Sometimes I think the internet is a giant Ouija board, and we use it to summon things and things appear through it. So if you want to be supernaturalist about it, if you want to be Christian about it, the world is inhabited by powers and principalities and demonic forces which have it in for us, and which want to turn us away from God. That’s their purpose. There’s something very spiritually dark about the internet, actually. I mean, just on a practical level, we see chatbots persuading teenagers to kill themselves. We have all sorts of dark, horrible stuff going on. But there’s something about the very deliberate drive to, as our Silicon Valley overlords say, to create God, to make God. I mean, the book is full of quotes from these people about what they’re doing, and it’s openly theological. We’re creating God, we’re building God, we’re replacing God. We’re creating machines that will have a spirituality to them. That’s where we’re going. So we have a sense that what we’re doing with the internet is not simply using a bunch of ones and zeros to give us a load of stuff we want, but actually creating a new religion, actually, a new spiritual worldview in which we are going to upload our minds, we are going to live forever. And that in the process of trying to create an artificial intelligence, the question that haunts me is: Are we creating these things or are we summoning them? OK, so is it possible that the machines we’ve made are actually being inhabited by something else? Is this just a mess we’ve made with our technology, or is there something that’s actually working on our minds through it, which occasionally can keep you up at night?
