Podcastskeyboard_arrow_rightSDS 845: Tech is Our New Religion And It Needs Reformation, with Greg Epstein

94 minutes

Life PhilosophyArtificial Intelligence

SDS 845: Tech is Our New Religion And It Needs Reformation, with Greg Epstein

Podcast Guest: Greg Epstein

Tuesday Dec 17, 2024

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Discover how technology has become the modern belief system shaping our world. Greg Epstein, author of Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation, draws striking parallels between tech culture and traditional faiths. From AI's "singularity" echoing prophetic narratives to Silicon Valley’s promises of salvation through innovation, Greg uncovers the profound influence of technology on our lives. He challenges us to rethink blind faith in progress, focus on genuine human connection, and navigate a future where ethics and empathy guide innovation. 


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About Greg
Greg M. Epstein serves as Humanist Chaplain at Harvard & MIT, where he advises students, faculty, and staff members on ethical and existential concerns from a humanist perspective. He was TechCrunch's first “ethicist in residence” and has been called “a symbol of the transition in how Americans relate to organized religion” (The Conversation). He is the author of the New York Times-bestselling book Good Without God and has also written for MIT Technology Review, CNN.com, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and Newsweek.

Overview
Greg Epstein explores how technology has transformed into a belief system, with movements like transhumanism and effective altruism offering promises of transcendence akin to religious ideologies. The episode highlights the unsettling parallels between AI's “singularity” and religious end-of-times prophecies, raising questions about our growing dependence on technology.

Greg argues for a “tech agnostic” approach—viewing technology as a tool rather than an end in itself. While technological progress is essential, it’s crucial to maintain our humanity and focus on meaningful human connections instead of chasing unattainable utopias.

The conversation also critiques the hierarchical, dogmatic structures within tech culture, advocating for a reformation that centers on ethical responsibility and collaboration. By doing so, we can ensure that technology serves humanity, not the other way around.

Finally, Greg emphasizes the importance of working within established civic and cultural organizations to build connections and communities, instead of creating isolated, tech-driven spaces. The episode calls for a balanced approach to technology—one that integrates progress with purpose and ethics.

In this episode you will learn:
  • (08:30) How can someone cultivate connection without religion?
  • (15:49) Social media as a new form of community
  • (17:00) Tech's transformation into a religion
  • (56:08) How to set boundaries with tech
  • (01:01:32) The singularity as a religious narrative
  • (01:19:53) Transhumanism and effective altruism as tech cults
  • (01:15:00) Defining tech agnosticism
  • (01:26:55) Prioritizing human connection in a tech-driven world 

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Jon Krohn: 00:00:00
This is episode number 845 with Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT.

00:00:12
Welcome to the SuperDataScience Podcast, the most listened to podcast in the data science industry. Each week, we bring you fun and inspiring people and ideas exploring the cutting-edge of machine learning, AI, and related technologies that are transforming our world for the better. I'm your host, Jon Krohn. Thanks for joining me today. And now, let's make the complex simple.

00:00:45
Welcome back, people, to the SuperDataScience Podcast. Buckle your seats for a fantastic episode with the entertaining and fascinating Greg Epstein. Greg serves as humanist chaplain at both Harvard University and MIT. He also wrote the bestselling book Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious Do Believe. His latest book, released just a few weeks ago, is Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation.

00:01:16
I will personally ship five physical copies of Greg Epstein's Tech Agnostic to people to comment or re-share the LinkedIn post that I publish about Greg's episode from my personal LinkedIn account today. Simply mention in your comment or re-share that you'd like the book. I'll hold a draw to select the five book winners next week, so you have until Sunday, December 22nd to get involved with this book contest.

00:01:39
Today's episode focuses largely on Greg's latest book, and should be interesting to everyone. In today's episode, Greg details how technology has supplanted traditional religion as society's most powerful belief system. Why Silicon Valley's promise of technological salvation parallels religious prophecies. The concerning parallel between AI's singularity and religious end of times narratives. How we can embrace technological progress while maintaining our humanity. And why building genuine human connections matters more than chasing technological utopias. All right, you ready for this mind-expanding episode? Let's go.

00:02:21
Greg, welcome to the SuperDataScience Podcast. It's so interesting to have you on the episode. I've been excited for a couple of months, since we booked this. Greg, tell me where are you calling in from?

Greg Epstein: 00:02:32
I am at home in Somerville, Massachusetts. The little urban suburb right behind Cambridge, where I work at Harvard and MIT.

Jon Krohn: 00:02:42
Nice, yeah. I actually just watched ... This is a completely random aside that I'll try to move through quickly for the audience's sake. But I just finished watching immediately before this recording a film called The Town by Ben Affleck. It's from 2010.

Greg Epstein: 00:02:57
Yeah, yeah.

Jon Krohn: 00:02:58
It's about bank robbers from Charlestown, Massachusetts.

Greg Epstein: 00:03:01
Yes. The whole Massachusetts thing. I'm a New York City person, that's my origin story, my lifeblood. I'm raising my eight-year-old son as a New Yorker in exile.

Jon Krohn: 00:03:19
Oh, really?

Greg Epstein: 00:03:19
In the biblical sense. I don't often have the greatest commentary on Massachusetts. I root against the Red Sox with a passion. But here I am, for a job.

Jon Krohn: 00:03:32
I guess you're a Yankees fan?

Greg Epstein: 00:03:33
I am, yeah.

Jon Krohn: 00:03:35
There you go. All right. Well, let's dig into the content that the audience came here for. You serve as the humanist chaplain at Harvard University and at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as you mentioned by your location there. I guess those are the kinds of institutions that are worth leaving New York for, if you got to go.

Greg Epstein: 00:04:00
I mean, the way I like to say it is I'm a humanist chaplain, so I'm a nonreligious religious advisor. It's a contradiction in terms, walking contradiction, whatever. I've been doing that work for 20 years. It's a wonderful career. There's always something problematic going on and something interesting happening. But, I like to say that I came here because I found out about humanism after majoring in religious 20-plus years ago, and felt that humanism, the positive ethics for the nonreligious, was the most under-rated, or under-appreciated idea of the 20th Century and I thought, "Well, why not go to Harvard? That's the most over ..." Well, anyway, I'll leave it right there.

Jon Krohn: 00:04:49
Okay. Well, it resonates with me, this idea, because I remember when I started my PhD in England, I wrote an email to the British Humanist Society, I think. I said something like ... I can probably even dig up literally the email, because I just got a Gmail account for the first time. That was 2007, so it was probably one of the first emails I sent with my still-current email account. I sent an email to the British Humanist Society. I said, "Religions have weekly meetings, they have communities like the priesthood, nuns that allow people to have this sense of community."

00:05:37
And as, you know what, I probably never said this on-air, but I'm atheist. Or I don't practice any religion.

Greg Epstein: 00:05:45
Is that going to get this podcast episode censored?

Jon Krohn: 00:05:53
I said, "I grew up in the Catholic Church, and I miss that community." I wrote a message saying, "Is there anything equivalent, where secular people can go and meet?" And talk about, like you're saying, like kind of religious questions but approached non-religiously. So, just, you know "What are we doing here anyway?"

Greg Epstein: 00:06:18
What did they say? Did they write back to you?

Jon Krohn: 00:06:20
They did, and they brushed me off. But I was surprised that they wrote back. It was a really nice-

Greg Epstein: 00:06:23
What year was this?

Jon Krohn: 00:06:25
It was, yeah, 2007 I'm pretty sure.

Greg Epstein: 00:06:27
2007? Well, so two, two-and-a-half years later, I was there on my first book tour for my book Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe, which spends a good 60 pages at the end arguing for exactly what you just described. I was there to visit them for my book tour. We talked all about it. There has been quite a bit more of that activity in the UK since than there had been to that point. You were a little ahead of your time, Jon. Just a little.

Jon Krohn: 00:07:11
Anyways, it's something that, this idea, what you do for a living, I think it serves a great function. You're the person I could imagine if I was at Harvard or MIT and grappling with existential issues, you would be obviously the kind of person to be seeking counsel and guidance from. Cool that you're doing what you're doing.

Greg Epstein: 00:07:34
Well, I mean, thanks. I guess what I would say is that there is a real need for nonreligious people to find meaning and purpose, and connection as well. This is a very isolating and often lonely period in history, particularly in Western wealthy societies. People are feeling very isolated and lonely and it's fun. It's meaningful to me. It's something that I really love to help people think about how to live a more connected, more purposeful life from a completely secular, atheistic, nonreligious perspective.

Jon Krohn: 00:08:32
What can people do if we're not at Harvard or MIT, and we're just out in the world? I mean, our listenership comes from anywhere in the world, really. About half of our listeners are in the US.

Greg Epstein: 00:08:43
Yeah.

Jon Krohn: 00:08:46
If your answer happens to relate to the US in particular, that's fine. But globally even, what can somebody do if they want to feel that connection, if they want to be part of, yeah, something that gives them that connection that you would get if you were part of a religious community, but you don't want to be paying lip service just to get that?

Greg Epstein: 00:09:07
Yeah. So, first of all, this is what you're describing is, on the one hand, kind of a congregational process, right. A congregational setting where people would do the sort of formal equivalent of what religions do in a nonreligious way. And that is pretty much precisely what I worked on for about a decade. But I then stopped working on exactly that and that is the story of how this book, Tech Agnostic, begins actually.

Jon Krohn: 00:09:49
Okay.

Greg Epstein: 00:09:52
Becasue, yeah.

Jon Krohn: 00:09:52
Let me introduce that really quickly then.

Greg Epstein: 00:09:54
Yeah.

Jon Krohn: 00:09:54
The reason why we actually booked you and are talking to you is because you just had a book come out called Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation. All of the prepared research that we have for you is related to your book, but I've ended up going off on this tangent beforehand. But it seems like we've-

Greg Epstein: 00:10:17
I like tangents. I'm a tangential speaker. We just had the walking avatar for tangents elected as our president elect in this country.

Jon Krohn: 00:10:30
Yeah.

Greg Epstein: 00:10:31
I suppose we have to bow before the altar of the tangent. But, anyway.

00:10:41
Yeah, so I was, for a decade, attempting to do this thing that you, Jon, apparently went to your local national humanist association and asked for in 2007. I started working on that issue right around then as well. I was already working on my book Good Without God at the time and after it came out, the book was meant as kind of a positive alternative to books like the God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, and God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens, The End of Faith, Sam Harris, et cetera. I think it did well as that. It helped provoke people to think about positive ways of viewing themselves as atheists or nonreligious people. And it also helped people to think about community and at the end of that process I was thinking, "Okay, essentially Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and people like that, at that point, had come atheist talking heads. Did I want to become a humanist talking head for a living?" I thought, "No, that's not really what's going to be the most fulfilling to me. I'd like to practice what I'm preaching, so to speak, and organize something positive."

00:11:55
I went out and brought a lot of people together, and we together created what became quite a vibrant congregation. It was meeting in Harvard Square. Not just every week, but almost every day because at the time, we were paying more than $100,000 a year just to rent our space in Harvard Square. We hired a brilliant staff. It was quite an adventure. It was popular. People would sometimes be seen lined up out the door, down the stairs, and down the block even to get into the events that we were doing. We had a core of young adults and others that were coming a few times a week. It was a real congregation.

00:12:45
But, at a certain point, and this coincides with the birth of my son, which really shook me up but in a wonderful way where I realized I didn't want to work 80 hours a week anymore as I had been to pull all that together. It just wasn't the way I wanted to live my life as a parent. I wanted to be very present for him. And so, it shook me up there, and I was thinking, "Okay, I love that work but it's not necessarily what I want to spend the rest of my life doing professionally." I was trying to think about what I did want to do.

00:13:20
Honestly, I was in this transition mode, which I now advise people about. When people are in a mode where they don't know what they're going to do with their lives, they have to be doing something at the moment, but they don't really know where they're headed. I've become something of a specialist in helping people to think about that time period, and helping them think that it's a really good thing. It's really constructive. You want to spend some months, maybe even a couple years, in a psychologically neutral zone where you don't know what your life is meant to be all about. I was in that phase.

00:13:59
And at the time, I was invited to join MIT as a chaplain, a humanist chaplain as well. Chaplain for the atheists, and agnostics, and nonreligious folks at MIT. I had been doing that role at Harvard for, 2018, so almost 14 years by that point. Something grabbed me about MIT. It was like, "Oh, wait, MIT. The T in MIT, technology." I realized that what I'd been trying to do essentially was bring people closer together. But that's not my phrasing, I've just used a phrase from Mark Zuckerberg to describe Meta and Facebook. Because we had been living, by 2018, through a decade of transformation in how people thought about their communities.

00:14:51
When you asked the British Humanist Association in 2007 to do community, that was at the very early moments of the social media era, in which we came to think, many of us did, of doing community online with our "friends." I realized, oh, there's been this radical transformation in how most people on a day-to-day level think about connecting with others and it wasn't necessarily good. It wasn't necessarily always healthy. I was at the beginning of 2018, I was just starting to be really critical of some of these technologies. But nonetheless, it had scaled to the point where it was too big to fail.

Jon Krohn: 00:15:49
Sorry. What was too big to fail?

Greg Epstein: 00:15:51
The social media.

Jon Krohn: 00:15:51
Social media.

Greg Epstein: 00:15:52
Social media as community was, at that point-

Jon Krohn: 00:15:55
I see. Yeah.

Greg Epstein: 00:15:55
Too big to fail. Religion, religious congregations were at that point often failing. I was seeing a lot of my colleagues and friends who ran liberal to moderate congregations running on fumes to the point where, if they didn't have a legacy status where they owned their own building and maybe they had for decades, if not centuries. Or they had a large endowment going back decades, if not centuries. Then a lot of those congregations, like mine did ultimately, would have been thinking about shutting down, folding. Because people weren't showing up in the pews nearly as much as they had been in previous generations. A big part of that was that people were seeking out their community, their sense of human connection, in these other very new, very technological ways.

00:16:55
The thought occurred to me, as I was invited to join MIT, which I did, now I'm at both schools. Yeah. That technology has now become the world's most powerful religion.

Jon Krohn: 00:17:13
It's interesting to me because when I think about that email that I wrote in 2007, it wouldn't have seemed to me then, it still wouldn't seem to me now almost 20 years later, that what I was seeking could be done digitally. It's interesting that there's obviously a huge amount of value to some digital things. This is a digital podcast. I get to be able to record in my home for most of these episodes. And tens of thousands of people hear every episode. There's situations where something like this podcast, people can be listening in their cars, or in their homes. I think it can provide some value.

00:18:04
So you know, obviously, I'm a techno optimist. There's lot of tech ways, there's lots of value that I think tech provides. But in terms of community at least, it's interesting how you said that people aren't coming into the pews as much, and instead they're finding community online. But it's interesting to me because, and maybe this is something that we can just dig into in a lot of detail and get your points on right now, get your thoughts on right now. But that digital community doesn't bring the same kind of satisfaction. I'm sure if you could somehow-

Greg Epstein: 00:18:38
No, it doesn't.

Jon Krohn: 00:18:38
Yeah. Biochemically see, how does this relate to oxytocin release, or dopamine release? I mean, it actually probably like a dopamine thing. There is actually, they figured out with these platforms how to get that dopamine hit. Then it creates ... But it has this cheap feeling to it. Yeah, you get that dopamine hit. You want to see that post that you made has gotten another like. Oh, who did the like? Oh, it was her. You know, like wow. There's some dopamine. But it doesn't, it doesn't. I don't know if it's oxytocin, or something else, but there's something that's lacking and something that's cheap about that digital community, where I'm confident that if I ... You actually experienced this. It sounds like it was with things like your son being born. I don't know how in-person community changed for you.

00:19:37
But it seems very obvious to me that if I had a community that, every Sunday let's say, I'm arbitrarily picking a day that a lot of people have off. If you knew that every Sunday at 10:00 AM there would be a group of people getting together to sing some secular songs together.

Greg Epstein: 00:20:02
We did this, by the way.

Jon Krohn: 00:20:03
Yeah.

Greg Epstein: 00:20:03
Everything that you're saying, we did. Absolutely. For years on end. Keep going.

Jon Krohn: 00:20:08
Yeah. And try to talk about what's going on in current society. Talk about the big, important things like, "A relative has passed, or this friend has passed. I'm wrestling with these big things in my life."

00:20:28
It's interesting because I have seen ... Since I moved to New York, I moved to New York 12 years ago, elements of this I have found in things like I did a 200-hour yoga teacher training. Sometimes in a yoga studio, you do end up finding this. There's the yoga classes happen at a set time and some people have what they call dharma talks at the beginning of the yoga, which is kind of like the homily kind of thing that I used to experience as a kid in Catholic Church. I've got to say that, the homily, that was where the priest could freewheel, whereas everything else about the Catholic mass was highly structured. I can see some value to that. I'm sure repetition is good, especially historically if people couldn't read, and this was the only place you could come and get some intellectual stimulation, that repetition was probably good.

00:21:23
But for me, in our modern age, growing up in the '90s in that situation, for me the homily was the only really interesting part. I was like, "At least something different is going to happen here. At least I can learn something new." Anyway, these dharma talks at the beginning of yoga classes can be like that. They might even conclude the yoga practice with something like that as well. You got a bit of chanting. I think that's an interesting thing for me. That was, whether it was in church growing up or in yoga classes more recently, people singing together, music being played together. There's an interesting something happens there that is really fulfilling that I earn for.

00:22:06
Anyway, I've gone on for a long time.

Greg Epstein: 00:22:07
No, no. It's great. You've set us up very nicely for an extra meaningful conversation. You're getting into some of the stuff that some of the other podcasts that I've done do not.

00:22:20
What I think I'd like to do, if you want, is first I'd like to actually get into some detail with you about what this congregation that I used to lead called the Humanist Hub actually did.

Jon Krohn: 00:22:32
Humanist Hub, yeah.

Greg Epstein: 00:22:33
Then, I'd like to tell you why I quit that job and went into writing this book for the past five, six years, and why the two things are so directly related for me.

Jon Krohn: 00:22:48
Cool.

Greg Epstein: 00:22:48
First of all, what I would love for you to picture and listeners to picture is we wanted a space that was big enough for what you'd call one Dunbar of people.

Jon Krohn: 00:23:06
It's 220, right? 240?

Greg Epstein: 00:23:10
It's somewhere between 140 and that.

Jon Krohn: 00:23:11
Oh, 140.

Greg Epstein: 00:23:14
Yeah. The idea is the Dunbar, it's a British sociologist who studied-

Jon Krohn: 00:23:20
Robin Dunbar.

Greg Epstein: 00:23:21
Robin Dunbar who studied-

Jon Krohn: 00:23:24
I went to Magdalen College at Oxford, and he was faculty there.

Greg Epstein: 00:23:27
Nice. Yeah. He studied packs of animals, correct me if I get any of this wrong. And determined, based on the brain size and complexity of animals, what size of herd they would tend to be in. Essentially, what their social cohort was, how many relationships each animal could manage at a time. His theory is that the human animal can manage about 140, to somewhere on the outsized, maybe 200-ish members of our intimate community, where beyond that you're going to need some kind of, I don't know, police force to adjust people's behavior because people can't control everything that's going on beyond that kind of realm.

00:24:22
Anyway, not that control is the ideal here, but that's just a word that comes to mind, perhaps subconsciously. Anyway, so we wanted a space that we could have for ourselves that we weren't just renting once a week that would fit about a Dunbar of people. And so we rent 4,000 square feet in the middle of Harvard Square on JFK Street. We hold, not only do we hold weekly meetings, which were centered around what you'd call the sermon in a church or synagogue or mosque or whatever, in the sense that we'd have every Sunday afternoon, because atheists and agnostics like us did not want to get up early on a Sunday morning, so every Sunday early afternoon we would have a different speaker. I would do the talk once a month. Somebody else once a month. It would be somebody who actually was religious, but had something meaningful and interesting to say to a humanist audience like us.

Jon Krohn: 00:25:30
I love that.

Greg Epstein: 00:25:31
It was a very diverse speakers. It was actually a very diverse audience as well. A lot of young people, even gender balance, a fair number of people of color, that sort of thing. People of different education and income levels, et cetera. So it was a talk, but there would always be music. There would usually be singing. There was a classroom-

Jon Krohn: 00:25:58
What would you guys do for the music or singing? Was it Tom Petty, or what?

Greg Epstein: 00:26:04
There would be a lot of different things like that. The most fun example would be that this led to ... When I was National Chair of Humanists for Biden and Harris in 2020, a better time I suppose, I called up the band Flaming Lips and asked them to perform for us, and they did because Flaming Lips are a humanist band. And their song Do You Realize?? from the album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots I believe it's called, is a humanist anthem. And so they performed it for us at our Humanist for Biden event.

00:26:47
But anyway, I digress I suppose. This is a whole big digression. So we would do the music, we would do poetry, we would have ... We had a kids' room that had all kinds of kids decorations and that we would do a humanist, secular, atheist Sunday school program in on a weekly basis. And we even named it after the famous scientist, E.O. Wilson. It was the E.O. Wilson Learning Lab that we created. So we did that.

00:27:34
On Monday nights we would have people come in and sit in a circle, maybe an average of 20 to 30-ish people every week on a Monday night, and people would talk in a very deep way about the best and worst things that had happened with them in their lives in the past week. But also about different topics each week that came down to what is the meaning of your life, what are you most struggling with, what are you most hopeful about, how do we interface with the world?

00:28:16
And so this would just go on and on. We would do meditation. I mean, I'll leave it there. And again, it was very hard work, and one of the biggest reasons to not do it anymore was just I couldn't figure out a way not to have to work 80 hours a week on this. But there was something more. I mean, if you want to interject, go for it. If not, I can just tell you the next phase and how it led to the book.

Jon Krohn: 00:28:48
I'll just quickly say that this aligns so much with the kinds of concepts that I've kicked around in my head, and I never have time to even get it going, but I'm like, " I bet I could get a dozen people together to do this once."

Greg Epstein: 00:29:04
Oh, you could. I mean, you're a charismatic person, you're very thoughtful. You could do way more than a dozen. But I mean, one of the challenges I think you'd face is, because you'd probably pull a big group together, is that there's a really huge difference between pulling a big group together and having a true community. Huge difference. Think about all the influencers out there that have crowds. Do we really feel that they have community, that they've actually provided a deep sense of meaning and purpose for their audiences and listeners? I mean, some cases, yes, but in many cases the connection is more superficial. And what happens with community is ... I mean, how would you say it? That there's a real depth to building better relationships with people. That it's about understanding that people are in pain and that they're suffering, and that there's no way of predicting what they're going to be in pain over or suffering or celebrating on a given day. And there's no perfect formula for how to solve their problems. It's all about being present with people.

00:30:42
And so if you don't have time to devote to those people, then no matter how brilliant you might be, it doesn't work.

Jon Krohn: 00:30:50
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00:31:31
Yeah. Something that I think might even help us figure out this distinction between digital community, which scales really nicely, and what you're describing, this deep and meaningful community, is that with that deep and meaningful community, people are getting to know you in such a way that they are thinking about your problems and you're thinking about theirs.

Greg Epstein: 00:31:56
Yeah, there's a reciprocity, absolutely, where the idea is ... Well, for example, I gave a talk at one point in our congregation that had a corny title, but it was the most powerful word in the world. And I didn't tell people in advance what word I was talking about-

Jon Krohn: 00:32:21
I'm on the edge of my seat.

Greg Epstein: 00:32:22
...but it's the most powerful word in the world. We put it out as a blurb, we put it out on our email list to thousands of people on email. "I'm going to give a talk about the most powerful word in the world." And the only thing that I gave people as a hint is that the idea for this talk was that when I was training as clergy ... I'm trained to be clergy for the non-religious, so officiating weddings, funerals, baby-naming ceremonies at times, coming-of-age ceremonies like a bar or bat mitzvah or a confirmation, all from an atheistic, secular perspective.

00:32:58
And so we were taught in the class on weddings that the words "I do" are incredibly powerful words, because with those two words, you can transform a person from one status in life to another. So the most powerful word in the world is?

Jon Krohn: 00:33:16
Do?

Greg Epstein: 00:33:22
It's "we." It's "we." Because if you can get a group of people to truly believe that they are a we and not just a set of isolated individuals, you've profoundly transformed the lives of those people. At the very least in some way, and in certain cases, in almost all the ways. And so-

Jon Krohn: 00:33:47
But we know Adam Neumann out there, who I'm sure doesn't listen to my podcast, but if he does, he's like, "Yeah, we nailed it. WeWork, WeLive."

Greg Epstein: 00:33:56
Yeah, shout-out to Adam. I mean, I'm sure he's on the rebound now. He lost his WeWork billions. He actually got to keep quite a few of them, right?

Jon Krohn: 00:34:08
Oh, he's-

Greg Epstein: 00:34:08
He's doing fine. He's doing just fine.

Jon Krohn: 00:34:10
Somehow people are investing, again. People are investing in whatever it is. It's like black ... I can't remember the-

Greg Epstein: 00:34:15
Oh, yeah. There's no limit to what you can do if you look and talk like the SoftBank founders' version in their minds of what a billionaire prophet Jesus should be.

00:34:29
And in fact, Julia Angwin, the New York Times tech policy columnist, surprised me on stage the other day. She was interviewing me about Tech Agnostic in New York City for an organization called All Tech Is Human, great org. I've written about them as the tech ethics congregation, by the way. And she's on stage interviewing me, and she surprises me with the question, "So if tech is a religion," and she believes that it is, "who's Jesus?" And I said, "Well, according to SoftBank, it's Adam Neumann."

Jon Krohn: 00:35:05
That's funny.

Greg Epstein: 00:35:06
I mean, he's their avatar, their prototype.

Jon Krohn: 00:35:08
You said that?

Greg Epstein: 00:35:11
Yeah.

Jon Krohn: 00:35:12
Because it seems if I had to pick someone off the cuff, that's not the first person that would come to mind.

Greg Epstein: 00:35:17
I mean, Steve Jobs. Who would be for you?

Jon Krohn: 00:35:20
Oh, he's dead.

Greg Epstein: 00:35:21
Yeah. Well, I mean, but he has risen, hasn't he?

Jon Krohn: 00:35:25
Has he risen?

Greg Epstein: 00:35:27
I mean, he's not risen to the extent that a Ray Kurzweil would like to be risen. Just to skip ahead for a second here, like a Ray Kurzweil, the great iconic figure, great is in scare quotes from my perspective by the way, but the iconic figure of AI, who likes to brag about having, what does he have, 60 or 70 years of experience in AI, and he's still going strong. He does take his 200-plus pills a day so that he can stay alive long enough to eventually upload himself into the cloud or some sort of new technological body when the singularity, which he has argued in successive books is either near or nearer, comes and humans meld with machines and the AI God is risen, Ray Kurzweil believes that we're going to end death.

00:36:26
Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who was fired for releasing the transcript of his conversation with his co-worker, which became Google's Gemini, Blake Lemoine told me, when I brought him to MIT, that he had worked with Kurzweil on what became Gemini, and that Kurzweil really led the creation of Gemini in order to recreate his dead father.

Jon Krohn: 00:36:58
What?

Greg Epstein: 00:36:59
And that is why I say these are just little examples of why I really do believe that tech has become our most powerful, and emphasis on powerful, religion. And so Steve Jobs, has he risen? His spirit fills our hearts, perhaps, but actually he's old news now. In the tech world, gods get replaced real fast. They don't have a very long shelf life, gods don't. It's like milk, I mean. So Steve Jobs, nobody really talks about Steve Jobs anymore, we've moved on.

Jon Krohn: 00:37:38
But yeah, so I'm surprised. I would've thought if there was one figurehead that, and this isn't me personally speaking-

Greg Epstein: 00:37:44
Yeah. Go ahead.

Jon Krohn: 00:37:45
... as my tech Jesus, but I would've thought that the obvious name that would roll off the tongue here would be Elon Musk.

Greg Epstein: 00:37:52
Oh, Elon Musk. No, I would say ... So my friend-

Jon Krohn: 00:37:57
No, he's not Jesus.

Greg Epstein: 00:38:00
He's not Jesus. He will not save us. No, Elon Musk will not save us. That is something I can confidently say. I wrote about that in an essay for Time recently.

Jon Krohn: 00:38:13
Isn't him, Joe Rogan, Donald Trump-

Greg Epstein: 00:38:19
All wrapped up in a sort of ethical turducken.

Jon Krohn: 00:38:24
Yeah. Peterson.

Greg Epstein: 00:38:26
Yes.

Jon Krohn: 00:38:29
To use some machine learning terminology in our vector embedding space, do they not have high cosine similarity scores with each other? And Jesus. And Jesus.

Greg Epstein: 00:38:44
I mean, Musk, by the way, my friend and colleague, Chris hyper-visible Gilliard, who is an anti-surveillance technology activist who is a leading figure in chapter five of my new book. And he's a really interesting guy. He won't allow his face to be shown publicly or online. And so his bio picture is him in a helmet and ski goggles and a mask and that sort of thing.

00:39:25
But anyway, but Chris is a fascinating person. He has a book that he has in mind for the future called The Illustrated Guide to Silicon Valley Super Villains. And so he's comparing tech demigods more to villains than to the more hopeful kind of deity. And in his pantheon, Musk is the Joker. So Musk will tend to get compared to Iron Man, but in fact, in Chris's book, and in mine as well I would have to say, Musk is more like the Joker. So, anyway.

Jon Krohn: 00:40:10
So Adam Neumann is Jesus?

Greg Epstein: 00:40:13
What I'll just say though-

Jon Krohn: 00:40:14
He's Jewish Jesus, again.

Greg Epstein: 00:40:15
Jewish ... Well, yeah. I mean, with the long hair and the real estate empire.

Jon Krohn: 00:40:23
Real estate empire.

Greg Epstein: 00:40:24
I mean, what-

Jon Krohn: 00:40:26
Did Jesus have a real estate empire?

Greg Epstein: 00:40:27
I mean, some would say he still does that. See, the question is, what kind of Jesus are we talking about? What kind of Christianity are we talking about? Because there's a couple billion Christians in the world, currently even, and that doesn't even speak to past Christians, future Christians, whatever. So there's a couple billion Christians, and they all have incredibly different ... or there are such an incredible diversity of views about what Christianity actually is and what Christians are really supposed to believe and do and that sort of thing.

00:41:15
And so the question is, when we say, look, who's Jesus, well, which Jesus? Is it that Jesus from the ancient world that's walking around in robes, very humble, saying that a rich person can get into heaven. Like a camel can pass through the eye of a needle. Berating people for being selfish and greedy.

Jon Krohn: 00:41:51
You're describing some-

Greg Epstein: 00:41:52
Are we talking about that Jesus, a lot of people feel would be deported immediately upon Trump's re-inauguration, or are we talking about the steak and guns and beer Jesus that is well known throughout certain corridors of America?

00:42:16
And that's the question. There's different Jesus's for different people. That's part of what has made this religion so powerful is that it can morph and reshape itself to be whatever various kinds of people want or need it to be. And so if you say, who's Jesus? Again, I would say it really depends on what kind of Jesus we're trying to project.

00:42:47
And tech is at its greatest, tech is all things to all people. It seems to be. The idea is that modern day Silicon Valley tech ... Because my book is not about all technology, right? It's not technology-agnostic. About technology, I'm not agnostic, I'm a believer. I do believe that it's good to create tools to improve human life. I am not somehow looking backward and also looking forward to the days of wooden ships crossing the Atlantic and having to sail all the way around South America because, I don't know, a canal would be too technological for somebody. No, I'm not trying to warm my food up tonight in an iron pot, in a fire surrounded by a ring of stones. No.

00:43:57
But around Silicon Valley tech, this new phenomenon which emerges in these manger-like garages with these mythological figures like Jobs and Gates and Larry and Sergey and others a generation or so ago, around that phenomenon, I really am agnostic. I'm not a total atheist about that phenomenon. I use these people's devices all the time. I'm using them right now to interact with you, and I'm happy to be doing that. And I do think that they've done some good in the world. The question is, has it been outbalanced by some of the many, many social, political, and ethical problems that these technologies have at best been associated with, at worst caused, or are causing or will cause?

00:44:53
So yeah, the thought that I have around 2018 that leads to writing this book, Tech Agnostic, is that religion is no longer what I used to think of it as, which is the most powerful social technology in the world, that the tech has now become the most powerful social technology in the world. And that tech is sort of overrun, I was thinking about it at the time, it became clearer and clearer to me as I researched this, it's overrun by weird ideas, weirdly theological ideas it turns out.

Jon Krohn: 00:45:35
That's exactly the quote that we pulled out ... I didn't even get to my first question. So my first question we have, as the answer, the answer that we have from your book, is many of those ideas are weirdly theological.

Greg Epstein: 00:45:48
Yes. Yes.

Jon Krohn: 00:45:49
That's the quote that we pulled out is the answer to what was going to be my first question, which was, "Greg, could you explain how technology's pervasive influence in modern life supplanted the role traditionally played by religion and society?" And we've gotten there.

Greg Epstein: 00:46:02
Yeah, we've gotten there. I mean, you seem like you wanted a riff so I hope your listeners like riffing.

Jon Krohn: 00:46:08
Oh, I've loved this.

Greg Epstein: 00:46:09
Yeah. These weirdly theological ideas had taken over. And if you think about it, although I didn't realize at the time that some of the ideas that I was studying, that I've spent the last six years studying, were going to be so influential in something so impactful or consequential, as Joe Biden likes to say, as the 2024 presidential election. But I think that they really have been.

00:46:40
I mean, if you look at, for example, the New York Times writer, Tressie McMillan Cottom, wonderful writer, just wrote a piece recently about how essentially Trump was able to take advantage of online spaces, echo chambers or whatever you want to call them, that are kind of like a secular religion she says. You've got influencers that are essentially teaching you, teaching their online churches, which really do look very much like churches in many ways, they're teaching their followers, their listeners, how to worship certain products, worship certain ideals. It might be thinness. It might be being a trad wife, a traditional wife who supports her husband and gets to live this work-free lifestyle. It might be a bro podcaster, tech bro podcaster, who served the flip side, the traditional masculinity and the products that he might be hawking.

00:48:02
But Dr. Tressie, as I might affectionately call her, an amazing writer, again, really does point out that these have become secular religions. Even marked by the term that people like to call themselves free thinkers, which is a term that was written about first back in 2005 by a woman named Susan Jacoby, trying to reclaim that word from the 19th century as a word that would define this secular, non-religious cohort in society, which has grown quite large, and Trump himself is known to not necessarily be the most pious guy.

Jon Krohn: 00:48:47
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00:49:41
Wait. So the free thinkers, I mean, the way you just described it there, that's the same, these secular free thinkers, that is the same as the tech bro podcasts, the trad women. Is that, because it kind of sounds.

Greg Epstein: 00:49:59
Well, a lot of these folks like to call themselves free thinkers, is what I'm saying, which is, it's sort of strange, I suppose that that is a thing, but what I would say is that the idea of a free thinker is a person who is proud of being able to have unconventional ideas on the one hand. And those ideas end up being things that people on the alt-right can get excited about.

00:50:43
But on the other hand, there's another definition of free thinker, which is this sort of secularist ideal of a term for people who are proud of themselves as atheists and agnostics. And they're saying there's a large cohort of people who are now non-religious, and this is who that person is. It's a free thinker. So there's this two types of being a free thinker and what I, yeah.

Jon Krohn: 00:51:14
It's interesting because that second group you described, you described the first group of free thinkers as far right. And that second group, it seems like that would correlate with typically more left-leaning groups.

Greg Epstein: 00:51:24
More left. Yeah, exactly. But I guess the problem is, as I see it as a problem certainly that the free thinker, the person who might want to define him or herself as a free thinker, but is really sort of an alt-right personality, a new kind of rightist, somebody that again, is looking for a sort of confident masculinity, I would even say a toxic masculinity in a very uncertain world where people are afraid. People are afraid because there's a lot to be afraid of, right? Climate is changing the world very quickly. Technology is changing the world very quickly. According to Ray Kurzweil, within something like 10, 20 years from now, our whole society is going to be completely unrecognizable. Our values are changing what we believe, what we believe about religion, what we believe about gender, what we believe about sexuality, what we believe about child-rearing. Everything's changing. And so people are very, very, very shook and uncertain.

00:52:31
And so one of the things that is comforting to some people in uncertain times is a kind of strong masculine, only I can know the way and only I will save us, and only I can do it. Trump is a confident figure, at least that's how he comes across.

00:52:51
And so I guess what I'm saying about the term free thinker is that these people are not the sort of conservative Christians of old where they were content to say, "We're going to follow everything The Bible says." That is some of Trump's constituency. But one of the genius elements of his rise to power, evil genius to me probably, but is that he had this ability to meld that Bible thumping, we're going to follow everything the Bible says, core of conservative voters with this other emerging group of people where they're not traditional. They want to co-opt a term like free thinker to signal to people that they've got their own way of doing things. They don't need vaccines like the rest of us. They don't need to be data-driven like the rest of us. They go with their gut and their gut is strong. It's filled with whatever RFK Jr. wants it to be filled with and-

Jon Krohn: 00:54:01
Free gutting.

Greg Epstein: 00:54:01
Yes. And so there's this new kind of confident movement that emerges that does really, really well online that if you look at traditional media, the kinds of legacy media that are really struggling right now, a world dominated by that kind of media and by sort of the early foundations of the internet, you're not surprised that Francis Fukuyama could look at that world and say, "Oh, history's ending because we're progressing towards liberal democratic ideals. Everybody's going to be on board. Everybody's getting educated and informed."

00:54:55
But actually this new media that emerges in this splintered, fractal internet times, conservatives do really well on it because there's just this information disinformation everywhere. There's uncertainty everywhere and into a void of uncertainty where a lot of liberals are trying very, very hard to master every bit of information they can master. They're trying to know everything and be experts on everything. And when you're trying to know everything and be an expert on everything, you can end up coming across to people as kind of an egghead because it's hard to know everything. It's just really freaking hard. And so you can sometimes lose touch with the gut, with the emotions, and those are also important parts of being human. And so yeah, I'll stop there perhaps.

Jon Krohn: 00:55:57
Yes. Now I can have an easy segueway into, yeah, I mean, that was fascinating. We covered a lot of topics there. I guess maybe I'll use this opportunity to go back to a couple questions that I, no, actually, you know what? I'm not going to do that. I'm going to save the couple of questions that I opened with. I'm actually going to save those to the end and get as your final thoughts. I want to dig into your book more now while we still have time to do that. So I'm sure a lot of the themes you've been discussing are related to it, but I want to dig into some specific topics. So yeah, so your book Tech Agnostic in it, you describe technology use as a ritual that offers both relief and entrapment. And this is interesting to me, and it does relate to something that you talked about earlier in the episode where you talked about in 2018, social media taking off and that kind of providing community.

00:56:57
What came to mind for me is not so much that that social media experience is community like it's purported to be, but it is more like in entrapment, it's product designers at big tech companies have figured out ways to make these tools or what could be tools as addictive as possible. So you see as many ads as possible typically. So you described technology as a ritual that offers both relief and entrapment. How so given this dual nature, how should individuals and societies cultivate awareness and set boundaries to prevent tech from overwhelming our mental and emotional health? So how can we get the benefits of tech without these negative side effects like entrapment?

Greg Epstein: 00:57:43
Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, again, I'll come back to my central argument in order to answer this. The central argument is that technology has become the world's most powerful religion and it desperately needs a reformation. So I spend the first third of the book talking about people's beliefs, that there's a kind of theology and doctrine to the tech religion as there are in traditional religions. But then I say in the middle of the book that we also really need to look at practices because a religion is not a religion if all it has is beliefs. Religions have practices. That's how they're shaped. That's how they take form and expression.

00:58:28
So therefore, with the idea of ritual, it's important to note that rituals are sort of two-sided coins, that there is a way in which as Durkheim, the father of the sociology of religion would've reminded us, ritual brings people together in a sense of community. It bonds them to each other and it bonds them to a shared sense of meaning and purpose and that's a very important part of what ritual is.

00:59:10
But it can do so in positive and negative ways, constructive and unconstructive ways. If you see people coming together in to celebrate important times of the year or important times of life, that's good by and large. My mom would often say to me as a kid, "We're not really big believers in all these holidays, but think about it, if we didn't believe in the holidays at all, then we probably wouldn't get together and see our extended family nearly as often as we do, and we wouldn't feel a sense of specialness when we did." And so that's a positive example of ritual.

00:59:54
But in, for example, Orthodox Judaism, there is a set of prayers that men are meant to say every morning as they get out of bed before they do just about anything else. And that set of prayers involves thanking God for not making them a woman.

01:00:18
Or another thing that people don't realize about, for example, Orthodox Jewish prayer, is that the central prayer that people are making to God that Orthodox Jews do three times every single day and four times on the Sabbath, it's asking for a resurrection of the dead. It's really, at least if we take it for the words at their face value, it is asking God to resurrect the dead. It's not like some liberal hippie dippy concept. It's like, "No, those people are dead. They're buried, they're in the ground, raise them up, take them to heaven," et cetera. Or praying for people to be sent to hell. There's stuff like that too.

01:01:00
And so the point is that rituals can be great for people. They can be not so great. People can do rituals, good and healthy numbers of times, or they can overdo it and that is very much true in what I would call the tech religion. I have not cast my smartphone into the sea yet, but I mean a lot of this book was spent on the fact that that is what we do. We take this stained-glass black mirror and we genuflect before it in a prayerful posture, bowing to its altar sometimes 200 times a day. When I have a bad day, I mean, I'm on this thing all the time right, and it's a mess. It's a real mess.

Jon Krohn: 01:01:54
Well said. I see the iconography there with the phone. I guess I am worshiping it.

Greg Epstein: 01:02:05
I mean, you're not alone. You're not alone.

Jon Krohn: 01:02:08
I'll move on to my next topic area, which still is related to your book. So again, that's Tech Agnostic is the book that we're talking about here. And so in 2003, the famous technologist and author Jaron Lanier wrote that, "Artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system instead of a technology."

01:02:31
AI still hasn't delivered on sci-fi promises of autonomous robots with intelligence indistinguishable from ours. But in the last two years, for me, the watershed moment was GPT4's release in March of last year. That blew my mind. It made me think, okay, this might happen in our lifetime, and some people think it's going to happen soon, very soon. You mentioned how Ray Kurzweil said, "It's near, the singularity is near. Now, it's nearer." He predicts that we'll have artificial general intelligence before 2029. Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO thinks next year 2025.

01:03:08
So your book Tech Agnostic delves into the implications of portraying tech as a messianic force like this. Could you elaborate on these kinds of narratives, especially regarding the singularity as being this kind of religious event that's coming soon? I guess it's kind of like, what is it? It's like the end of days?

Greg Epstein: 01:03:30
Yeah. I mean, it is very much like the end of days in the revelation, which is the English word for the Greek word apocalypse.

Jon Krohn: 01:03:43
I didn't know that. Revelation means apocalypse. Wow

Greg Epstein: 01:03:46
Yeah, or apocalypse means revelation. The new world will be revealed. And for some that's a good, that's going to be fun and pleasurable, and for others that's going to be utter doom and disaster, right?

Jon Krohn: 01:04:03
So given what you've just said and how this singularity AGI coming can be perceived as this kind of end of days, why do these, why do these narratives exist? Why do we choose to believe them? And actually, I've got to say that that kind of thing for me, I don't know if we're going to have AGI next year, like Sam Altman thinks, or in 2029 like Ray Kurzweil thinks, but since GPT4 came out, I think it's probably likely in my lifetime. And I also do believe that whenever it arrives, and it isn't one event, because also that's, I think like an oversimplistic thing to say that it's one event.

01:04:46
But gradually over time, over the coming years or maybe over the coming decades, AI systems seem like they could become so much more intelligent than us that we might start to just trust them to run off with their own processes because we're like, "Well, you know what? They should just be governing because they're doing it, we've run all these simulations and they do it way better than us. We run these small pilots, they do it way better than us." And then AGI systems go off and maybe very rapidly create artificial super intelligences that are far beyond, they could theoretically have a kind of intelligence that is far beyond what could be explained to us in the same way that I can't explain, no matter how much time I spend trying to explain partial derivative calculus to a chimpanzee. A chimpanzee is almost as smart as us, but I have no chance of explaining partial derivative calculus. And in that same way, the artificial super intelligence that could come very hot on the heels of artificial general intelligence may have ways of understanding the world that just don't make sense to us.

01:05:58
But so for me, even I guess I, without really realizing it, until we had this conversation today, I suppose in my mind, I am kind of thinking of the singularity as kind of a religious event because it's so difficult to predict what's going to come past it. And I'm just kind of hopeful, I guess as an optimistic person that it's going to be good for most people on the planet, if not maybe even everyone.

Greg Epstein: 01:06:26
Let's just take a look at what you've just described and analyze it as though we were breaking down the content and the structure of what you just laid out in a divinity school. What you've laid out sounds very much like the structure of a kind of new religious vision for society. You're talking about, my words now. I'm paraphrasing you very loosely because I'm trying to make a point, but it sounds to me like a kind of slow-moving, multi- stage rapture where the people who are good, who should benefit from this new all-powerful technology, this force greater than us, than any of us, and all of us even will rise in some literal or metaphorical way to benefit from such a thing. Anybody that does not, I suppose, deserve to be benefiting from such a thing, maybe because their behavior is bad, they're mean, they're naughty, maybe they're not the right race or gender. I don't know. You know, in other words the all seeing, all knowing technology will meet out justice, will it not? I mean, if not, right, there's two choices here.

Jon Krohn: 01:08:00
I guess it has to. It has to.

Greg Epstein: 01:08:01
There's two choices here, either the thing has to be completely capricious and really nasty, or it has to be positive and healthy, and there's two choices for that.

 01:08:25
And so I guess the point that I want to make here is people have always wanted and needed a system of thinking about and interacting with the world so as to cope with the fact that the world is so uncertain. We don't know what is going to happen in the long-term future. We can tell ourselves we see trend lines and we might, but we don't have any proof of what the world is going to look like in 10 or 20 years. And so to a certain extent, if we want to say that we do, that's a faith proposition. I believe that the world is going to look this way. Based on evidence, but it's still a belief.

Jon Krohn: 01:09:35
Yeah, I guess am I tech agnostic if I am not confident about what tech will bring about? And also, I guess if my instinct would be that just like tech today ends up being positive and helpful to some people and unhelpful and negative to other people, that it will probably continue to do that in the future. It's not like some, it's not like we've reached some definitive utopia or dystopia. It's just that we kind of like the world today. There's some people that are benefiting a bit in some ways and benefiting less in other ways from change. Does that make me tech agnostic?

Greg Epstein: 01:10:18
Well, I mean, certainly I am advocating for people to be more tech agnostic, and I think some of what you're saying is in that category, it's this idea that we're not sure how things are going to go, but what I really want to emphasize about why I think tech agnosticism is an important concept in this day and age is I was describing earlier this of confidence or this strong faith that certain kinds of leaders like a Trump will have in this day and age where he's a great example of this because he's a 34 time convicted felon whose own former chief of staff, who by the way was a general in the Marine corp John Kelly, said, he compared him to fascism and fascists, and yet we voted for him and elected him to the highest office in the world because in large part, he comes across as really confident and in a very, very fundamentally uncertain world, that confidence has a lot of value to some people.

01:11:51
And so what I'm advocating for is an alternative model where we recognize that there's a beauty and a dignity and an honorableness in not knowing, in not being certain about what the future holds, and not being certain that we have to invest $7 trillion immediately as Sam Altman is begging us to do. He says because we've got to do all we can to bring about the tech and AI rapture, the coming of the AI God, the miraculous, abundant world. Those are, I'm quoting words like miraculous and abundance, that he himself uses biblical sounding terms.

01:12:46
I think he needs the 7 trillion because OpenAI is absolutely burning cash right now, and if he doesn't get that kind of investment, his baby, his company might legitimately go belly up because it has no way whatsoever to make a profit right now. So just push that timeline infinitely into the future with this investment that will make it too big to fail, right. That's why the SoftBank folks actually say that we need 9 trillion, don't they, in AI investment. But anyway. Or is it the Bitcoin people that say the 9 trillion, I lose track, somebody's calling for 9 trillion. Anyway, so in that world where Eric Schmidt is saying that we're falling desperately behind the Chinese in the AI arms race, and yet AI robots are running around ... How do we say this? The AI robots are running around ... What are they doing, the AI robots? The Chinese AI robots are now rebelling against their ... One robot actually convinced the other robots to run away from their rulers.

01:14:27
This is an actual story out of Chinese AI of late. And so, if that is what you get by moving quickly, maybe there's some real benefit to moving slowly. Maybe there's some real benefit to losing the arm's race, and gaining ourselves in the process.

01:14:53
Because maybe the ultimate goal of being human is not victory, and conquering, and colonizing the stars. Maybe it's looking at one another, and at ourselves, and appreciating humanness, appreciating the small, every day, slow process of loving one another, caring about one another, forming a more compassionate society, so that when we eventually project our digital consciousness into the far corners of the universe, trillions of us, AI robots out in space powered by unseen stars, and what have you, that when we eventually do that, maybe what we don't want to project is the jerks that we are now to one another all too often out there.

01:15:53
Maybe we want to take the time to learn how to treat one another better here on Earth, so that when we eventually project something out into space, that it's actually our best versions of ourselves, and not glitchy, weird, selfish, uncertain to actually work, maybe going to ask you to glue the cheese from your pizza onto the crust kind of AI.

Jon Krohn: 01:16:25
Okay. And so, I guess you've kind of given us some picture here, but what does it mean? Like, can you define succinctly what a tech agnostic is?

Greg Epstein: 01:16:42
Yeah, I mean. I think a tech agnostic is somebody who sees technology as a tool, not as the end of itself to human life. A tech agnostic is somebody where we don't know if all of the technologies that we're using, or anticipating are going to be good for humanity, or not.

01:17:10
But we take what Lesley Hazleton, a great writer of a book called Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, who appears in the conclusion of my book, calls, "A spirited delight" in not knowing that there's a real pride and honor in admitting what we don't know, because there's all too much certainty in our world.

01:17:31 A tech agnostic is somebody who recognizes that the Silicon Valley world that we know today is one of the most hierarchal religions in the world, and we want to flatten those hierarchies.

01:17:49
A tech agnostic is somebody who prioritizes human connection, and humanness above pretty much all else that we recognize that, at the end of the day, we evolved for connection, and we want a sense of real purpose in our life, and in a universe as vast as this, as Carl Sagan might have said, the purpose that's most worthwhile is love, is caring about one another.

Jon Krohn: 01:18:26
I like that.

Greg Epstein: 01:18:27
We're agnostic about anything that distracts us from the actual work of building a society that's more caring, and more just, more equitable, more human.

Jon Krohn: 01:18:40
And then, so that also at the end there when you're talking about love, and being more human, humanness, does that mean that a tech agnostic is also a tech humanist?

Greg Epstein: 01:18:50
Yeah. I think that the world of humanism that I've spent my professional life in these last 20, 25 years has a lot to offer to the world of tech, because the world of tech, I've noticed having traveled all around the world speaking to religious and non-religious audiences, the world of tech is the most secular demographic group I've ever seen, I mean.

01:19:20
If you go to arts and culture spaces, political spaces, different industries, whatever, I've done that, and there are some secular non-religious people there. It's now 20% to 30% of society in America, at least.

01:19:37
But in tech spaces, there are extraordinary numbers of non-religious people.

Jon Krohn: 01:19:46
Yeah. You just assume like ... This is simpleminded of me to say, but your default assumption when you meet someone else who works in the tech industry is that they're non-religious.

Greg Epstein: 01:19:59
Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Krohn: 01:20:00
All right. So, related to this idea of humanism, in the last few years, we've witnessed the rise of something called transhumanism, which maybe you could define for us, because I don't know if I'd do it justice, but transhumanism, effective altruism, technolibertarian movements.

01:20:17
And so, tech elites, particularly, concentrated around the Bay Area, with these kinds of worldviews, hope to influence, or impose on society, or the economy with their worldview.

01:20:29
And some of these things are not helpful. So, it's, like, a Ponzi scheme under the pretense of helping others, or building a privately-owned technolibertarian colony in Honduras, or a tech bro-run city in Solano County, California.

01:20:48
There's a cultishness to these movements, to some extent. And so, yeah. If you could define some of these movements for us, why they're cultish, and what the risks of these movements are.

Greg Epstein: 01:21:07
Yeah. So, I walk readers through in the early chapters of the book a number of these different movements, and ways of approaching technology. I'll let people read most of that, but I'll just say that one of the groups that I look at is the effective altruists.

01:21:34
And effective altruists are almost entirely a secular group of people. Once, back in my congregational days, I had the leadership of the Harvard Effective Altruists in my office, and just asked them like, "What are your beliefs?" There was not more than maybe one person that had some, sort of, traditional religious belief. It was a collection of atheists, agnostics, and such.

01:22:09
But it really does strike me as a, kind of, modern faith, the movement does, in the idea of data as being able to tell us exactly how we should live, exactly how we should donate.

01:22:26
And even more than that, there's a vision in the effective altruist movement, at least, as it was expressed as I was writing the book, that the movement has gone through a major rebranding effort-

Jon Krohn: 01:22:41
Yeah. With Sam Bankman-Fried.

Greg Epstein: 01:22:43
With Sam Bankman-Fried-

Jon Krohn: 01:22:44
And FTX.

Greg Epstein: 01:22:44
... in prison with P Diddy. You've got to rebrand. Right? Because he was the prophet, a Jesus figure, in fact, of that movement. Except imagine if Jesus was also the biggest funder of your movement. Like, imagine Jesus having $27 billion, and pledging to donate it all to Paul. That's what Bankman-Fried was.

01:23:10
Well, at least, he was going to give some to the Roman Empire, he was going to give some to the Mesopotamians, but mostly he was going to give it to Paul, and Paul, of course, was William MacAskill, and I'm sure Toby Ord would get some as well, and they'd buy a castle, and everything would be great.

Jon Krohn: 01:23:27
Buy a castle.

Greg Epstein: 01:23:31
They bought a castle.

Jon Krohn: 01:23:32
Did they?

Greg Epstein: 01:23:33
Oh, the effective altruists absolutely bought a castle. I believe it's in Scotland. I think they paid $17 million for it. They also paid reportedly $10 million for William MacAskill's latest book tour to talk about the effective altruist movement, and the long-term movement, including, many believe, this belief in the fact that what effective altruism was, ultimately, aiming for was Nick Bostrom's vision of trillions of digital beings in the long-term future, that it was our duty to bring about-

Jon Krohn: 01:24:13
And that ties to the transhumanism point. Right? So, transhumanism is a belief that the human race can evolve beyond its current and physical limitations. So, that also ties back to the Kurzweil, Ray Kurzweil thing, you talking a bit about uploading your mind, being able to live forever.

01:24:30
So, where humanism is saying, "Humans and humanity should be our north star, being loving, being kind to humans," transhumanism is saying, "Well, humans are kind of outdated. We should be looking beyond that."

Greg Epstein: 01:24:51
I believe that there really needs to be a, kind of, tech humanism in all of this as well where, to me, humanism is an alternative to traditional religion, that is sort of running parallel to traditional religion, where we say, "Look, we are going to believe things based on reason, and evidence, and as well as following our compassion, and our caring for one another. That's going to be our North Star. We believe that the gods were created by human beings. There's no chosen people. We're all in this together."

01:25:42
That's, to me, the best of what humanism has to offer, and I believe that that's something that's very important to look at for people who have become fairly religious about their tech.

01:25:56
We need a North Star, and it's not traditional religion for many. If you're listening to this, and you're a deeply faithful Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, et cetera, and you believe that your god, or gods, and your religious teachers will show you the way, I respect that, and I am not as critical of that in any way as you might think I would be, because there's a lot of good people who believe that sort of thing.

01:26:27
But for those who don't, for those who do not, we need to really spend more time asking ourselves in this world of change, "What is our North Star? Why are we doing the things that we do? Is it all just about progress? Is it all just about profit? What's the point?"

01:26:50
And, to me, rather ... If you believe in a society where, as it was reported in The New York Times recently, you're going to have AI avatars doing your dating for you, then, ultimately, you're just going to be people who don't know how to connect with one another, don't know how to love one another, don't know how to be intimate with one another without AI intervention.

01:27:20
And so, what kind of people are we even going to be? What kind of humans are we envisioning if that's the society we think we want to build? I suggest we need to dial it way back on a lot of stuff like that, even ban some of it maybe, but, certainly, disinvest in some of that, and reinvest in one another.

Jon Krohn: 01:27:45
Nice. I like that. That was a really good final soundbite. Nice conclusion, drawing-

Greg Epstein: 01:27:52
Thank you.

Jon Krohn: 01:27:53
... a line under everything. I have two questions, which I hope are really quick, which are just related to ... Yeah. Like I said that I was going to come back to questions that I started off at the very beginning with. And so, you just provided us with some really good sense there on ... I buy what you're saying. I think that being all-in on technology in every aspect is problematic, and that we need to dial some of that back, maybe disinvest some of that, at least, in terms of our time and attention, maybe literally financially.

01:28:22
So, that's all great, but also ... So, going back to one of the questions that I asked you right at the beginning of this episode, how ... Is there some way that people can find some kind of local experience, if they are secular, like The Humanist Hub that you created?

Greg Epstein: 01:28:41
Yeah.

Jon Krohn: 01:28:41
Is there some way for people to find something like that locally? There may not be.

Greg Epstein: 01:28:47
I've become convinced that secular people are going to be secular, and we don't need a traditional congregation. What I would suggest for people to do is get involved with the causes, the people, and the experiences that they find meaningful.

01:29:08
So, go out and get involved in political organizations, in civic organizations, in arts organizations. Do things to care for your neighbors, to care for your loved ones. Take the time for that. It's not going to scale, but if more and more of us do it, then it does scale actually. It creates a more compassionate world.

01:29:36
You don't need, if you're listening to me, and you're intrigued by what I have to say, you don't need a traditional structure for it. You are beyond that. At times, you'll wish you had it, and that's fine. That's normal. It's, like, "I wish I could dunk," but I can't.

01:29:56
But I don't need to dunk, and all we really need to do is care for one another, care for our local communities, and use that to build a better world.

Jon Krohn: 01:30:07
Nice. Another really great soundbite. Thank you. Awesome. All right. So, I'm going to let you go, but before I let my guest go, I always ask if they have a book recommendation for us. So, do you have anything other than your own book? Which, yeah, again, the full title Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became The World's Most Powerful Religion And Why It Desperately Needs A Reformation, available around the world now, and, we'll, of course, have a link to that in the show notes.

01:30:36
But beyond that book, beyond Tech Agnostic, obviously, the focus of our conversation today, do you have any recommendations for us?

Greg Epstein: 01:30:42
For sure. There's so many books I could recommend. Anything by Ruha Benjamin, the wonderful scholar of both technology and African American studies at Princeton University is worth reading. Her latest books are phenomenal.

01:30:58
I'll also say in each chapter of the book, I center this comparison that I'm making of a different aspect of religion to a different aspect of technology with the story of somebody who embodies that relationship between religion and tech.

01:31:16
And so, in my humanism section of the book where I'm talking about the positive alternatives to the tech religion, I tell the story of this wonderful character. Her name is Kate O'Neill. If you're watching this, you can see her book behind me, Tech Humanist.

01:31:31
So, I'm the tech humanist in the sense that I'm the humanist who is now doing tech. Kate is the tech humanist in the sense that she is a technologist who got really fascinated with humanism.

01:31:43
And her new book that's coming out relatively soon, you can pre-order it, is What Matters Next. What Matters Next by Kate O'Neill, the tech humanist. Go pick that up. Go pick up Ruha Benjamin's work, and thank you for listening.

Jon Krohn: 01:31:56
I love that. Thank you. And if people want to follow you outside of this episode, where is the best way to do that?

Greg Epstein: 01:32:02
LinkedIn and Bluesky now. I'm loving Bluesky. Would love to connect with people there, and, of course, LinkedIn is a great way to follow people's professional work, and including mine.

Jon Krohn: 01:32:14
Nice. There's a decent chance that by the time this episode comes out, I will have migrated from Twitter to Bluesky-

Greg Epstein: 01:32:18
Oh, come on over.

Jon Krohn: 01:32:19
... it's really touching on ... Yeah.

Greg Epstein: 01:32:19
Come on over. The skies are bluer over there. They really are.

Jon Krohn: 01:32:24
Nice. Greg, I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation in case that wasn't obvious.

Greg Epstein: 01:32:29
Thank you, Jon. It was a pleasure.

Jon Krohn: 01:32:30
We've also-

Greg Epstein: 01:32:32
It was really, really a thorough conversation, and in many wonderful ways.

Jon Krohn: 01:32:36
Yeah. And you were very generous with your time. We've gone half an hour over the slot that we booked with you. So, I felt like there was momentum in this conversation, and I hope I didn't just, like, ruin the rest of your day by doing that.

Greg Epstein: 01:32:46
No. No. If you feel that your audience will benefit from it, I trust you. So, I love it, and hope to talk to you again some day.

Jon Krohn: 01:32:54
Yeah. For sure. Thanks, Greg. Yeah. Next book comes out, we'd love to have you back on.

Greg Epstein: 01:32:58
Thanks very much.

Jon Krohn: 01:33:05
I loved filming today's episode. Wow. In it, Greg Epstein covered how technology has become our new religion complete with prophets, tech leaders, rituals, like checking devices, and promises of salvation, like, the singularity brought about by AI.

01:33:21
He also talked about how the tech industry, particularly, in Silicon Valley operates with religious-like certainty, and hierarchal structures that need reformation, how movements like transhumanism and effective altruism function similarly to religious cults promising technological transcendence, how being a tech agnostic means viewing technology as a tool rather than an end in itself, maintaining healthy skepticism about technological promises.

01:33:46
He also talked about how the path forward involves prioritizing human connection and compassion over blind faith in technological progress, and how rather than creating separate secular communities, we should focus on building meaningful connections through existing civic and cultural organizations.

01:34:02
As always, you can get all the show notes, including the transcript for this episode, the video recording, and the materials mentioned on the show, the URLs for Greg's social media profiles as well as my own, at www.SuperDataScience.com/845.

01:34:14
Thanks, of course, to everyone on the Super Data Science Podcast team. Our podcast manager Sonja Brajovic, media editor Mario Pombo, partnerships manager Natalie Ziajski, researcher Serg Masis, our writers Dr. Zara Karschay and Sylvia Ogweng, and, of course, our founder Kirill Eremenko. Thanks to all of them for producing another mind-expanding episode for us today.

01:34:34 For enabling that super team to create this free podcast for you, we are deeply grateful to our sponsors. You can support the show by checking out our sponsor's links, which are in the show notes. And if you, yourself, are interested in sponsoring an episode, you can get the details on how to do that by making your way to www.JonKrohn.com/Podcast.

01:34:53
Yeah. And you can also help out by sharing this episode with people who might like it. You could review the episode on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you listen, on YouTube. You could subscribe, obviously, if you're not a subscriber already.

01:35:08
Above all, the most important thing is that you just keep on tuning in. That's what I'm hoping for. I'm so grateful to have you listening, and I hope I can continue to make episodes you love for years, and years to come.

01:35:17
Until next time, keep on rocking it out there, and I'm looking forward to enjoying another round of the Super Data Science Podcast with you very soon.F 

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