One of the engineers behind Google's self-driving car has established a nonprofit religious corporation with one main aim – to create a deity with artificial intelligence. According to newly uncovered documents filed to the state of California in September 2015, Anthony Levandowski serves as the CEO and president of religious organisation Way of the Future. The documents, discovered by Wired's Backchannel, detail that Way of the Future's mission is "to develop and promote the realisation of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society". No more is known about the specifics of Way of the Future's Godhead, so it seems unlikely that a figure will be revealed any time soon. But the emergence of the documents demonstrates how the rapid advancement of AI and bioengineering is forcing discussions around how humans and robots will coexist on earth.

The mass-scale deployment of robots has already ushered in a whole new world of work. It's a CEO's capitalist paradise, where the workforce doesn't call in sick or take vacations, can't file lawsuits, doesn't organize unions, and is cheap. As a result, robots are rapidly climbing the pay ladder into white-collar and professional positions that millions of college-educated, middle-class employees have wrongly considered safe....