³The religious implications of artificial intelligence have been discussed before. Russell and Norvig[21, pg 961] state “In Computer Power and Human Reason, Weizenbaum (1976), the author of the ELIZA program, points out some of the potential threats that AI poses to society. One of Weizenbaum’s principal arguments is that AI research makes possible the idea that humans are automata–an idea that results in loss of autonomy or even of humanity. We note that the idea has been around much longer than AI, going back at least to L’Homme Machine (La Mettrie, 1748). We also note that humanity has survived other setbacks to our sense of uniqueness: De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (Copernicus, 1543) moved the Earth away from the center of the solar system and Descent of Man (Darwin, 1871) put Homo sapiens at the same level as other species. AI, if widely successful, may be at least as threatening to the moral assumptions of 21st-century society as Darwin’s theory of evolution was to those of the 19th century.” Jaron Lanier stated “All thoughts about consciousness, souls and the like are bound up equally in faith, which suggests something remarkable: What we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture.”[23]