Perhaps, in the near future, believers can join the new church that worshiped artificial God.

"The Path of the Future"

In 2015, the former Google engineer and Uber Anthony Levandowski filed documents for the creation of a non-commercial religious organization "Path of the Future" dedicated to the worship of artificial intelligence.

The mission of the church, according to the backchannel, where this news first appeared, is to "develop and promote a deity based on artificial intelligence, and through understanding and worship to help improve society."

It is known that Levandowski is the general director and the President of the Future path. Presumably, in the organization there is no vacancy of the high priest.

The author and scientist-religious officer Candy Cannes, who teaching a comparative religion at the University of Bailora, says that the Spiritual Initiative of Levandowski is not strange from a historical point of view.

"It seems to me that the idea of \u200b\u200bLewandowski looks like a typical American religion, said Cannes. - Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) and Scientology are clearly American traditions that focus on very promising thinking religious views. Mormons are discussing other planets and extraterrestrial life, and Scientology pays special attention to therapy and psychological worldview, which is rather modern and promising thinking. "

According to Cannes, the concept of worship of artificial intelligence even has a certain resonance with one of the main world religions.

"From the point of view of comparative religion, I believe that it is more like a Hinduism, in which there are avatars of the deities found on Earth, she said. - Thus, artificial intelligence can be reflected best peoplewhich will begin to worship. "

Theft of patents

Lewandowski is accused of stealing patents when he worked as an engineer in Google, and to use them to create a private unmanned car, which was later acquired by Uber for 680 million dollars. Uber deny information about the intended stealing or about the use of Google technology to create your own car. Waymo creators, an unmanned car company Google, filed a lawsuit against Lewandowski in February. Uber fired him in May, stating that he is legally not associated with it.

Danger warnings

Levandovsky's attempt to create a church that worships AI occurred against the background of the apocalyptic warnings from the world of science and technology, such as Elon Mask and Stephen Hawking, about danger artificial Intelligence. Elon Mask, for example, a few years ago, he stated that he invests significant funds into artificial intelligence in many respects to follow its development, since it can become a potential threat to humanity.

"With the help of artificial intelligence, we call on a demon," said the founder of Tesla and Spacex. - In all those stories where there is a guy with a pentagram and holy water ... It seems that he is sure that he can control the demon. But it does not work. "

Motivation Levandowski

Former friend and colleague, Levandowski, quoted by BackChannel, gives us some idea of \u200b\u200bthe views of the potential leader of the Church of the Future on robots and artificial intelligence.

"He had this very strange motivation against robots who won the world, as if they would have to do this in a military sense," says an unknown engineer and a former friend of Lewandowski. "Looks like he wanted to be able to control the world, and AI can do it."

But, as Cannes notes, it is important to remember that any assumptions about Lewandov's motivation are based only on one document.

"For me, it looks more like a new paradigm, from which new religious practices may appear, said Cannes. "It's not too similar to religion, as well as a religious worldview."

Intellect - "The ability to argue, plan, solve problems, think abstract, understand complex ideas, quickly learn and remove lessons from experience" (quotes, see).

Probably, the first study of the connection of intelligence and religiosity was held in 1928, at the University of Iowa, USA. Scientists were measured both IQ and religiosity, and found that the higher the coefficient of intelligence, the less religiosity. Since then, many other experiments have been done, and recently a group of psychologists (Zuckerman, Silberman, & Hall, 2013) selected 63 such studies for conducting meta-analysis. The methods of assessing the intellect in these studies were the most diverse: both IQ, and secondary school ratings, and the results of entrance exams in higher education institutions, tests of cognitive abilities (working memory, verbal flexibility, etc.)

Analysis showed statistically significant negative Association between intelligence and religiosity. The association turned out to be the strongest for students and the public at all, and at least for adolescents, but even for them it turned out to be different from zero.
Simply put, the higher the intellect, the less religiosity, but it should be noted that this is a correlation, and not a causal relationship.

Why can it happen?

1. Atheists are not a conformist. People with intelligence are less prone to blind conformism, and is able to resist religious dogmatism. It should be noted that atheists becomes quite a conformist in societies with low religious activity.

2. People with intelligence are prone to an analytic warehouse of thinking, which is little compatible with religious beliefs. Such thinking is characterized by systematic, awareness, slow speed and is based on the rules. For religion, intuitive thinking is more suitable - reflective, fast, spontaneous and, in general, unconscious.

3. Religion performs certain functions that satisfy believers. For example, the compensation of control is a belief in the external source of control, in ordering, non-sufficiency and predictability of the world. Some studies have shown that the decline in personal control increases religiosity.
Another religion function is affection. Experiments have shown that when people are scared with loneliness, their religiousness is growing (Epley, Akalis, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2008). The construction of personal and close ties with God helps a person not to feel lonely. What is interesting, but intelligence makes a person less lonely without any gods! There is evidence that the higher the intellect, the higher the probability family life (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994).
Thus, a person with high intelligence does not need religion functions, finding them in his life without the help of gods.

Since the meta-analysis showed only the association between intelligence and religiosity, there are attempts to find exactly a causal relationship. So, one sounds like this (Sherkat, 2010): The commitment of religion since childhood, as a rule, carries a refusal or limitation of secular knowledge. This in turn leads to a decrease in interest in knowledge, which is expressed in measurable values, for example, a decrease in verbal abilities. The confirmation of this was found from the fundamentalists of the Christian sense, so it would be wrong to disseminate an explanation for other religions.

Epley, N., Akalis, S., Waytz, A., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2008). Creating Social Connection Through Inferential Reproduction: Loneliness and Perceived Agency In Gadgets, Gods, And Greyhounds. Psychological Science., 19, 114-120. DOI: 10.1111 / J.1467-9280.2008.02056.X.

Herrnstein, R. J., & Murray, C. (1994). The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York, NY: FREE PRESS.

American experts from the University of Rochester in New York and the Northeastern University in Boston presented the results of a metashestation made on a material of 63 separate comparisons intellectual abilities With religious level. Conclusions of scientists who are published by the magazine Personality and Social Psychology Review, I say that there is a negative correlation with the -0.24 ratio between religiosity and intelligence and the 95 percent confidence interval from -0.20 to -0.25.

These findings based on the comparison of 63 separate publications (open, but not such a complete overview of previous works on the topic is in the English Wikipedia), it is suggested that the probability of meeting a smarter person among atheists is higher than among believers, and the belonging to one or other confession is not so important as the degree of religiosity. Religiousness The majority of analyzed research work determines in such formal criteria as consent to the dogmas adopted by one or another religion, participation in the life of religious communities and the frequency of visits to temples.

To measure the intellect, part of the authors used standardized tests (both the well-known test of the ventilation, and some others), and some of the scientists suggested that the intellect is quite well consistent with the general level of education. In other words, a person with a degree of doctor of philosophy is most likely smarter who completed his education at high school. Tests and levels of education are not always definitely determined by intelligence, but all the analyzed work was operated on in large amounts of cases, so exceptional examples did not make a large contribution to the final statistics.

Data covered the period from 1928 to 2012. The authors of 53 work from 63rd came to the conclusion that religiosity correlates with a decrease in intellect, but the value of this correlation was obtained differently; American psychologists decided to find out what is obtained when systematizing all available information. They also appealed to the long-term surveillance program for gifted children in 1921: as scientists then interested in the connection psychological characteristics With long-term life success, observation continues and for those who lived to the present day.

Comparing the results obtained by different psychologists and sociologists, the researchers calculated the correlation coefficient of intelligence and religiosity. The correlation coefficient expresses how (and in which direction) the change in one value is reflected on the other; An example of correlating values \u200b\u200bmay be the cost of housing and the distance from the city center. Coefficient, equal unit, denotes a completely clear dependence and the growth of one value in response to the growth of the other, and the correlation coefficient -1 means that one of the values \u200b\u200bdecreases with an increase in the other. If the correlation coefficient equal to zero.Any value can be changed arbitrarily without any change in the other, and intermediate cases correspond to cases when it is possible to argue about the effect only in terms of probability.

Scientists have demonstrated that the intelligence back correlates with religiosity with the coefficient from -0.20 to -0.25, and the most likely value is -0.24. This means that among a fairly large group of atheists there will be more people with good results IQ tests and higher education than among the same group of adepts of one or another religion, and the magnitude of the effect grows when moving from formally believers to those who have a central place in life.

Since the correlation itself does not speak anything about causal relationships (for example, the color of the day on the calendar correlates well with the passenger traffic in the subway, however repainting all calendars in the red color of the metro will not help), the researchers offered three different hypotheses that can explain the found pattern . And they all do not exclude each other, that is, the pattern can be due to several reasons at once.

As the first explanation, the fact that smart people have a smaller tendency to a conformism and therefore the religious dogmas are with a smaller probability. By itself, the causal intelligence relationship with conformism, of course, requires a separate study.

In addition, scientists associate intelligence with an analytical style of thinking, which, according to them, is poorly consistent with religiosity (which is also with past research). And finally, smart people are usually more achieving in life and due to this find ways to organize their lives and without the help of religion.

The latter conclusion is well agreed with sociological studies, which showed the negative correlation of the religiosity of society with the well-being of its members, as well as with social equality. It is also known to psychologists that religiosity is part of the average above in people who survived or.