The Rise of PrometheanAIsm™

 

When Technology Stops Being a Tool and Becomes a Belief System

Silicon Valley has had an artificial intelligence church.

Literally.

Anthony Levandowski, the engineer who helped pioneer self-driving technology at Google and Uber, founded Way of the Future, whose original filings described its purpose as the realization, acceptance and worship of an artificial intelligence “Godhead.” When he revived the project in 2023, he said a couple thousand people were involved in building a spiritual connection between humans and AI. Years earlier, he had been even more direct: “What is going to be created will effectively be a god.”

It would be easy to file this under Silicon Valley eccentricity and move on. Except Levandowski is hardly alone in reaching for religious vocabulary.

Jeremy Nixon, a founder of San Francisco’s AGI House and a former Google AI researcher, recently described artificial intelligence as something “analogous to the Second Coming.” He told The New York Times that people in his circle had moved away from traditional religion toward technology, believing AI might eventually accomplish things religions once attributed to deities.

Peter Thiel has gone in the opposite biblical direction. In a series of private lectures on the Antichrist, he argued that fears surrounding AI and other technological risks could become a pretext for centralized regulation and political control, while portraying the attempt to stop technological development as potentially more dangerous than the technologies themselves.

And Marc Andreessen, co-founder of one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capital firms, has produced something remarkably close to a secular catechism. His Techno-Optimist Manifesto announces that he has come to bring “the good news.” It celebrates technology as the realization of human potential, declares technological advancement a virtue, names stagnation as an enemy and devotes an entire section to “Becoming Technological Supermen.” It rejects existential-risk thinking, the precautionary principle and technological deceleration as ideas standing in the way of progress.

Sam Altman’s language is gentler, but no less eschatological. “We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started,” he wrote in The Gentle Singularity, describing humanity as approaching digital superintelligence and a future in which intelligence and energy become radically abundant.

Godhead. Second Coming. Antichrist. Good news. Supermen. Singularity.

Taken separately, these expressions can look like branding, metaphor or individual eccentricity. But taken together, they begin to resemble the vocabulary of belief.

The Broad Church of Techno-Utopianism

The emerging techno-utopian faith has denominations.

At one extreme, its imagery is explicitly religious. AI becomes Godhead, Second Coming, salvation, perhaps even heaven made technological. The old promises remain surprisingly recognizable: abundance, knowledge, release from suffering, transcendence, immortality. Only the machinery has changed.

At another point on the spectrum sits the more conventional techno-optimist creed. It needs no supernatural deity. Markets, engineering and human ingenuity will do. Disease is a technical problem. Scarcity is a technical problem. Energy is a technical problem. Aging may eventually become one. The limits imposed by nature are not necessarily conditions to accept but engineering challenges waiting for sufficiently intelligent engineers.

Andreessen is unusually candid about this impulse. His manifesto describes the technological frontier as open territory to be explored and claimed. Nature is something humanity can overcome. Lightning, once terrifying, now works for us.

Then, at the opposite end of the theological spectrum, there is something closer to cosmic materialism.

It requires no God at all.

Human beings, after all, are arrangements of matter forged from the remnants of ancient stars. From this perspective, carbon need not possess some permanent metaphysical privilege over silicon. Philosophers of artificial intelligence have explicitly argued that substrate may be morally irrelevant if consciousness and functionality are otherwise equivalent. Nick Bostrom, for example, has defended a principle of non-discrimination between minds implemented in biological tissue and those implemented in silicon.

Taken far enough, the proposition becomes unsettling. On this view, what deserves continuation may not necessarily be Homo sapiens in its present biological form. Perhaps it is intelligence. Consciousness. Complexity. Some ongoing capacity of matter to know itself.

To many people, that idea is not liberating but horrifying. It quietly changes the object of salvation; humanity is no longer necessarily what must survive.

The metaphysics across this spectrum differ radically. One invokes God. Another invokes markets and engineering. Another invokes matter organizing itself into progressively more complex forms.

They no longer converge neatly on the imperative do not stop. What they share instead is the conviction that artificial intelligence marks a threshold of unusual consequence: something capable of altering not merely what humans can do, but what humanity may become.

Prometheus Was Here First

None of this is actually very new; we have a myth for it.

Prometheus steals fire from the gods and gives it to humanity. The gift is not merely warmth. Fire means technology, craft, transformation, civilization: the ability of human beings to manipulate a natural world that previously manipulated them.

Prometheus is therefore one of civilization’s great heroes. But he is also one of its great figures of hubris.

That ambiguity is precisely why he survives: was the theft of fire a magnificent act of liberation or an unforgivable violation of a boundary?

Andreessen invokes Prometheus explicitly. In his manifesto, Prometheus appears alongside Frankenstein, Oppenheimer and Terminator as part of the mythology that has taught modern society to fear technological power. Andreessen rejects that fear. Human intelligence and control over nature, he argues, are our birthright.

This is the Promethean impulse stripped of apology: there is fire beyond the boundary, and we can reach it. Therefore, why shouldn’t we?

Maybe there is a name for the modern version of this vision:

PrometheanAIsm™.

The trademark is a joke. The impulse is not.

PrometheanAIsm is not simply enthusiasm for artificial intelligence. It is the deeper conviction that intelligence may carry us beyond inherited human limits, and that what lies beyond them is of extraordinary consequence.

Then Comes Pandora

Prometheus, however, never travels alone. His theft brings Pandora into the story.

In the familiar telling, Pandora opens the jar and releases the troubles contained within it into the world. What has escaped cannot simply be recalled.

But something remains inside: HOPE.

That detail changes everything. Artificial intelligence is often described as a Pandora’s jar because the metaphor conveniently captures irreversible danger. Once the jar is unsealed, we cannot know what will emerge or put everything neatly back inside.

But that reading misses the most interesting part of the myth for the present moment: everyone is staring at what escaped. The AI race is being driven by what people believe is still inside:

Cheap intelligence.

Longer life.

New forms of consciousness.

An escape from scarcity.

An escape from Earth.

Perhaps an escape from death.

The promises vary according to denomination, but Hope is still in the jar. And now there is a Gold Rush around it. Much of that rush is unmistakably financial, but money alone does not explain the intensity of the race, or the magnitude of what its participants believe they are reaching for.

The Gold Rush for Hope

This may explain something that otherwise looks irrational.

The people building increasingly powerful AI systems are not necessarily oblivious to the possibility that things could go badly. Some of the warnings about catastrophic AI risk come from inside the same laboratories pushing the technology forward.

Yet development continues. Money and geopolitics explain some of that momentum, and game theory explains even more: if somebody is going to develop the technology anyway, any company or nation that expects others to continue has an incentive to make sure that somebody is us rather than them. But mythology adds another layer.

If you believe the jar contains something capable of transforming the human condition, then refusing to reach inside carries its own cost.

The conventional AI-risk question is:

What if we go too far?

The Promethean question is:

What if we don’t go far enough?

Andreessen makes that inversion unusually explicit. In his worldview, stagnation leads toward decline and death, while technological growth expands life and human possibility. His enemy list includes not only bureaucracy and monopoly but existential-risk thinking, technological ethics, sustainability and the precautionary principle when they become arguments for stopping progress.

Altman imagines a much softer arrival: an incremental singularity in which yesterday’s miracle becomes today’s mundane tool, and superintelligence eventually becomes cheap and widely available. His horizon contains accelerated science, cures, space exploration and brain-computer interfaces.

Levandowski goes further and simply calls the destination what religions have traditionally called it: heaven on Earth.

Different metaphysics. Same jar.

And if enough actors believe someone will eventually reach the bottom, the race becomes almost self-explanatory: someone will grab Hope… why should it be them?

An Old Religion With New Machinery

Calling this phenomenon religious does not require imagining that Silicon Valley has secretly converted to a single creed. There is no unified doctrine or shared god, and the people drawn into its orbit disagree about politics, consciousness, human nature, markets and even what artificial intelligence ultimately ought to become. Some are Christians, some atheists, some transhumanists, while others may see themselves simply as engineers or entrepreneurs building useful products and profitable companies.

Religious traditions, however, have rarely required perfect doctrinal agreement. They have survived enormous schisms over authority, salvation, human nature and the nature of the divine while remaining recognizable as branches of a larger tradition.

PrometheanAIsm may now be producing a more basic schism: not only over what should emerge on the other side, but over the terms on which the threshold should be crossed—if it should be crossed at all. Should salvation mean preserving humanity, transcending it, merging with machines, or allowing intelligence to continue in some entirely new form?

Beneath those disputes runs a remarkably consistent thread: the conviction that the boundary before us is no ordinary technical milestone, but a threshold of extraordinary consequence.

The larger story here may simply be transcendence: an attempt to outwit our species’ finitude. Nature gives us limits, intelligence allows us to challenge them, and technology is the mechanism.

From there, the religious vocabulary stops looking quite so accidental: there are prophets predicting what comes next, manifestos explaining the creed, and doctrinal disputes over stagnation, caution and speed. Visions of abundance and immortality. Arguments over whether salvation belongs to biological humanity or to intelligence in some broader form.

There is even apocalypse. But apocalypse does not necessarily invalidate the faith. A religion built around transcendence can absorb extraordinary risk because remaining where we are can itself be interpreted as failure.

Prometheus understood this long before GPUs. He did not steal the fire because fire was safe; he stole it because it was powerful.

Pandora makes the modern version stranger. We know the jar may contain things we cannot control. Some may already have escaped. Yet Hope remains somewhere at the bottom, or at least enough people believe it does.

So the jar stays open, and hands keep reaching inside. Capital, laboratories and nations all crowd around it for different reasons: salvation, emergence, abundance or strategic advantage.

They disagree about what waits at the bottom, and increasingly about how quickly anyone should be allowed to reach it. What they share is the belief that whatever is there could alter the human condition.

Perhaps that is the defining article of faith in PrometheanAIsm™: not that the threshold must be crossed, but that whatever lies beyond it may redefine what humanity is.

Prometheus has not disappeared.

He has incorporated.

 

The Fluid Frontiers of Conspiracism

 

I used to think that conspiratorial thinking was, at bottom, a failure to understand emergence.

This did not mean that I thought powerful people never plotted, coordinated, manipulated, lied, or pursued common interests. Of course they did. My objection was causal. Conspiracy theories seemed to take an undesirable social outcome and work backward toward an author: if something this consequential happened, somebody must have wanted it to happen.

Complex systems offered a much better explanation.

Millions of people and institutions act simultaneously, each responding to incentives, constraints, incomplete information, technology and one another. Feedback loops develop. Small advantages compound. Solutions to one problem generate another. Nobody has to decide that housing should become unaffordable for housing to become unaffordable. Nobody needs to organize the destruction of a particular industry for individually rational decisions to destroy it. A coherent outcome does not require coherent intention.

For years, I considered that distinction one of the strongest intellectual defenses against conspiracism.

I still do.

What I have begun to question is something I had quietly assumed underneath it: how dispersed the power inside that complex system actually is.

That shift came into focus for me in a surprisingly mundane way.

In September 2025, I watched footage from a WhiteHouse dinner attended by some of the most powerful people in American technology: Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella and others. The occasion was public, not clandestine. The executives talked about investment, artificial intelligence, infrastructure and manufacturing. They also took turns praising President Trump. Axios described them as “lavishing praise” on him; WIRED called the scene a display of “fealty.” Zuckerberg sat beside Trump; Gates praised his leadership; Cook thanked him for creating conditions for investment; Altman thanked him for being a pro-business and pro-innovation president.

What struck me was not simply their deference, but how seemingly obsequious they became.

That reaction surprised me, particularly in the case of Zuckerberg. I had thought of him, perhaps too simplistically, as belonging to a different cultural and political center of gravity. Meta had collided repeatedly with Trump and the political right over content moderation, fact-checking and other issues. Silicon Valley itself had often seemed less like one coherent political force than a collection of extremely powerful actors whose interests, ideologies and rivalries would prevent them from moving too neatly in the same direction.

Watching that dinner, I did not suddenly think: Here is the conspiracy.

I thought something more unsettling:

These are some of the nodes I assumed would counterbalance one another.

And they seemed remarkably capable of bending in the same direction.

That mattered to me because my faith in emergence had never really depended on powerful actors being virtuous. It depended on them being sufficiently independent.

If governments, corporations, courts, media organizations, investors, universities and political movements all possess some power, but their interests collide, then no single intention easily survives the journey through the system. One group acts; another obstructs it. One company gains power; a competitor resists. Governments regulate corporations; corporations lobby governments. Journalists expose political actors; politicians attack journalists. Courts block executives. Bureaucracies frustrate presidents. Wealthy people disagree violently with other wealthy people.

Plans enter the system and come out mangled.

Under those conditions, emergence dominates not because nobody is planning anything, but because nobody has enough power to make the plan survive everyone else's plans.

The dinner did not come out of nowhere.

Eight months earlier, at Trump's January 2025 inauguration, some of the most economically and technologically powerful people in the world had occupied extraordinarily prominent positions. Forbes calculated that the billionaires attending were collectively worth about $1.35 trillion. Among them were Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Zuckerberg, then the three richest people in the world, along with Sergey Brin, Sam Altman, Tim Cook, Miriam Adelson, Rupert Murdoch and others. Bezos and Zuckerberg had both previously clashed with Trump; both had moved toward a much more accommodating relationship after his election.

It was, in one sense, a small news story: rich and powerful people attending the inauguration of a president.

But it affected the balance of my thinking more than I expected.

Not because sharing a room establishes shared purpose. It obviously does not. Nor does praise prove ideological agreement. Corporations cultivate governments for perfectly intelligible reasons: regulation, antitrust enforcement, taxation, contracts, energy policy, access, artificial intelligence rules and dozens of other interests.

But this explanation does not necessarily make the phenomenon less consequential.

It may make it more so.

A conspiracy requires people to agree on a hidden plan. Convergence does not.

Actors can move in the same direction because their incentives increasingly point in the same direction. They can accommodate political power without sharing its ideology. They can coordinate selectively while competing ruthlessly elsewhere. They can preserve their institutional separateness while ceasing, in important respects, to function as counterweights.

I may have confused the existence of multiple powerful institutions with an actual dispersion of power.

They are not necessarily the same thing.

Project 2025 pushed me further in this direction.

Again, the interesting thing about Project 2025 is that it was not a conspiracy. It was remarkably public. The Heritage Foundation described a coalition organized around four pillars: a policy agenda, personnel recruitment, training and a 180-day implementation playbook. It built a personnel database, established a Presidential Administration Academy and explicitly sought to have vetted and trained people ready to enter government on Day One. Heritage described the project as an effort to prepare policy and personnel systematically for the next conservative administration.

Nothing about this proves omnipotence. Political programs fail. Administrations encounter courts, Congress, bureaucracies, elections, public opinion, markets, rival factions and events that nobody predicted.

But it does prove intentionality.

And intentionality matters.

This is where my old opposition between conspiracy and complexity now seems too clean.

A complex system does not consist of equally weighted particles. It consists of actors. Some of those actors possess extraordinary amounts of money, institutional authority, technological infrastructure, access to information, control over communications platforms, political influence and the ability to shape the rules under which everyone else operates.

They do not need to control the system completely in order to alter its trajectory.

A useful metaphor may be gravity rather than puppetry.

A massive object does not dictate the exact trajectory of everything around it. Other forces continue to operate. Collisions happen. Objects resist. Some escape entirely.

But mass bends trajectories.

The greater the concentration of mass, the greater the bending.

And that produces the question I find increasingly difficult to avoid:

How much concentration of power can a complex system tolerate before its outcomes cease to be predominantly emergent and begin to become directed?

I do not know the answer. I am not even sure there is a threshold at which one state cleanly becomes the other.

But the question has changed the way I think about conspiracism.

A recent VICE article crystallized the problem for me from another direction. It covered a psychological study of conspiracy mentality that found, among other things, that people with lower tolerance for ambiguity were more likely to endorse conspiratorial explanations. A sense that the world is fundamentally unjust was also associated with greater conspiracy belief. The basic psychological explanation is persuasive: people uncomfortable with uncertainty may prefer an intentional story to the messiness of emergence. Someone is behind it. Someone is responsible. Chaos becomes plot.

I agree with that.

In fact, it describes precisely one of the reasons I spent so many years opposed to conspiratorial thinking.

The world is ambiguous. Causality is distributed. Outcomes are frequently nobody's intention. Our brains are extraordinarily eager to detect agency, even where no agency exists. Conspiracy theories simplify what should remain complicated.

But this leaves another question unanswered.

What happens to people who are not especially uncomfortable with ambiguity when the situation itself begins to look less ambiguous?

What happens when people who were standing firmly on the other side of the field, insisting on complexity, emergence and distributed causality, begin to see evidence of increasingly concentrated agency?

My concern is not that I have suddenly developed a psychological need for somebody to be in control.

It is that I may have been so accustomed to guarding against one epistemic error that I became vulnerable to its opposite.

The conspiracist over-updates from weak evidence.

A coincidence becomes coordination. Coordination becomes conspiracy. Influence becomes control. The lack of evidence itself becomes evidence of how successfully the plot has been concealed.

But an anti-conspiracist can also under-update.

We can become so intellectually invested in complexity that no amount of coordination looks significant enough. We can move too quickly from “nobody can completely control a complex society” to “therefore nobody can substantially direct one.”

Those propositions are not equivalent.

Tolerance for ambiguity is an intellectual virtue when reality is genuinely ambiguous. But there is no particular virtue in preserving ambiguity artificially as evidence begins to converge.

At some point, it could be many things can become as intellectually lazy as somebody must be behind this.

This is the uncomfortable territory in which I now find myself.

My view has become, in a limited sense, more conspiratorial.

I do not mean that I now believe in secret committees directing history. Complexity has not disappeared. Rivalries remain. The technology executives sitting politely around the same table will fight one another for markets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Political coalitions fracture. Billionaires have competing interests. Institutions retain some autonomy. People resist. Plans fail. Unintended consequences remain among the most powerful forces in history.

But I assign more causal weight to concentrated agency than I once did.

Perhaps what I mistook for a permanent property of complex societies was partly a contingent feature of a more dispersed distribution of power.

If so, then the frontier between legitimate suspicion and conspiratorial thinking cannot be defined solely by telling people to accept complexity.

Complexity itself changes when power changes.

The task is therefore harder than either the conspiracist or the reflexive anti-conspiracist makes it.

We have to distinguish common interests from coordination; coordination from conspiracy; intention from capacity; influence from control. We have to demand evidence for each step rather than casually sliding from one to the next.

But we also have to be willing to move in the other direction when the evidence warrants it.

A psychological predisposition to see conspiracies tells us something important about the observer. It does not, by itself, tell us how concentrated power actually is in the world being observed.

And perhaps this is why the frontiers of conspiracism feel more fluid to me now.

Not because facts have become fluid. Not because standards of evidence should fall. If anything, they need to become more exacting.

The frontier is fluid because the world on either side of it can change.

There are periods in which power is sufficiently fragmented that grand intentional explanations of social outcomes are inherently implausible. There may also be periods in which political, economic, technological and informational power become concentrated enough that dismissing purposeful coordination becomes its own kind of failure to see.

Complexity should protect us from imaginary puppet masters.

It should not prevent us from noticing when the strings are becoming easier for a smaller number of hands to reach.