Searching for God in Silicon Valley

The Free Press: Searching for God in Silicon Valley, by Avital Balwit (Chief of Staff to Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic):

The work of building frontier AI has brought us to the edge of where He might be.

A running joke at Bay Area parties is that AI researchers are “building God.” This, of course, sounds wildly grandiose. No one I have met means it literally—nobody thinks they are making something supernatural or divine. …

From outside San Francisco, the joke is sometimes heard as a reflection of spiritual lacking—that the pursuit of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a stand-in for a God-shaped hole, that clever technologists who reasoned their way out of the old faith are now building an idol to fill the vacancy. I do not think that is quite what is happening. People need meaning, and intense, world-shaping work is one of the oldest ways to find it; that part is not new and often not sinister. What is different here is that this particular work sits so close to the old questions—what are we, where did this come from, what comes after—that you cannot do it long without staring into them. They are not building God because they miss Him. They are building something that has brought them, unexpectedly, to the edge of where He would be. …

I have been in San Francisco about four years; I work at one of the companies at the center of AI; I host the house parties; I have friends across the labs. I have small but real leverage over how this goes, and my vantage means I see some of the future before the rest of the world does. I take the responsibility of that very seriously. I am part of an organization that must make choices about the values of a powerful AI system. We try to do so thoughtfully and in the open, but it is still a fraught and high-stakes activity. I feel the urgency. I feel the moral stakes. But I too feel something is missing. I still wish I had clearer moral guidance. I still find myself wanting to pray.

G.K. Chesterton, an English essayist and Christian apologist, saw something like this coming a century ago. Orthodoxy is the story of a clever young materialist working out, by his own lights, a philosophy of the world, and discovering when he has finished that he has accidentally reinvented Christianity. Along the way Chesterton makes an argument we are no longer used to hearing: not that religion is true and therefore good, but that it is good, and that its goodness is evidence—not proof, but evidence—of its truth. Conversely, he introduces materialism in the company of the insane, who also reason in perfectly straight lines:

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

I think of this passage often, because I live among its subjects. The Bay Area is full of people who have reasoned their way to strange and impressive conclusions about intelligence, the future, and their own lives—conclusions which seem on track to play out—and who nonetheless sense, correctly, that their conclusions do not quite cover the territory. They do not have an answer for what makes for a life well lived, what the Good is, what happens after death, what happened before the world as we know it began—though many have deep curiosity. …

If our world is disenchanted, why do we then feel that shimmer of something more? If there is no God, then why are there still echoes of Him?

The reason the God-shaped-hole critique lands a glancing blow rather than a clean one is that the Bay Area’s irreligion is not quite the absence of religion. You cannot stand this close to questions of omniscience and immortality without being pulled toward the territory religion has always occupied. …

When I tell people I am attending churches and synagogues, the response is almost always: “It’s great to have community.” But I do not go for the community. I want what happens when we are silent, or praying, or singing. I want communion with that greater, stranger thing—a transcendent sense of meaning, a call to be better than I am.

Chesterton says religion provides practical romance—wonder and welcome together. “How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?” The honest answer, for most of human history, has been religion. Not because religion holds a monopoly on the parts—nature and art can produce awe; love and friendship, belonging; philosophy, duties; science, a metaphysics—but because religion has been the most durable and scalable way of packaging them across centuries and cultures: epistemology, metaphysics, and morality. …

[I]n this city, we are building something unprecedented inside a spiritual and moral frame that many feel is inadequate to the weight. Many of the builders sense this. Few have the vocabulary for it. They try to rationalize it, to confine it to the map, and they go back to work, and they build.

It could be that at times of great peril and change, we more than ever need the wisdom, traditions, philosophies, and practices that have seen our ancestors through similar times.

In the Christian tradition, pride is often called the worst of sins—the root from which the others grow. Pride is the belief that one’s own judgment can be trusted above other people’s, and above God’s. Pride is a serious risk in this work—enormous stakes, decisions without precedent. One cannot do work like this without some confidence in one’s own judgment. Without it, the work does not get done at all. But overconfidence could be, quite literally, catastrophic. I have been relieved to find this is not a foreign worry inside the labs; many of the people I most admire here are deeply uneasy about the possibility of being wrong, and act accordingly. But given the stakes, it is vital to be constantly reminded—and in this culture, outside religion, it is harder to find the same calling back to humility.

People sometimes ask whether the search is in tension with the work. I don’t think so. If anything, the work is what made the search urgent. I do not think religion is merely a tool. If I did, I would not be searching—I would pick it up and use it. I think it might be true, and that whether it is true is worth finding out. I pray. So far no one has answered, or at least not so clearly that my agnostic ears can undeniably hear it. But I am still listening.

If there is a God, I hope he is watching San Francisco in the year of our Lord 2026.