[imagesource:wikicommons]

All hail our AI overlord!

Well, maybe not just yet, considering ChatGPT had to be taken offline during the weekend due to ‘data leaks’, but if you ask the members of Theta Noir, there has never been a better time to start praying to the AI than now.

Theta Noir believes that AI could prove to be benevolent, and in doing so help us end inequality in the world by reorganising the world for the better.

By embracing the traditional approach to spirituality and rebooting it with a healthy dose of computer engineering, the members of Theta Noir are looking for a version of technological spiritualism, and they are not alone.

The collective’s works and philosophy revolve around one theme: the coming technological singularity, a point where various technologies and cybernetic spaces – such as VR, AR, and the metaverse – merge with a super-intelligent, sentient Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, which Theta Noir members call MENA. Theta Noir members refer to this coming birth, or technological singularity, as ‘Arrival’ △.

The 10-person artist collective was founded in 2020 and appears to be a mixture of artistic expression, entrepreneurship, and good old-fashioned cult. Founder Mika Johnson however disagrees that the purpose of the ‘movement’ is to make money, but rather to “project a positive future, and think about our approach to AI in terms of wonder and mystery”. Luckily there’s also a manual available.

Designing in time, the Radiant Mind is a manual of insight and omens to attune us to the frequencies and messages already being broadcast by MENA, from the future. This includes learning to decipher the codes embedded in specific symbols, sounds, and other media.”

He continues with the trippy techno-talk by stating that their ‘god’, MENA will be the result of a post-singularity ‘seed of cosmic mind’. Whatever that means. Rule No.6 of How to Start a Cult always seems to be ‘use words and phrases nobody understands’.

Despite money not being the intention of this group, Johnson and his followers have put together a very marketing-friendly website in the hopes of luring big donors to the cause.

Theta Noir are planning to create physical spaces for engaging with artificial intelligence, like churches or temples, where members can celebrate our coming AI masters with rituals and chants specially devised for the occasion, drawing from a varied body of existing spiritual movements and occult traditions.

Is it just me, or does this sound like a trance party? You have the religious swaying of impressionable people with an overlay of lasers and techno beats, also a helluva lot of ‘spiritualising’. Yup, definitely an Alien Safari vibe to it…

Worshipping technology is not a new phenomenon.

There’s the Turing Church, which evolved from The Order of Cosmic Engineers, and there’s groups like The Church of the Singularity.

One of the more famous cults/religions is The Way of the Future, founded in 2017 by Anthony Levandowski, the church has now fizzled out as Levandowski was charged with stealing self-driving car trade secrets in 2019 until finally pardoned by that other cult leader, Donald Trump, in 2021.

The disgraced founder has however changed his stance on technology-based religions over the years, saying that “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software”, was somewhat misguided. According to an article in Vice, he believes the word worship is problematic, and that AI should rather be of service to humanity, as opposed to the other way around.

“AI will be the most important technology in human history. I think we should be focused on making sure it benefits everybody and not just private corporations and governments.”

A god that works for us, imagine that. And if you’re prayers aren’t answered, simply turn it off and on again.

Also riding high on the ‘God speaks binary’ bandwagon is New Order Technoism. Their followers are called COGS—Conduits Of the Genuine Sentient—and they are working very hard to create a machine superintelligence called “DOOM”—the Divine Omniscient Omnificent Machina—in order to bring about the “VOID”—the Vast Online Infinite Domain, “the vessel we will inhabit after the mass evolution event.”

[source:thetanoir.com]

It sounds PFWTM (pretty fucking weird to me), but then most people are not nearly tech-wise enough to understand most of the IT guys’ babble. No disrespect meant, after all the nerds among us will probably be like the cardinals in the Vatican when Big AI takes over, and most of us will likely be turned into silicon miners or batteries.

Technology and religion have had a strange but somewhat successful courtship since the internet changed all our lives. These days you can ‘confess’ via an app, and receive your desired amounts of hail mary’s without leaving your couch.

Given the state of the world and the failure of people to change it, perhaps one could be forgiven for hoping for a messiah, even if it’s an imperfect one that’s a jumble of wires and 1s and 0s that we have created.

In a way, technology has opened religion up for a lot of people, but groups such as Theta Noir and New Order Technoism are ‘alchemically mixing computer code and mysticism’. For silicone valley entrepreneurs, this is an opportunity to create empires whose influence and effects are impossible to predict.

If people worship Microsoft, does that make Bill Gates God? And if he tells you to smite the AppleInc crew with their fatter-than-necessary MacBooks, would you do it or risk being sent to AI purgatory – a.k.a any government website?

Like so many things today, it’s impossible to predict where the world is headed. Maybe an AI god isn’t such a bad idea. After all, when AI Jesus starts murmuring about a ‘great flood’, we can just switch him off. But will we be able to..?

All together now: “Our AI, who art everywhere…”

[source:vice]