During an interview last week with journalist Pedro Pinto, atheist and World Economic Forum senior advisor Yuval Noah Harari asserted that within “a few years,” a new religion will emerge whose author is artificial intelligence.
While dismissing the validity of religion as a whole, Harari specifically took aim at Christianity, suggesting that AI can rewrite a new, more correct Bible.
“[Artificial intelligence is the] first technology ever that can create new ideas. The printing press, radio, television, broadcast spread the ideas created by the human brain, by the human mind. They cannot create a new idea. You know Gutenberg printed the Bible in the middle of the 15th century. The printing press printed as many copies of the Bible as Gutenberg instructed it, but it did not create a single new page,” Harari stated. “It had no ideas of its own about the Bible. Is it good? Is it bad? How to interpret this, how to interpret that. AI can create new ideas [and] can even write a new Bible.”