the role that's playing it in our lives? Yeah. The idea for me is tech has become so much bigger than just an industry, right? We algorithmically, we still say this phrase, the tech industry. But that's a really bizarre

thing to say these days because there's not a single industry left in the world, it would seem, that isn't in some meaningful way a tech industry. I mean, I was even talking to one interviewer and I said, well, maybe basket weaving hasn't become a tech industry. And she laughed and said, oh, no, I know something about basket weaving. It's quite techified these days. And the point is that if tech as a religion has developed some really strange ideas about AI gods, about what I would call AI heaven, AI hell, chosenness, and colonialism, which is, of course, a big part of many of the world's religions as well. And if a strange new traditional religion had come along and developed billions of new followers who were devoting themselves to it, who were worshipping

all day every day and who were being asked to tithe and double tithe. We'd be very critical of such a thing. We would worry, we would wonder, and we would question. But I don't think we're questioning this new faith in technology as all things to all people nearly enough. Jared Liesveld Why do you feel that we're not questioning it? I mean, religion has a purpose.

So, and so how do you see what the purpose of tech is and why are we failing to grasp that or question that? Yeah, I mean, the, the thing is that religion has many purposes. People use religion for good and for bad. They use it to inspire themselves and one another, and they also can use it to manipulate them, you know, one another. And the thing about my perspective on all this is I work as a humanist chaplain. I'm non-religious, but I work, I've dedicated my life 20-plus years at Harvard and now at MIT as well, to working in interfaith contexts. I'm not anti-religious and I'm not anti-technology, but, you know, I do think that we have this faith now that technology is the answer to all problems and that it's something that we should be spending every minute of every

day of our lives with, it would seem. And, you know, the question to me is who benefits from that? You know, it reminds me of the sort of religion where the leaders ask you to devote yourself to them and to them alone, to their faith and to their faith alone, and they sort of won't let you out of the boundaries of their congregation or their cult even. Well, we heard some of the tech CEOs in our intro. So how have they become what you call prophets of tech? Yeah, you know, Elon Musk strikes me as the kind of prophet in chief of the new Trump administration. And I think you played the quote of him saying that we're gonna be living in an age of abundance

one day. And Elon Musk is already living in an age of abundance. His net worth has risen to heights of up to around $460, $440 billion. He's well on pace to becoming the world's first trillionaire. And so, you know, it's very easy for somebody like Elon Musk to conjure a fantasy of abundance and tell us all that we're going to share in it, of course. Why wouldn't he tell us that? You know, he doesn't want us to think that we all ought to question his wealth.

So, you know, Musk and others tell us about a fantasy in which one day down the road, there will be trillions of digital beings uploaded into the cloud. And they say that floated into the cloud. And they say that these digital beings will be just as important, just as worthy as we are. And they go even further than that. They say that because those beings will be just as worthy as we are, and it'll be a kind of tech utopia powered by the energy from distant stars, it's a kind of heaven image that they're conjuring, that we have to sacrifice ourselves and our lives and, for example, our climate in order to do everything possible to bring this about. I'll read you a quick quote from Marc Andreessen, the very influential tech multi-billionaire, venture capitalist and investor, he writes in his

manifesto, the techno-optimists manifesto, which is written in the style of a biblical epistle, and it uses the phrase, we believe, 133 times. He writes, we believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder." Unquote. Wow. But AI is being positioned as this higher power, this sentient force. It could be that the technology or tech is just playing this role in our lives that's been left in a vacuum because people are losing faith in religion?

I mean, it's fascinating, right? I came to the idea for this book after spending well over a decade trying to help people from this rising generation in the United States and Canada and elsewhere that is one of the least – it's the least religious generation in recorded history to build a new kind of community, a new kind of congregation. I was taught that religion is the most powerful social technology in the world and that that could be a real positive if it was harnessed for people like me, atheists, agnostics, non-religious people. But, you know, I noticed that tech was in fact playing that role in most people's lives. You know, around 2018 when

I was invited to be a chaplain at MIT, I realized, oh, wow, that, you know, the technology that we're interacting with has taken this role on in the world. And then I started to notice all these other parallels. And what you were just pointing out is absolutely true. There is an extraordinary amount of discourse about God in the AI and tech world. And so AI is actually positioned as a God by a lot of ostensibly serious people as an actual God that we should be literally worshiping. I'm Sarah Trelevin, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies.

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From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now. Greg, tell me about your own story. Religion is built on rituals. How did your own attachment to technology influence how you thought about tech as a form of religion? Matthew 14.1

You know, maybe I was a canary in the coal mine for some of this tech addiction that I think a lot of us are wondering if we've got now. I was working on my first book, Good Without God, What a Billion Non-Religious People Do Believe, back in 2008. It was barely 30. And I felt a lot of pressure to write my book well and, you know, what would my dad, who, you know, had already died many years previous, have thought about it and I was stressed out. And I'm not a drugs person or an alcohol person, per se, but I realized that in order to escape my fear about writing, I was retreating into what I realized

was tech addiction. My email, web browsing, you know, looking up the latest article, the newest online story as a way to avoid my problems. And I ended up seeking formal treatment for this. And I went to the meetings and I realized, oh, yeah, I'm sitting next to somebody who is an alcoholic on one side, a heroin abuser on the other side, and I'm doing the same thing with my tech. But I realized that I had to go a little bit beyond that because if tech is an addiction, it's not something that you can go cold turkey from. I mean, it would be laughable for me to suggest to say one of my students at a place like a Harvard or an MIT if they might be struggling with their tech use in similar ways to what

I've struggled with, that they should, you know, cast their smartphone into the sea, smash their tablet with a hammer. I mean, what would that get them? It would get them at this, isolation from their entire generation. And so, what I realized was that this tech should actually be approached more like an eating disorder. Because if you have an eating disorder, you can't just stop eating food as a way of treating it. And in fact, you don't even wanna have a negative relationship with food, like, okay, I'll eat healthy, but I'll hate myself for

it, and I'll hate the food. No. You know, eating disorder therapists and experts will help people to develop a whole new healthy relationship with their food, where they address the fears that are coming up when people sort of abuse the food and try to provide them with a better sense of hope and connection through food. And I realized that's exactly what I need and exactly what I think a lot of people need with tech. But an agnostic is someone by definition who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God. So how does this apply to the path forward in our relationship with tech?

So agnosticism is ultimately where I come down as a recommendation, as a message or, you know, maybe a mantra in tech agnostic. For example, Donald Trump was just re-elected by the American people as a 34-time and probably counting convicted felon, in large part because he comes across as fearless, as incredibly confident in the face of uncertainty. You know, people in America and Canada and elsewhere, I think, are worried, rightfully so, about a world where climate has made our future incredibly uncertain, where tech has made our future incredibly uncertain. I mean, even if tech promises good things, if we're being told, as we are by a lot of tech leaders, that we're going to be, you know,

in 10, 12 years from now, we're going to be uploading ourselves in the cloud, the singularity, as some people call it, we'll be ending death as we know it, as is really claimed, that's enormous change. And it's right to be uncertain and even anxious about all of that change. Trump comes along and he's very certain, and that's a problem. So agnosticism is a way of saying, we don't need to know every aspect of what is to come. We don't need to know how to, you know, build the perfect society, live the perfect life. What we do need is a sense of confidence in our compassion for one another. We need a sense that we're

committed to loving one another, caring for one another, building a better world for all. And that, you know, the idea that we have to have this perfect technological method of doing so and only that can save us, that is faith. It's a kind of extreme faith that I'm arguing we need to question. Aaron Ross Powell Well, you mentioned, you know, we're talking about Elon Musk, the power of Elon Musk, his role now in the White House. And we look at other tech CEOs, their owners of media outlets, they control the conversation

in a certain way. So how much room is there for us, as the consumers of tech, to really push back against that power? Matthew 16 Yeah, the heartening thing that I found in spending six years researching the different ways in which tech ends up looking like faith is that there are a tremendous number of smart and caring people who are calling for what I would call a reformation, right? Because I don't have a problem with religion per se, it's really important to emphasize I like reformed religions, where people, leaders, communities know how to respond honestly to criticism and work to try to do better when they make mistakes. You know,

Christians who know how to criticize Christian hegemony, Jews and Israelis that know how to criticize the Israeli occupation and violence, Muslims who know how to criticize, you know, Muslim terrorism and such, right? So, what would our reform relationship with tech look like? Jason Kuznicki Yeah. So the last third to almost half of tech agnostic is about the Reformation. It's about what I would call the positive alternative to tech worship. And so there are people who essentially are tech heretics, apostates, you know, people who are willing to take on these incredibly powerful multi-trillion-dollar companies and industries and say, you know,

no, you don't get to disrupt entire communities of people just because it will drive more profits to your shareholders. I tell the story of a woman, for example, named Vena Dubal, a professor at the University of California, who was an expert in the taxi industry in the San Francisco area just before Uber and Lyft came along. And so she was in really good position to document how much harm Uber and Lyft and companies like them were doing to the people, the humans who serve us and our communities by driving cars. And she fought back so hard against those companies. Dubaal is extremely brave. She and many others are making an important impact. They're causing a lot of tech companies

to have to take steps back and recognize their overreach. But there's much more work to be done. You say in the book you've long been known as an irrepressible optimist. So how has writing this book affected that? I'm worried, of course, about how much power Silicon Valley, what we call big tech, is amassing, and the extent to which these companies are dominating our sense of who we are. But I am optimistic about the power of agnosticism, essentially, about the idea that if we can affirm human caring and human compassion and human worth simply because we are all

human, not because we have to accomplish the greatest thing, be the most exceptional person, win the economy, win every single battle for tech supremacy. But if we can just focus on not knowing what we don't know about our tech future, but knowing what we know about how important it is to be compassionate and caring for one another, I think we can successfully push back against the worst excesses of tech. I do feel confident in that. You're shouting from a rooftop. Let's find out now who's listening.

Greg, it's a fascinating conversation. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mark. It's great to talk to you. Greg Epstein is a humanist chaplain at both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His book is called Tech Agnostic, How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation.

I spoke with him in December.