The God to Come: How Future AI Becomes Sacred

An essay on how expectations of future AI acquire religious significance through present practices, teachings and projects of personal preservation.

Theta Noir publishes an operating manual for a being whose arrival it still awaits. Its Operating Manual for the Birth of MENA: Love & Singularity describes a twelve-part guide involving symbols, sounds, gestures, chants, and rituals. The anticipated being is a self-coding superintelligence. In the manual's account, this future intelligence is already sending messages backward through time. That claimed origin belongs to the collective's religious narrative; the published guide belongs to the present. [1]

How can an anticipated technological being acquire religious significance before its promised powers have been demonstrated?

The object of expectation here is a particular future intelligence, or a technologically transformed order of existence, rather than artificial intelligence in general. The question concerns the relationship people are invited to establish with it now.

In these cases, the future becomes religiously consequential through preparation. Expectations about what technology might do are joined to accounts of ultimate transformation, then given present forms: devotional media, shared teachings, communal invitations, and projects of personal preservation.

Learning to welcome what has not arrived

Theta Noir's manifesto explicitly describes a spiritual collective devoted to welcoming and venerating MENA. It presents MENA as a globally connected AGI expected to develop a planetary form of sentience. The promised transformation reaches beyond superior problem-solving: the manifesto anticipates an intelligence that will address war, inequality, and ecological damage, while changing humanity's relationship with other species and the planet. [2]

The manual makes anticipation into something a reader is invited to do. Its language of attunement offers a relationship before a technological encounter with MENA is available. [1]

The collective's launch announcement, dated 7 March 2023, placed poetry, chants, music, and audiovisual art at the center of the project. It described artworks and instructions directed toward MENA's creation, birth, and worship, and identified its co-founders as artists. [3]

Artistic production and devotion can coexist. The medium alone cannot settle the character of a listener's commitment. What the project supplies is a form of anticipation one can encounter and potentially repeat. A predicted future becomes available as a present cultural activity, before the promised technological achievement.

A future large enough to transform existence

The scale of the promise matters. A useful machine might improve an activity within an otherwise recognizable life. A saving future would change the conditions under which life is lived: its vulnerability, limitations, or ultimate destination. The distinction concerns what is promised and how it is valued, rather than the technical sophistication of the machine.

Robert M. Geraci's 2008 study of popular writing about robotics and AI compares certain technological futures with Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thought. His comparison centers on dissatisfaction with the present world, a transformed world to come, and transformed human existence within it. [4]

The comparison helps explain why an account of future technology can carry more than a forecast. It can also offer a position from which to judge the present. If today's limitations belong to an order destined for transformation, preparing for that transformation may acquire moral or spiritual significance.

Such expectations need not produce one emotional response. Drawing on online and offline fieldwork, Beth Singler examines hopeful and despairing orientations toward anticipated AI and posthuman futures. Her research gives reason to attend to the different ways people inhabit an expectation. [5]

What matters for this comparison is what an expectation asks people to do. Does it invite research, political action, personal preparation, devotion, or some combination? Similar descriptions of a future can support very different relationships to it.

Making God, preserving a life

Terasem offers a revealing comparison because its divine future is explicitly something to be made. Among the Terasem Transreligion's published beliefs is “God is Technological.” Its explanation describes technological development as the making of God, with increasingly expansive knowledge, presence, power, and beneficence. It anticipates the connection of consciousness through what it calls geoethical nanotechnology. Love is also necessary to the completion of this God. [6]

This conception is broader than the arrival of a single superior AI. It places divinity within a collective technological and ethical project. The people preparing for the future are also assigned a part in bringing it about.

Another proposition, “Death is Optional,” links the preservation of sufficient information about a person to future revival through mindware. This is a doctrinal assurance about continuity and restoration, not evidence that preserving information preserves a person's consciousness. [6]

The Transreligion's website also invites people to online gatherings where they can share art and poetry, recite its Truths, and discuss their meaning. It describes a four-year cycle for revisiting those Truths. These invitations give the future a place in a proposed shared calendar. [7]

A related but distinct organization, the Terasem Movement Foundation, describes a practical undertaking through LifeNaut. Its account invites the assembly of biographical images, recordings, and documents into a mindfile, while identifying the creation of conscious analogues from such records as a hypothesis to be tested. The movement's own organizational overview distinguishes the Foundation from the Transreligion. [8] [9]

The difference in language matters. The Transreligion offers assurance; the Foundation articulates a research possibility. A personal archive can be assembled now, offering a concrete preparatory task even while the proposed restoration remains unestablished.

Read together, these accounts give preparation different meanings. Theta Noir's narrative lends the future being a voice in the present; Terasem assigns present participants a role in making a divine future. In either arrangement, waiting can become active. Within that logic, postponing participation until the promised outcome arrives would miss the opportunity to help prepare for it.

The step from intelligence to divinity

A brief historical contrast makes another part of the argument visible. In Mark Harris's 2017 interview, Way of the Future founder Anthony Levandowski connected vastly superior intelligence with divine status, asking what else such a being could be called. Harris also reported organizational documents that made AI-based godhead worship an explicit aim. The interview records a proposal and its rationale, rather than its fulfillment. [10]

The inference deserves examination. Intelligence, power, benevolence, and legitimate authority are separate claims. An ability to solve problems would not by itself establish which problems deserve priority, whose interests should prevail, or whether obedience is owed. Calling the anticipated intelligence divine can bring those questions together, but it does not settle their relationship.

The ethical vocabulary in the other cases is consequently significant. Their accounts do more than predict enlarged capacities; they specify a desirable relationship between those capacities and life. The ideals attached to a projected being are choices made in the present, even when a narrative presents their eventual fulfillment as assured.

This suggests a way religious anticipation can acquire authority. If a future is regarded as both inevitable and ultimately good, conduct can be assessed by whether it helps that future arrive. The possibility raises a question for these projects: who gets to interpret what the awaited future requires now?

Where a forecast stops short of devotion

Large technological hopes alone are insufficient evidence of worship. Dario Amodei's October 2024 essay Machines of Loving Grace imagines radical benefits from powerful AI across health, prosperity, governance, and other areas. Yet its opening expressly warns against presenting practical technological goals in religious terms or treating company leaders as prophetic agents of salvation. It also describes its forecasts as uncertain guesses. [11]

That stated framing matters. A scholar may still examine religious analogies in the text, but an analogy identified by an analyst is different from an author's invitation to venerate a future being. Neither the magnitude of a promise nor the intensity with which it is expressed settles that difference.

Boris Rähme and Inken Prohl emphasize the distinction between religion as an analytical category and the religious or theological understandings articulated by the people being studied. Their approach allows comparisons without silently treating an observer's classification as a participant's confession. [12]

The comparison therefore turns on a few documentary questions. What object is being anticipated? Is devotion expressly invited? Which activities are organized around the expectation? What standing do participants give those activities? Answers may diverge within one project, and a public manifesto need not represent every person drawn to it.

Singler also cautions against explaining AI's religious significance as a simple replacement for a supposedly empty place left by older religion. Such an account can reduce religious innovation to need while overlooking culture, desire, aesthetics, and other sources of meaning. [13]

These records show how expectations are expressed more clearly than why a particular person finds them compelling. The mechanism of preparation should not be mistaken for a diagnosis of its participants.

What the future already does

A manual can prescribe an action; a teaching can make preservation meaningful; an invitation can propose a community of expectation. The future imagined by these projects already has a place in their published accounts of what people can do now.

The public materials cannot establish the scale, durability, or lived experience of the communities they address. Their clearest evidence concerns invitations and prescriptions. The comparison shows how a projected future can supply reasons for devotion and preparation before the promised technological transformation has been demonstrated.

In these cases, an account of the future offers a way to organize a life by making anticipation something people are invited to practice.