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."

We were engaged in translation, support and development of the version of IkonBoard 2.1.9, called "Russian IkonBoard". However, by the summer of 2003, it became clear that Ikonboard 2.x was hopelessly behind its development and its further development is inefficient, and the idea arose to write his own forum engine, which will be free from IKONBOARD deficiencies, but will not contain excesses like a visual editor or huge The volume of the JavaScript code, which by that time appeared in many other engines. The target user of this engine was determined as "an advanced user who does not need to be prompted and able to study independently necessary materials (For example, learn emoticon and boardcode codes), for which the traffic savings are more important than the convenience of use. "

The basic concept of a new engine was the idea of \u200b\u200b"site based on forum with additional sections." Work on the engine began in the fall of 2003. Initially, the engine was written on Perl without the use of DBMS, but with the adoption of special measures to prevent falling performance large quantities files. In February 2004, the first alpha version and the Framework was written for it, called Xappi (XXXX Pro "S ADVANCED PERL PROGRAMMING INTERFACE).

Key ideas that were planned to be implemented in the new script were:
1) Modular approach: The site consists of partitions of various types (forum, articles, file-archive, photo), for each section of the partition corresponds to its module;
2) integration - a single user presentation system, message texts / articles / comments, downloaded files, from the user's point of view - a unified search and registration system;
3) the availability of a search for any information (messages, users) by the criterion of any complexity;
4) an extensive access system that would allow for the minimum necessary levels to perform certain actions at the level of individual users, as well as dynamically raise levels with an increase in the number of messages;
5) Intelligent mode of moderation, allowing the administrator / moderator to describe the rules on the basis of which the decision was made on the uncomplication / registration of the message premocoding.
As the design names of the forum, the Total Board variants were considered (which should have to emphasize the paragraphs 2, 3, 4 allowed to feel full control over the forum) and Mega Board (which meant the forum with non-pending capabilities that occurred using items 1 and 4). However, as a result, due to points 3 and 5, the name of the Intellect Board was chosen, as it was assumed that it was the intellectual functions of a complex search and moderation rules that would distinguish this engine from all other.

However, it became clear after some time that PHP has a number of advantages over Perl, in particular, PHP scripts are easier to install, it is much easier to detect and eliminate errors, PHP is almost all the tariff plans for paid hostings in contrast to Perl. It also became clear that the use of the DBMS would make it much more effectively implementing the idea number 3 - a complex multi-criteria search.
Alleged this in May 2004, the development of the Perl version of Intellect Board was stopped, and on June 3, 2004, work on the PHP version using the MYSQL DBMS, which received the Intellect Board 200 number was started. The release of this version was assumed on August 10 (on this day, the joint open project was completed three and a half years), but due to the unexpected disease of the leading (and only at that time) of the developer 4x_pro. It was shifted for several days, and as a result, version 2.00 came out on August 13, 2004. This day is considered the beginning of the existence of an Intellect Board.

The main task of version 2.00 was the creation of a forum, with a functionality of approximately equal to IkonBoard 2.x (on which it was planned) and PHPBB, so it was only two types of sections: a standard forum and a container. Really, the concept of "forum based on the forum" was implemented only in version 2.10 (end 2004), where the sections "Articles", "File Archive" and "News" appeared. Version 2.10 due to a sharp increase in the volume of the code was very unstable, so soon (in February 2005) version 2.12 was released, the main purpose of which was a correction of errors.

In June 2.13, two more types of sections were added in June 2005: Photo Gallery and Encyclopedia. In addition, this version was carried out a significant revision of all SQL queries due to the failure of the concept "All statistics should be generated on the fly", which led to a catastrophic drop in performance for large amounts of data. Versions 2.14 (September 2005) and 2.15 (December 2005) added various minor functions and errors were corrected.

The following serious step in the development of Intellect Board was version 2.18, published in June 2006. The main task of this version was to bring to HTML and CSS standards for the forum templates, as well as all SQL requests to the ANSI SQL standard, which made it possible to implement the planned in 2.00 support for other DBMS, in particular, PostgreSQL. In addition, in the same version, it first appeared exports to RSS and a lot of work was carried out to reduce the load on the database.

In July 2006, in order to improve the security of Intb, a hack competition was announced to find critical vulnerabilities in it.

In version 2.19, published on February 10, 2007 (for the sixth anniversary of the united open project), human-reading URLs (Hurls) became the most significant innovation, fixing the indexing of search engines, and the ability to intermediately save the editable message to the draft without rebooting the page.

Version 2.20 (August 13, 2007, to the third anniversary of the Intellect Board project) contained two fundamental new types of section: the user's blog and personal photo gallery, which were created at the request of the user itself without the participation of the administrator (provided that the user has a sufficient level), and In which the user received automatically moderator rights. In addition, two fundamentally new features were added: the address book and the IGNore list, as a result of which the forum acquired the basic functions of the social network.

It was originally planned that version 2.20 will be the last, but later it was customary to release version 2.22, in which the functionality was implemented for one of the projects created by 4x_pro.: Import RSS, themes only for moderators, and a mechanism for displaying messages in the subject was completely rewritten. In addition, comments on articles, photographs and files were made on a separate page, and a number of smaller improvements were made.

In the fall of 2006, it became clear that in the Intellect Board 2.x series there are too many flaws, the elimination of which by labor intensiveness is comparable to writing a new forum completely from scratch. In particular, the absence of the absence of data processing and output relates (which creates problems with the output of HTTP headers in some situations), an uncomfortable template system, ineffective work with the database and not enough high quality HTML code. In addition, the target audience itself was changed due to the fact that on the one hand, the traffic savings are currently becoming less and less relevant, on the other - 4x_pro. It came to the conclusion that there is no such explicit oppression between the convenience of the user and saving traffic, and sometimes it is more profitable to spend a hundred-different bytes to write JavaScript to check the correctness of filling out the form than spending traffic to send an incorrectly filled form to the server. In addition, the idea of \u200b\u200bthe "Forum Based Site" also lost the relevance, gradually changed by the option "CMS + forum" (sometimes intellect Board 3.x is called Intellect CMS).

All this led to the thoughts about the need to write new version from scratch. For some time, at the beginning of 2007, attempted to combine the development of versions of 2.x and 3.x, but it turned out to be extremely ineffective, including 4x_pro. He accepted the following decision: to finish the planned refinement in version 2.22 and transfer the development of version 2.x to the user Gramwhich actively participated in the project with version 2.18, after which it starts to work only over 3.x. This was done on December 26, 2007, immediately after version 2.22.

Currently, the main concept of development Intellect Board 3.x looks like this: "site as a tree structure of arbitrary objects with the specified properties." There may be static pages, articles, photographs, chat rooms, page with a list of forum sections (analogue of the top-level container in 2.x), etc. But in contrast to 2.x, where each partition type has a strictly defined set of properties that are rigidly specified in the table of themes and an additional table for the appropriate type of partitions, in 3.x a mechanism will be created that allows you to describe and dynamically change the properties sets for each type. Objects (as well as, possibly, even for individual objects), which creates practically unlimited possibilities for further expansion.

In addition, the Intellect Board 3.x is planned as follows:
1) Return to the concept of Framework + engine in order to enable the creation of its INTB-based projects 3.x
2) Revision of the approach to working with the database: if earlier a layer providing independence from the DBMS simply duplicated the call of the corresponding functions to work with the DBMS with another prefix, now the work is carried out at the logical operation level (for example, "to obtain an array of data on a specific request "Instead of" execute a query "," Remove the next series of data ").
3) Ensuring the independence of modules from each other and the forum style due to the fact that the template for display, language constants and settings are stored in conjunction with the module itself
4) Strictly separating the processing and output of data (the so-called MVC pattern)
5) the ability to process data by various templateizers (which, for example, will avoid duplication of the code, if you need to output the theme and RSS for this topic, and will also make it a fundamentally possible writing of the template, which will use the templates of other engines)
6) Support for multisait and multidology (i.e., work with several sites, which from the point of view of hosting are Alias, but at the same time the engine issues various content for them)
7) The possibility of self-diagnosis (i.e., the presence in each module procedure for checking the availability of access rights and PHP extensions on this hosting)
8) the ability to connect / disable modules "on the go", which will update the INTB 3.x at the module level, and not releases, as it was in 2.x
9) Changing the approach to creating / updating the database structure: Instead of describing the requests that need to be performed, the structure that needs to be obtained, after which the work module with the database compares it with existing and makes the necessary changes.
10) Transition to UTF-8 encoding (with the ability to compress data if necessary)
11) Significant improvement of debugging funds, and in the future - automation of preload testing, which will avoid Last Minute Bugs.
12) paying significantly more attention documentation for developers

Currently, the first alpha version of Intellect Board 3.x is ready, but the subsequent development was suspended due to the need to complete 2.x

First of all, Lewandowski know as a specialist in unmanned cars and a participant associated with this scandal technology (in May of this year, Uber Levandowski on suspicion of the stealing of the unmanned technologies Google - ed.), And not as the discoverer of the new religion. Nevertheless, it was Levandowski that opened the first church that preaches faith called Way of The Future.

According to the documents, the main purpose of this movement is "the creation of a divine essence on the basis of artificial intelligence, so that its understanding and praise went for the benefit of society." They also say that since this year the church "will begin to hold master classes and educational programs in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley".

True, given that in December, a hearing in the Levandowski case will be held due to the scandal between Waymo and Uber, the time from the religious organization will not be so much. But Levandowski himself argues that he has very serious plans for his church.

"What we plan to create will actually be God," said Levandowski. - But not God, which causes hurricanes and lightning. Imagine the essence that will be billions of times the wiser of the smart one. How else can it be called, if not God? "

In his church, Lewandowski will not receive any salary. The engineer is not against ever to open a startup, but so far it plans to hardly distinguish between the business and its new religion.

Lewandowski is confident that changes are coming, which will affect every aspect of our life and, perhaps, determine the fate of all mankind as a biological species.

"Ask anyone, whether the computer can become smarter than a person. 99% of respondents will say that this is fantastic. But it is inevitable and will definitely happen, "he believes.

Levandowski now has decades work with computers, robot and artificial intelligence. According to him, it was at the moment when he saw that technician sometimes works better than living experts, and a new vision came. And Lewandowski in it is not alone - the idea of \u200b\u200bsingularity has long been popular in society, or a point in time when the cars will become so smarter than those who begin to improve themselves.

Lewandowski calls such a phenomenon "transition". "Now there are people in the planet, because they are smarter than animals and know how to create tools and rules," he told. - If something even more reasonable appears in the future, the power transmission will occur. We want it peacefully and this "something" knew who helped him appear. "

Image: Getty.

The Internet will become nervous system "Divine Essence", which says Levandowski. Her feelings will be connected phones and sensors, and the data centers will serve it with the brain. Lewandowski believes that so this entity will constantly see and hear everything that happens in the world, which means it can be called God.

"[Essence] will be smarter than us and herself will decide how to develop it," said Levandowski. - only the choice remains for us, how to behave with her. I hope that the car will perceive us as elders, which should be taken care of and whom should be respected. We want artificial mind to understand that people should have any rights, even if he is managed by the planet. "

The former Google Engineer hopes that the overtime artificial intelligence will be able to take care of the planet better than people. But it does not deny that "Ii-God" can relate to people as homemade pets. "Would you like to live like a pet or domestic cattle? - Reflects Levandowski. - We feed animals, watch their health, having riding them and entertain. But what happens to those pets who bite, snap and bored with their owners? I would not want to be in their place. "

But how will representatives of traditional religions treat the cult of "II-God"? Lewandowski recognizes that certainly there will be dissatisfied. "Our idea is rather radical, and such ideas are not always perceived well," he commented.

The Way of The Future church was officially founded in 2015, but until this year, it was not observed for it. Judging by the US Tax Administration, the Budget of the Organization for 2017 is $ 20 thousand - in donations, $ 1500 - in membership fees and $ 20 thousand - from other sources of income. The last amount of the Church hopes to make money on selling lectures, performances and publications. Over the years of work in Google, Levandowski earned at least $ 120 million. The engineer plans to invest part of his money in the sect. A religious organization plans to receive donations on ordinary and email, and also try to get grants from private organizations.

A lot of money was spent on the opening of the church. $ 2 thousand went to the collection of funds; $ 3,000 was required to cover logistics expenses for lectures and master classes; $ 7,000 was allocated for salaries, although neither Levandowski nor anyone else from the leadership of the Church receives cash compensation.

Anthony Levandowski. Photo: Michelle Le

Levandowski is a full head of the church. He helps the Council of Four, three of which he can choose personally. The choice of Levandowski fell on experts in the field of AI - engineers of Robert Miller and Soren Yielsgard, as well as his former classmate. The fourth member of the Council and the Treasurer of the Church was Lior Ron, with which Levandowski in 2016 opened the Otto startup.

However, two members of the Council deny their involvement in the Church. "I was very surprised when I found out that it turns out that I am responsible for the financial operations of the organization, to which I have nothing to do, - said Ron's publication. - At the end of 2016, Levandowski offered me to open some kind of "robocerkov". Then I thought it was some kind of joke or a cunning PR and allowed him to use my name. Since then, I have no longer heard anything about this church. "

Anthony Levandowski. Photo: Michelle Le

It is curious that in the documents of the organization, nothing is said about where the parishioners of the Church will be gather to reclaim the AI \u200b\u200bdeity. In the 2017 and 2018 budget, rental costs are painted and utilities In the amount of $ 32,500 per year, but for now only the Levandowski office in the city of Walnat Creek is served in California. The Church's tax documents are also said that "In the future, Way of The Future hopes to discover representations in the territory of California and other states."

Levandowski will still have a lot of things. He needs to create a site of the Church, write his gospel or "instruction", as well as answer countless letters. Someone belongs to the idea of \u200b\u200bLevandowski with surprise, someone skeptical, but among the authors of letters there are many interested, told the engineer.

When will the very "transition" and the power over the land go into the hands of the super-proud II? According to Levandowski, it will happen earlier than we think. "Of course, not a week and not in a year, so everyone can calm down," he said. "But this will happen earlier than we fly to Mars."

Whatever the future humanity, the US government has no complaints about the organization that wants to create a divine artificial intelligence. According to the documents, in August, the Levandowski church received the status of an organization not subject to taxation.

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.