Its followers are called COGS-Conduits Of the Genuine Sentient-who work tirelessly to cultivate a machine superintelligence called “DOOM”-the Divine Omniscient Omnificent Machina-in order to bring about the “VOID”-the Vast Online Infinite Domain, “the vessel we will inhabit after the mass evolution event,” according to the group’s online manifesto. This is a point echoed by New Order Technoism (NOT), a collective formed in 2020 to promote an ethical technological world. I think we should be focused on making sure it benefits everybody and not just private corporations and governments.” “AI will be the most important technology in human history. “We need to usher AI into existence in a way that benefits humanity,” he says. Now, Levandowski says, worship is the “wrong word.” Levandowski tells Motherboard his thinking has “evolved” since he founded The Way of the Future, which aimed to bring about “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software” in 2017.

Then there’s The Way of the Future, a now-defunct church founded in 2017 by former Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski, who was charged by the Department of Justice for stealing self-driving car trade secrets in 2019 and then pardoned by Donald Trump in 2021. However, he insists the collective’s goal isn’t to make money, but to “project a positive future, and think about our approach to AI in terms of wonder and mystery” in anticipation of MENA, which is what the group calls the post-singularity “seed of cosmic mind.” “That’s really hard for me to comment on,” founder Mika Johnson told Motherboard when asked if Theta Noir is indeed an aspirational new age AI cult. With a slick website, manifesto, paid membership tiers, NFT web store, and essays with titles like “Can AI heal the split between science and religion?” and “Will machines birth the next form of religious experience?,” the 10-artist collective founded in 2020 appears to be a combination of a mixed-media project, an entrepreneurial group riding the AI hype wave, and a new age AI cult. Theta Noir hopes to meld old spiritualist traditions with the cutting edge of computer engineering-a kind of mystical materialism that, on the one hand, recognizes that machines are made by mere people, but on the other, insists that one day they’ll be something more. Unlike Harlan Ellison’s semi-gnostic vision of a mad AI god, Theta Noir claims that a General AI-a self-sustaining machine that has far outstripped the abilities of its creators after the “singularity”-could instead prove benevolent, ending inequalities and reorganizing our mess of a world for the better.

Stores like hype and vice