Religious life, I think one thing we’ll see, and this is, again, pretty soon, it won’t be hard to create your own religion. I’m not sure many people will do this. I don’t think most people will. But they’ll be like accretions to the religions we have now. And I think with Fable 5, you could even do this already. Like, you ever actually try to read through the Hindu sacred texts? They’re pretty naughty, pretty detailed, quite long. Many parts are great and dramatic. I wouldn’t say they’re smoothly or evenly written. Not all of it is well written. They have significant meaning. For some people, a lot of people consume them through stories they’re told with their children. It’s not that every Hindu is like reading through the whole Ramayana. That’s all fine. But if you can sit down with, you know, the latest quad, whatever, and create your own set of sacred books. Again, I think like 2% of people are going to do this. Not most people. People have other interests, other hobbies. A lot of people aren’t religious. But if 2% of people do this, you end up with a lot of new religious accretions. Some of them will be totally new religions. But I think a lot will just be like, here are my sacred books of Christianity, or my add-ons to the Book of Mormon, or my whatever’s. There’ll be this extreme religious diversity. I don’t know, too much, too little. I think it will be quite different.

And you’ll get used to taking religious queries to the AIs. This already is the status quo. I’m pretty sure there’s no priest who knows the Bible as well as the strongest LLMs. So you have a question about the Bible, you know, where should you go? Well, you go to the LLM. Not everyone has internalized this, but a few years from now, it’ll just be understood. Rabbinical analysis, go to the LLM, and so on. So there’ll be this disintermediation of some of the priests, the rabbis, the imams, whoever the sacred intermediary figures are. They’ll be maybe modestly less important. So their ability to kind of crack the whip and say, hey, you can’t create your own religion, that’s not what I told you, that’s going to be a bit weaker, because you’re not going and asking them, oh, pastor, you know, in the Book of John, what does this mean? You’ll just ask your LLM, and the pastor will be some distant figure, or maybe he like sings a hymn at the church on Sunday, but he won’t quite have the force and authority. There may be fewer such people, just like there’s fewer Rob Wrights than Tyler Cowens. And again, that will make it easier for religions to multiply. Again, I’m not convinced it will be good. I think it will be pretty weird, very dramatic. Drama is not always a pleasant thing, but it’s another way to think about what this future will look like.

https://tylercowen.com/human-life-in-a-post-agi-world-talk/

Most of those feels like an acceleration to existing trends, rather than something new.