“The more you listen to Silicon Valley’s discourse around AI, the more you hear echoes of religion. That’s because a lot of the excitement about building a superintelligent machine comes down to recycled religious ideas. Most secular technologists who are building AI just don’t recognize that.”
But they aren’t building intelligence. They are creating code that uses the intelligence of the human actor to fool them into believing they are having a conversation.
Not to get into a religious argument, but one could argue that at least certain styles of religion are about (ab)using the intelligence of humans to fool them into believing that they are having conversations with one or another deity when they're actually just hearing what they want to hear.
@DavidSalo A valid point if somewhat cynical.
There is another aspect which I think is perhaps a little kinder in that religion allows people with like minds to gather and support each other.
Fear is the mind-killer; the slayer of logic and some people require the latticework of religion. Religion is literally what people want it to be: in the 1960’s MLK used it as a movement to enact change. It has power to engender enormous good.