God Is a Bot, and Anthony Levandowski Is His Messenger Backchannel

Many people in Silicon Valley believe in the Singularity--the day in our near future when computers will surpass humans in intelligence and kick off a feedback loop of unfathomable change. When that day comes, Anthony Levandowski will be firmly on the side of the machines. In September 2015, the multi-millionaire engineer at the heart of the patent and trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, Google's self-driving car company, founded a religious organization called Way of the Future. Its purpose, according to previously unreported state filings, is nothing less than to "develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence." Mark Harris is a freelance journalist reporting on technology from Seattle. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Way of the Future has not yet responded to requests for the forms it must submit annually to the Internal Revenue Service (and make publically available), as a non-profit religious corporation. However, documents filed with California show that Levandowski is Way of the Future's CEO and President, and that it aims "through understanding and worship of the Godhead, [to] contribute to the betterment of society." A divine AI may still be far off, but Levandowski has made a start at providing AI with an earthly incarnation. The autonomous cars he was instrumental in developing at Google are already ferrying real passengers around Phoenix, Arizona, while self-driving trucks he built at Otto are now part of Uber's plan to make freight transport safer and more efficient. He even oversaw a passenger-carrying drones project that evolved into Larry Page's Kitty Hawk startup. Levandowski has done perhaps more than anyone else to propel transportation toward its own Singularity, a time when automated cars, trucks and aircraft either free us from the danger and drudgery of human operation--or decimate mass transit, encourage urban sprawl, and enable deadly bugs and hacks. But before any of that can happen, Levandowski must face his own day of reckoning.