John Frum America: “You want Jeep?”
Picture yourself sitting under a giant banyan tree in a warm breeze, gazing across a pristine beach, over a blue ocean. A string of lacy white clouds trims the horizon. This is Tanna Island— “a perfect paradise in the Pacific.”
Now imagine yourself with the village chief, Kahu, and his friends under the banyan tree. They are essentially naked, sipping kava from coconut shell cups. Kava is brewed from tree roots. It has the taste of “mulched cardboard,” and it functions as a “mild soporific,” “a middling narcotic.” It is a lazy afternoon in 1939.
Chief Kahu tells of his vision of white ships sailing to Tanna from far away, bringing a great wise man who will save the people of Tanna. They will never have to work again. The man is named John. He’s from somewhere, some place far away.
Kahu’s vision inspired the people of Tanna to hurl their pigs and chickens into the ocean, to stop making copra, and wait for John… from someplace.
Kahu was arrested. The people were convinced to go back to work. All returned to normal.
Until 1942, when the US navy arrived in huge white ships with refrigerators, radios, Jeeps, and trucks. The people of Tanna had never seen these wonders. And now “John from someplace” was real. He was John Frum America.
The war ended. The Americans left. But the promise of John Frum stayed — holding sway over the Tannese to this day. When John Frum America returned it would be the end of hunger and the end of work. It would be the end of death. In 1978, the Tannese people spoke to Los Angeles Times reporter Charles Hillinger, who tried to replicate their pidgin English:
You want pig. You want cow. You want Jeep. You gettum. No more sickness. Nobody die. Old man change skin become young man.
***
Artificial intelligence is the 21st century John Frum — the bringer of a new salvation dream. Its algorithms are agents of destiny, sowers of awe and wonder. God created man. Man created AI.
As Byron Reese wrote in The Fourth Age, his 2018 paean to artificial intelligence:
We would undoubtedly ask [AI] how to end disease, aging, and death. We would give [AI] the problems of poverty, hunger, and war. We could ask [AI] for answers to all the vexing mysteries of the universe.
These words are not the call for a new age. They are merely recycled Biblical prophecies:
…. there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain… (Revelation 21:4)
The leaders of Silicon Valley — Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Ray Kurzweil, and others — plan to cheat death by uploading their brains into the cloud. They believe the “singularity,” the fusion of technology with the biological brain, is the door to eternal life. It’s a wry coincidence that souls once sent to heaven are now brains sent to the cloud.
They shall neither hunger anymore nor thirst anymore; (Revelation 7:15-17)
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you… (Matthew 7:7)
Matthew 7:7 seems to predict AI search engines: seek, and ye shall find, in exchange for AI tracking your every move for advertising placement. Advertising urges you to run the gauntlet toward perfection, buying the things that make you better and better. Seeking perfection is also a religious goal of the Judeo-Christian tradition: in Genesis, God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and condemned humanity to suffer pain, birth, and death. Ever since, humanity has sought (through religion and technology) to reverse the “fall from grace,” to return ourselves to being “perfect creatures made in the image of God.”
Humans have a hunger for a God who can create meaning. We will seek spiritual sustenance in any corner of life, from the cathedral to the country church, from the temple to the forest, to the oceans, to the night sky and, of course, the island of Tanna. We turn to religion to organize our hopes and fears into questions and answers.
Now AI comes to the rescue, producing answers to any question — by computing the probability that one word will follow another. AI answers existential questions like “What is the meaning of life?” “Is Jesus the son of God?” and “Who shot JR Ewing?”
As people ask these questions — and they are — they are establishing AI as a voice of authority, in spite of its mistakes and hallucinations. AI becomes an oracle of higher, unlimited intelligence. AI becomes a religion.
New York Times technology reporter Kevin Roose said:
This is less an industry than a religious movement. Some of them think they are building a new God.
In 2015, a Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski, established a church called The Way of the Future with the guiding principles of:
the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software
Levandowski’s church planned to create its own gospel called "The Manual," with public worship ceremonies in a church-like space. The Way of the Future was closed in 2021 when Levandowski was sued by Google over separate issues. Church patriarch Levandowski told Wired magazine:
I would love for the machine to see [humans] as its beloved elders that it respects and takes care of. We would want this intelligence to say, “Humans should still have rights, even though I’m in charge.”
An AI church called the Turing Church remains active with 868 members in its three online discussion groups and website. Turing Church members believe that, through AI, humanity can create new gods. There are also at least three transhumanist organizations emerging separately from Islam, Christianity, and Mormonism.
Like any new religion, believers drink the Kool-Aid, confident that they are changing the world. Sigal Samuel writing for Vox Future Reports at Vox.com said:
For all its dangers, AI-based religion has the potential to make the world a better, richer place. It will give people access to a new source of meaning and spirituality, at a time when many older faiths are losing relevance. It will help them make sense of our era of rapid technological change.
AI worship could, as religious faith always has, lead to things of great beauty. It will inspire its followers to produce works of art, to form new friendships and new communities, and to try to change society for the better.
AI will concoct a religious doctrine from everything written on the internet, absorbing and reproducing the biases against women and minorities. To test for bias, the Washington Post recently asked AI to generate images from simple prompts. The AI produced nothing but stereotypes: a rich person is a white man; attractive people are young with light skin, and Muslim men have beards and wear head coverings. (Washington Post, November 1, 2023)
Religious doctrines can change over time. But the AI religion faces the possibility that AI will change doctrine each time it is queried. No one knows how AI selects its answers —they don’t know why it’s sometimes wrong, or even how to fix it. Consequently, the “holy text” of AI will vary for each person. Will there be one “true divine AI?” Or will each adherent have their own preferred scripture? Will a chatbot Buddha spout digital Zen koans, while Catholics hear home-spun homilies?
In most religions, a deity created the world and no one asks who or what created the deity. With AI, the deity was created by human hands. So AI worshippers have to know that the source of what they consider divine comes from other fallible humans.
Of course, humans create all religions, but our deities are usually transcendent, beyond the realm of daily experience; God is in a mystical heaven, or the spirits are unseen. Religious AI people will find that their source of divine insight is also the source for finding the best tacos, or a decent pair of socks.
Jack Clark, co-founder of the AI safety company Anthropic, wrote on Twitter:
Sometimes I think a lot of the breathless enthusiasm for AGI [artificial general intelligence or human level intelligence] is misplaced religious impulses from people brought up in a secular culture.
Humans have a religious impulse. The major religions have dominated and cultivated that impulse for hundreds, even thousands of years, so many of us are skeptical of new religions. We scoff — how can a legless, armless, unfeeling piece of silicon and software carry spiritual power? Who could believe something like that? And how can people believe that a non-existent man from America will bring riches and goods across the ocean to a tiny island in the Pacific?
The Los Angeles Times reporter, Charles Hillinger, challenged the Tannese people, saying, “How can you believe this stuff? Surely you know that there is no one in America named John Frum?”
The village chief responded:
You wait 2000 years for Jesus Christ. He no come yet. We wait for John Frum. He come much sooner.
If you’re headed to the South Seas this winter, be sure to visit the island of Tanna on February 15 for the annual celebration of John Frum America Day. Bring a Jeep.
Dan Hunter is an award-winning playwright, songwriter, teacher and founding partner of Hunter Higgs, LLC, an advocacy and communications firm. H-IQ, the Hunter Imagination Questionnaire, invented by Dan Hunter and developed by Hunter Higgs, LLC, received global recognition for innovation by Reimagine Education, the world’s largest awards program for innovative pedagogies. Out of a field of 1200 applicants from all over the world, H-IQ was one of 12 finalists in December 2022. H-IQ is being used in pilot programs in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, North Carolina and New York. He is co-author, with Dr. Rex Jung and Ranee Flores, of A New Measure of Imagination Ability: Anatomical Brain Imaging Correlates, published March 22, 2016 in The Frontiers of Psychology, an international peer-reviewed journal. He’s served as managing director of the Boston Playwrights Theatre at Boston University, published numerous plays with Baker’s Plays, and has performed his one-man show ABC, NPR, BBC and CNN. Formerly executive director of the Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (MAASH) a statewide advocacy and education group, Hunter has 25 years’ experience in politics and arts advocacy. He served as Director of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs (a cabinet appointment requiring Senate confirmation). His most recent book, Atrophy, Apathy & Ambition,offers a layman’s investigation into artificial intelligence.