



Some have names. In Denver, they can also help you buy a house. Register for Envision, and you will have two at your disposal: “‘Dante’ hunts for other listings that closely map to the selected style the user first chose, while ‘Eden’ offers a more expansive set of options, including properties with related or similar styles,” reports Inman, a real estate industry news site.

Some have bodies, and, like humans, they find that those bodies are susceptible to abuse. At the Arts Electronica Festival in Austria in September, men reportedly so soiled a sex robot named Samantha that her creator must now take her for repairs. The men broke two of her fingers, reports BBC Three, and “mounted” her breasts. “People can be bad,” Sergi Santos, her developer, told the BBC. “Because they did not understand the technology and did not have to pay for it, they treated the doll like barbarians.”

For now, bots belong to an evolutionary process we can control. And we exercise that control when they become too frisky. Months after Facebook’s El Moujahid extolled the virtues of “an automated army of messengers,” two Facebook bots began speaking in tongues. “i i can i i i everything else,” said Bob the bot; “balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me,” replied his botfriend Alice. Facebook shut down this program, though not, as was initially reported, because the results frightened their engineers. They didn’t achieve the desired results: Alice spoke of balls because engineers wanted her to barter with Bob for balls, making their chats a simple negotiation. Still, this doesn’t reduce the sense of creeping horror. We made an intelligence, and in a limited way it learned to speak for itself.

The god in all these scenarios is the human architect, not the bot under her control. But the Valley’s mightiest titans grasp their own innate limitations, and see salvation in their creations. If Thiel seeks young blood, it’s because he knows he’s going to die. The acolytes of Ray Kurzweil—the academic who helped popularized the Singularity, the idea that artificial intelligence will eclipse human intelligence and ultimately make it irrelevant—are itching to become one with a higher entity. And if Levandowski wants to make a Godbot, it’s because it theoretically possess a quality that he lacks: permanence, or something like it.

“Science is like religion, an effort at transcendance that ends by accepting a world that is beyond understanding,” John Gray writes in The Immortalization Commission. “Just like faith, reason must at last submit; the final end of science is the revelation of the absurd.” The chief hypocrisy of evangelical atheism is its reluctance to recognize the magical thinking in its own dogma. Intellect and religious feeling can co-exist, because that religious feeling springs from a place intellect doesn’t reach. The desire to transcend, to conquer, and to endure propels our drive to invent and maps our relations with those inventions.