Silicon Valley is now cultivating projects that embolden a vision slightly grander than that of subscription software, and these projects will be helmed not by some anemic ayahuasca-drinking softie but by a new kind of entrepreneur, a serious person with a serious vision for the future. The Valley’s most powerful venture capitalists are seeking entrepreneurs with “the fire in the eyes, the ferocity of speech and action that is the physical manifestation of seriousness,” writes Katherine Boyle, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and cofounder of the firm’s American Dynamism practice.
There’s an ideological compatibility with the capitalist-friendly notion “that each person has a calling and a vocation and using your gifts to the max is a good thing and it’s what God would want,” said Toby Kurth, a pastor who has headed Bible studies attended by Thiel. Or, as Daniel Francis, the Catholic founder of the AI start-up Abel, put it, “You have a duty as a founder to make really good products and get them into people’s hands. You’re making God real in people’s lives when they experience that.”
Another idea gaining steam among some of the Silicon Valley faithful is the notion that tech is not an inherent evil. Rather, tech produced by bad thinking—and by extension secular thinking—is. This was the general theory floated by entrepreneur Reggie James in October at Hereticon, a Founders Fund–backed conference for “creative dissidents.” (During its apocalypse-themed Miami gathering, Thiel spoke about the coming of the Antichrist.) There, James introduced the idea of “SecuTech,” or “secular technology” designed from a secular perspective.
Some of what Tan had been getting at onstage reminded me of those Silicon Valley technologists that Burgis warned me about, the ones who are so eager to manufacture their own god. And admittedly, at one point in the reporting of this story, I started down a highly cynical, conspiratorial line of thought that some people in Silicon Valley, like Tan, were cloaking their ambitions to build a god under the guise of traditional religion. “Like a 21st-century version of Joseph Smith with a direct line to a godlike intelligence that performs technological ’miracles
“At the core of everything, there is a factual question: How much power does AI end up with in the limit? Can its makers control it?” he told me. “You can’t settle it by religious thinking. You can’t settle it by accusing other people of religious thinking. If someone could actually build a god for $20 billion and have it follow their orders, they wouldn’t need to be religious to want to do that.” When I took Tan aside to ask why he thought a Christian perspective was relevant to anyone working on artificial intelligence, he told me that it was imperative for people working in tech to realize that they’re building for “something beyond themselves: their families and communities,” he said. “Technology is so powerful right now that…you need to have this sort of ‘touch grass’ moment. “People are so ready to make AGI their god,” Tan added. “What we’re trying to do with events like this is give them an alternative.”
