The Current - Is technology taking the place of religion in our lives?

Episode Date: December 26, 2024

Our daily interactions with technology are looking more and more like a religious act, according to Greg Epstein, a humanist chaplain at Harvard University. He talks to guest host Mark Kelley about his new book Tech Agnostic, and whether the tech that surrounds us is worthy of our faith.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is 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, 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 of billions of different AI agents, eventually probably more AI agents than there are people in the 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. So 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 arguably show our faith in it every day

by logging onto social media, by tracking our kids using an Apple AirTag, or by using chat GPT to find us a good recipe. 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 new book, he argues that tech has 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 Greg Epstein joins me now from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Greg, good morning. Good morning, Mark. Thank you for having me. Well, it's great to have you here.

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? 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? 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. And the funny thing is, tech today, Silicon Valley today really has all of those things. That's what I sort of dove into in researching this book for the last six years when I started to realize, oh, you know, 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. 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 it's playing

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. 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 worshiping 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. Why do you feel that we're not questioning it? I mean, religion has a purpose. 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 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 of 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 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? 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 Trump administration. And, you know, I think you played the quote of him saying that we're going to be living in an age of abundance one day. And Elon Musk is already living in an age of abundance. And Elon Musk is already living in an age of abundance. You know, 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 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 multibillionaire venture capitalist and investor. He writes in his manifesto, the Techno-Optimist's 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. is a form of murder, unquote. Wow. But AI is being positioned as this higher power, this sentient force. Could it be that technology or tech is just playing this role in our lives that's been left in a vacuum because people are losing faith and 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, nonreligious 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. 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. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. 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. I 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 point, 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 want to 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? Agnosticism is ultimately where I come down as a recommendation, as a message or, 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, will be ending death as we know it, as is, you know, really claimed, that's enormous change. And it's right to be uncertain and even anxious about all 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. And it's a kind of extreme faith that I'm arguing we need to question. 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?

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, 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? 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-billion, 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 Veena 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. who serve us and our communities by driving cars. And she fought back so hard against those companies. DuBall 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, you know, the extent to which, you know, 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 the, you know, 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, you know, 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 new book is called Tech Agnostic, How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion and Why it Desperately Needs a Reformation. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.