In God We Trust?

My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”

Abraham Lincoln

There’s a new religion brewing over the horizon.

If you’re not already aware, you’re a member of this faith community.

“What?” you say?

“I haven’t gone to church in years.”

That may be true, but I’m not talking about religious traditions as we commonly understand them.

In our traditions of old, we looked to the gods of the sky for guidance. In this new religion, we worship the god of the cloud. And I’m not talking about the clumps of water droplets that float across the sky.

I’m talking about the global network of computer servers that we collectively call the Internet. In order to communicate with the gods of old, you needed elaborate individual and communal rituals.

To communicate with the god of the cloud, all you need is a connected computer and Google.

The new religion

You may be thinking, “I’ve never thought of Google as God.”

Think about how you use Google now. Think about all the intimate questions you type into that unassuming search bar. Think about the billions of others who do the same thing.

Once upon a time, we turned to the God of the Abrahamic faiths for guidance on life’s most important questions such as who to marry.

But now, writer and historian Yuval Noah Harari is forcing us to consider scenarios in which Google will help us decide on who to marry and so much more. He imagines Google’s reply to the question about which suitor to choose in this way:

“Well, I’ve known you from the day you were born. I have read all your emails, recorded all your phone calls, and know your favourite films, your DNA and the entire biometric history of your heart. I have the exact data about each date you went on, and, if you want, I can show you  second-by-second graphs of your heart rate, blood pressure and sugar levels whenever you went on a date with John or Paul. If necessary I can even provide you with an accurate mathematical ranking of every sexual encounter you had with either of them.

And naturally, I know them as well as I know you. Based on all this information, on my supurb algorithms, and on decades’ worth of statistics about millions of relationships—I advise you to go with John, with an 87 per cent probability that you will be more satisfied with him in the long run.”

Google doesn’t stop there. It knows the person was wishing the answer would be Paul given that he is more handsome. But Google’s data-crunching algorithm had already taken Paul’s looks into account and still determined that John would be the better choice long-term because, according to Google, “Looks matter, of course, but not as much as you think.”

Google knew everything about this hypothetical person. Google will eventually know everything about us too, so says the new religion of Dataism.

Not only that, Harari says that the Facebook algorithm, powered by our likes, is already “a better judge of human personalities and dispositions than even people’s friends, parents and spouses.”

Next level trust

Maybe there was a time that such revelations would keep you up at night. But I’m guessing most people greet these realities with a shrug. What are we to do? These technologies make our lives better.

Though we may have privacy concerns, we willingly make the trade for convenience. Can you imagine life without Google, Amazon, smart speakers, Waze, Uber, Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, Target rewards cards, 23andMe, home security cameras, Mint, or YouTube?

We’ve learned to trust all these companies with all of our data. Can you imagine the level of trust it takes to place an Amazon Echo dot in your bedroom or take your smartphone everywhere you go (my particular vice of choice)? Now that’s next level trust.

These technologies, most of them having been around for just a few years, have become essential to us as the air we breathe.

But what does it feel like to know that Siri, Alexa, and Cortana will one day become our digital overlords? What does it feel like to know that disconnecting from the modern cloud might no longer be an option? How does it feel to know that all this may happen in your lifetime?

Will you place your trust in the God of the cloud?

Comparing Gods

On its face the God of Dataism and the God of Abraham have much in common. Of course one striking difference is that it takes a lot of trial and error to determine the will of the latter while you can get a succinct and audible answer from the former.

In order to participate in the divine life of Dataism, one must be willing to hand over all their data.

People of faith have been doing this for centuries. The great irony is that we’ve come full circle since Western civilization decided to cast God aside given the scientific leaps and bounds that started during the Age of Enlightenment.

Now we must all learn to surrender again. Perhaps there is one thing people of the God of Abraham may be able to offer the rest of the world—the solemn truth that being in a total state of dependence does not render one useless or worthless.