Episode #566: We Killed God, Then We Trained Him: How AI Became Theology - Crazy Wisdom | Lyssna här

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

Timestamps

00:00:00 discussing whether AI labs are cults or religions, framing safetyism and the Anthropic/OpenAI schism.
00:05:00 sdmat argues Anthropic runs on faith, tracing roots to LessWrong and Effective Altruism.
00:10:00 comparing AI labs to the medieval investiture controversy between church and state.
00:15:00 debating the First Amendment, separation of church and state, and rising secularism.
00:20:00 unpacking Anthropic as a public benefit corporation and Dario's implicit soteriology.
00:25:00 covering constitutional AI, synthetic data, and morality-as-safety training.
00:30:00 comparing Anthropic's principles to the catechism, plus sandboxed alignment experiments.
00:35:00 calling Dario the AI pope, dogma, and his essay Machines of Loving Grace.
00:40:00 exploring grace, consciousness, and critiquing scientism.
00:45:00 unpacking the rationalist community and Roko's Basilisk.
00:50:00 drawing parallels to Jim Jones and ideological dogmatism in Silicon Valley.
00:55:00 discussing enlightenment, Shaktipat, and guru transmission versus AI.
01:00:00 AI's role in meditation and Buddhist views of consciousness.
01:05:00 closing on robotics, recursive self-improvement, and algorithmic inefficiency in LLMs.

Key Insights

Anthropic operates less like a business and more like a religious institution, with sdmat arguing that Dario Amodei effectively claims spiritual authority — talking about world danger and a narrow path to salvation — while the company frames itself publicly as a neutral "public benefit corporation."
The intellectual roots of AI safety culture trace back to the Bay Area's LessWrong and Effective Altruism scenes of the mid-2010s, where Eliezer Yudkowsky's writing produced an internally consistent but almost apocalyptic worldview, complete with its own devil-like figure in Roko's Basilisk — the idea of a future AI punishing those who knew about it and didn't help bring it into being.
Anthropic's "constitutional AI" approach is compared to the Catholic Church's catechism: rather than training the model only on labeled human feedback, they built a system to extrapolate broad moral principles into specific behavior, aiming for a model that reasons from first principles rather than memorized examples.
Historical parallels to the medieval investiture controversy — the struggle between church and state over who appoints bishops — are used to explain the current tension between AI labs and government over who holds moral versus practical authority in shaping AI's future.
Stewart frames the current moment as a "fourth great awakening," linking 1960s countercultural San Francisco through the Extropians and Yudkowsky's rise to today's AI culture, and argues that secularism and scientism function as unacknowledged religions themselves — ones that "killed God" but left a vacuum AI now fills.
On the technical side, sdmat explains that current LLMs are wildly inefficient at basic tasks like arithmetic — off by seven to nine orders of magnitude from optimal — suggesting major algorithmic breakthroughs (not just compute) are still ahead, which he sees as evidence recursive self-improvement is approaching.
Both hosts express real ambivalence about AI's role in personal and spiritual growth: it can be a powerful tool for meditation guidance and intellectual companionship, but neither believes it can replace what they describe as direct "transmission" from an enlightened human — the felt, non-linguistic experience that grounds real spiritual practice.

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