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They Don't Believe In God... They Believe They've Created One

Tyler Durden's Photo
by Tyler Durden
Authored...

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

The same crowd that spent years sneering at faith now wants America to treat a computer program like the Almighty - and hand the keys to a global watchdog while Beijing keeps building unhindered.

Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale told Jesse Watters the panic over AI is not some spontaneous outbreak of civic caution. It is a coordinated campaign to scare the public into slowing the one industry that still gives the United States a decisive edge.

Lonsdale's diagnosis was blunt. The loudest doomers, he said, have already discarded Christianity. What they put in its place is a machine.

"These guys don't believe in God. They're atheists, but they've created something they believe is God," Watters said, laying out Lonsdale's point. "This is their Messiah, and this is their end of the world."

Lonsdale argued the fear campaign is doing exactly what it was built to do: stampede Washington into rules that favor the biggest labs and the most political operators.

"There is a coordinated campaign to make the American people afraid," he said.

He tied the theology of the panic to the culture that produced it. San Francisco, he said, has largely given up Christianity. When a civilization drops its old faith, it still wants a messiah and an apocalypse.

"If you give up religion, you want some kind of messianic complex, some kind of big thing to believe in," Lonsdale said. "These effective altruists - this is their Messiah, this is their end of the world, this is their obsession."

Watters asked the obvious follow-up: so these people don't believe in God, they're atheists, but they've built something they treat as God?

"I think that's a big part of what's happening," Lonsdale replied. AI is real, he added. An industrial revolution is coming that would be "amazing for America if we get it right." The people trying to stop it, he said, "hate America."

That is the frame the doomer class never wants discussed. Not safety as engineering. Not narrow, targeted rules for the handful of systems that can actually do damage. A substitute church, complete with prophets, end-times charts, and a demand that the state enforce the creed.

Watters had already mocked the surrounding media script, calling it a diet of "fantasies from a bunch of sci-fi freaks."

Lonsdale has been saying the same thing off-camera. After an Anthropic researcher quit and warned that frontier labs were "gambling with our lives," Lonsdale posted: "The world is going to be alright, guys. Leaders have big responsibilities and challenges ahead, but it doesn't help to scare everyone. We are on top of it."

Scare everyone, then regulate everyone. That is the play.

Scott Jennings spotted the pattern immediately. Climate. Covid. Now silicon.

"It's always the same apocalyptic crowd moving from one issue to the next," he notes. "Responsible guardrails are one thing, but handicapping American innovation while China speeds ahead with zero regulation isn't sound policy - it's just foolish."

Beijing is not holding a pause-and-pray summit. Chinese firms have been accused by U.S. officials of stripping American models "at an industrial scale." China's spy chief, Chen Yixin, has called AI a threat to "political security, institutional security, and ideological security" and demanded tighter Party control - which is another way of saying the CCP wants the weapon, not a shared conscience.

President Trump has already rejected the slowdown. "We're leading China in AI," he said. "Whoever wins AI, wins." He added that a lot of the horror stories being shopped around "won't happen," and later wrote that a "SICK conspiracy" against AI and data centers has one obvious beneficiary: China.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made the same point when Rep. Maxine Waters tried to bounce Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Anthropic off him as if their press tours were holy writ. "They could stop any time they want to," Bessent said.

They could. They haven't. They want Congress to do it for them.

The political demand behind the theology landed this week from Bill Gates. The Microsoft co-founder is back on the emergency circuit, this time calling AI an "alien intelligence" that no government is ready for - and insisting the answer is an international organization to police it.

Bill Gates Calls For GLOBALIST Crackdown On AI

In a Reuters interview, Gates said, "I don't think any government is nearly as deep on this as they have to be." Then: "Governments are way behind on this one." He reached for the Hollywood script. "There's all sorts of movies where some aliens are coming, and magically the US and China and everybody comes together to solve the problem," he said. "AI is kind of like this alien intelligence. It's here, and we better do like it shows in those movies."

On a podcast, he went further: "It's not the role of the industry to self-regulate or understand the whole-of-society impact that comes out of AI." In an August essay he called the transition "one of the most turbulent times in human history" and floated a permanent cross-border watchdog built from pieces of nuclear inspections, aviation rules, and ozone treaties. He has pitched the idea to Trump's team and says he wants a meeting with Xi Jinping later this year.

Left to the market, Gates warned, "AI will be designed by and for the richest people in the world." The good outcome, he said, "won't happen by accident." His foundation then pledged $1 billion over two years to spread AI through education, health, and agriculture - a reminder that the man selling the panic is also buying the pipeline.

The chorus around him is familiar. Barack Obama told Democrats to get "on top of" a technology "moving very fast in private hands." Bernie Sanders called a runaway system "humanity's problem" and again demanded a pause-and-ban deal at the coming Trump - Xi meeting. House Democrats rushed to agree. The Netflix circuit is already warming up the next Inconvenient Truth.

None of that is a safety protocol. It is a bid to internationalize control of a technology American labs still lead.

Narrow rules for real dangers - bioterror tools, open-weight models that hack at scale, systems that should not ship to the CCP - are not the same thing as a global pause designed in Davos and enforced by inspectors wandering through American labs. One protects the country. The other kneecaps it.

Lonsdale's point cuts through. A class of people who no longer believe in God have built a machine they talk about as if it were God, then demanded that Washington and a new Globalist body kneel with them.

Whoever wins AI, wins. The people treating the code as their Messiah are asking America to lose on purpose.

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