The cultish behavior of top AI figures (2024)

A Rolling Stone essay argues that the hype around AI at CES and among investors like Marc Andreessen resembles cult dynamics, citing psychologist Robert Lifton's concept of "voluntary self-surrender" and comparing tech evangelism to Scientology. The author describes products such as the Rabbit R1 and rhetoric from NVIDIA, Google, and McDonald's executives, contrasting vague promised benefits with specific harms like voice-cloning fraud and algorithmic bias. It also examines the effective accelerationism (e/acc) movement and the Rationalists, including Roko's Basilisk, as evidence that AI belief has taken on religious form.