Coeckelbergh, Mark: Artificial Religion

How AI is shaped by Western religious culture and universal existential aspirations—and why we think we need it in the first place.

Artificial Religion argues that to fully understand our puzzling relation to AI, we must first look at the religious and existential background of our thinking about machines. Mapping some surprising connections between how we think about machines and Western religious narratives to political issues and existential human needs and aspirations, Mark Coeckelbergh looks back through history to offer a better understanding of how we think about machines and why we think we need them at all.

The book is unique in talking not just about the myth of AI in terms of its technical limitations and the power of Big Tech, but in revealing the deeper cultural “grammar” of AI—that is, the religious patterns of thinking and existential aspirations that are often not visible but still haunt Western thinking and shape its technological culture. Moreover, this is done in a way that also sheds critical light on the power of AI.