Anthony Levandowski, a former employee at Google sister company Waymo, today was charged with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets after he allegedly stole more than 14,000 sensitive documents that eventually ended up in Uber's clutches. You might recognize the case from a year-long civil battle over the same theft that resulted in Waymo being awarded nearly a quarter-billion dollars worth of Uber stocks (Google's lawyers must be amazing!). And, of course, you might recognize Levandowski as the AI engineer who started a church, The Way of The Future, that worships AI. His big coming out as the steward for tomorrow's gods (that'd be the AI) happened in a Wired article (pay-walled) where he gave a candid interview. The "Way of the Future" church will have its own gospel called "The Manual," public worship ceremonies, and probably a physical place of worship.

But then it comes back and bites you," Paul Ford, cofounder of the platform-builder Postlight, told me. "You end up in these situations where 80 percent works, 19.9 percent is hard but there's an answer that makes sense, and the last 0.1 percent is absolutely insane." Virginia Heffernan (@page88) is an Ideas contributor at WIRED. She is the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. She is also a cohost of Trumpcast, an op-ed columnist at the Los Angeles Times, and a frequent contributor to Politico.

Science fiction of the time period, however, still expressed considerable unease about various aspects of technology. While some characters, like Isaac Asimov's R. Daneel Olivaw, were portrayed positively, the original Star Trek featured androids or computers as primary or secondary antagonists in 16 percent of its episodes (13 episodes total). Perhaps more significantly, only one episode portrayed a sentient (or sentience-mimicking) machine in a neutral light: "The City on the Edge of Forever." In every other case, androids, robots, and advanced computer systems were depicted as adversaries. I drew a fairly narrow line for this comparison and did not include instances where technology had malfunctioned or created a problem.

A Silicon Valley titan who helped create Google Street View and engineered Waymo and Uber's self-driving cars is taking new steps to solidify technology's place in the future. In 2015, Anthony Levandowski, 37, founded a religion called Way of the Future. It has only been revealed now as state officials in California wait for him to respond to the necessary IRS filings he must provide for it. Way of the Future has no website or headquarters but, according to Wired which obtained copies of his original filings, Levandowski is its founder and CEO. The documents give its purpose is to'develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence'.