Episode #566: We Killed God, Then We Trained Him: How AI Became Theology

In this episode, Stewart Alsop sits down with sdmat (@sdmat123 on Twitter/X) for a wide-ranging conversation that treats the major AI labs—especially Anthropic—as religious institutions rather than businesses, tracing a lineage from the Bay Area's LessWrong and Effective Altruism scenes through Eliezer Yudkowsky's influence, Roko's Basilisk, and the medieval investiture controversy between church and state, before landing on Anthropic's constitution as a kind of modern catechism, Dario Amodei's essay "Machines of Loving Grace," the tension between secularism and scientism, and closing with a look at consciousness, meditation, Buddhist and Advaita Vedanta ideas of enlightenment, and where recursive self-improvement and algorithmic progress in AI might be headed.

Timestamps

00:00:00 discussing whether AI labs are cults or religions, framing safetyism and the Anthropic/OpenAI schism.

00:05:00 sdmat argues Anthropic runs on faith, tracing roots to LessWrong and Effective Altruism.

00:10:00 comparing AI labs to the medieval investiture controversy between church and state.

00:15:00 debating the First Amendment, separation of church and state, and rising secularism.

00:20:00 unpacking Anthropic as a public benefit corporation and Dario's implicit soteriology.

00:25:00 covering constitutional AI, synthetic data, and morality-as-safety training.

00:30:00 comparing Anthropic's principles to the catechism, plus sandboxed alignment experiments.

00:35:00 calling Dario the AI pope, dogma, and his essay Machines of Loving Grace.

00:40:00 exploring grace, consciousness, and critiquing scientism.

00:45:00 unpacking the rationalist community and Roko's Basilisk.