Fifteen years ago, I sat down with the father of virtual reality, and he told me the Singularity was a religion for geeks.

I disagreed with him. To his face.

Jaron Lanier was no technophobe. He built the tech. He just refused to worship it. In 2011, that made him an outlier. Everyone in my orbit was mapping exponential curves and setting dates for digital immortality.

Now look at the culture around #AI.

We have prophets and prophecies, heretics and true believers, people who genuinely expect a machine god to arrive and solve death, meaning, and the economy on our behalf. Lanier saw the shape of that faith before most of us would admit it was a faith at all.

I still think he was wrong about parts of it. I also think he was early on the part that matters most: technology is the How. It was never going to answer the Why or the What. That is the work a religion does, and for a lot of brilliant people the #Singularity quietly became exactly that.

Was he right? Fifteen years on, you can decide for yourself.

The full conversation with Jaron Lanier, recorded May 2011: [ https://snglrty.co/47e4EDj](https://snglrty.co/47e4EDj)

Want to hear Jaron Lanier discussing why the singularity is a new religion? Check out his interview for www.SingularityWeblog.com