Machine Learning Religion?

Coming to a global village near you. Soon. Probably.

I put a question mark at the end of the title to this Substack piece, just to soften it up a bit.

Machine learning religion?

Creepy, right?

So let’s start at sort of a beginning.

Man is a story-telling social animal, and as such, he and she tell lots of stories about religion.

But here we go, illustrating once again how imprecise and wobbly language is, so I suppose I ought to attempt to define religion.

Wikipedia says “a controversial and complicated subject in religious studies with scholars failing to agree on any one definition.”

Okay.

The Latin word ligare means to tie, and the prefix re- means again, so the Latin origin of the word implies something that ties us social animals together again.

But of course, we are used to reading and speaking about all kinds of religions, such as the “World’s Great” category; through what we call cults in English, implying “not so great;” to the adverb “religiously” which can be used to describe a behavior that has nothing to do with the World’s Great Religions, or any cult, or anything else religious for that matter.

But religions do in fact tie us together, and few would argue with that, even if they disagree with any specific definition of a religion.

Now, you know that I love to refer back to the French Revolution, so let me do that right now:

One of the goals of the revolutionaries was to fight the power of the First Estate, the clergy, which in France meant the Catholic Church. Attempts were made to create brand new religions to replace Catholicism, especially the Cult of Reason (Hébert) and the Cult of the Supreme Being (Robespierre). In French the word culte implies worship, not as demeaning as the way the word cult is generally used in English.

Right off the bat the revolutionaries disagreed about the proper culte to replace the Catholic Church, and whether reason was enough or whether there had to be a supreme being too.

And that disagreement brings us right up to the day I am writing this on the terrace of Philz coffee: if the world is now ruled by Big Tech, what is the latest World’s Great Religion?

Remember, this is a global village, and it’s not enough for any one of the Old Normal religions to claim world supremacy. That just won’t work any more.

And so it’s been widely proclaimed over the past few years that the new World’s Great Religion has something to do with Woke, sometimes called the Church of Woke.

There is ample evidence to suggest, if not to actually prove beyond doubt, that Big Tech is promoting the Church of Woke. But what does that mean?

Or to rephrase the question, what is the theology of the Church of Woke?

Theology comes from Greek for god and word(s) but does the Church of Woke worship a particular god?

Well, no, but yes. Not a capital-G God as worshiped by Christians and Jews, but some entity to take seriously enough to justify fighting against blasphemy.

And what is blasphemy in the Church of Woke? Racism, in all of its various meanings, to which diversity is proposed as counter-measure.

I could go on to detail DEI and ESG and Environmental Justice as components of Wokeness, but others have done a much better job than I have either making the case for Wokeness or criticizing the cases as made.

Therefore I will move on to the title topic of this Substack piece, machine learning religion, and this time I left off the question mark.

If there is any truth to the allegation that Big Tech is promoting a Cult of Wokeness, then a few questions are implied:

1. Will Big Tech promote Wokeness indefinitely?

2. Will Big Tech end up creating a new, more explicit world (Global Village) religion to replace Wokeness? [To these two questions I hereby add a third:]

3. Will Big Tech make use of its most powerful technologies, including machine learning, to promote its new, explicit global village religion?

My answers (on the day I am writing this) to these questions are

1. No, Big Tech will move on from “Wokeness.”

2. Yes, Big Tech will create and back a new World’s Great Religion (at least one: read on) and

3. Yes, Big Tech will rely heavily on machine learning to create and promote a religion that its research will try to make universal and permanent.

But, here’s the kicker:

Just as the French Revolutionaries were never able to agree on a replacement for the Catholic Church (the Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox clergy have done much better in that regard), whatever Big Tech comes up with as their own version of the Universal Church of Bigness and Techness, an alternative, probably several or many, will immediately arise, resulting in Big Tech Orthodoxy, Big Tech Catholicism, Big Tech Protestantism, and maybe Big Tech A-Pox-On-All-Your-Houses-Ism.

And that’s without blockchain encryption, or whatever the newest versions of the new technology will be called.

The existence of rapidly developing encryption technology making the software off limits to software pirates, pillagers, and pontiffs, pretty much guarantees that we will not only have one Great World Big Tech Religion generated at least in part by machine learning, we will have many such religions.

Does that mean the end of the Protestant churches, Orthodox Judaism, Reform Judaism, Salafi Islam, Shia Islam, Sunni Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Theravada Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints? (I could go on with more names, but you get the idea.)

I will answer that question with a well-known Internet acronym:

ROTFLMAO.