What technology? Agriculture? The steam engine? The automobile? Modern medicine? Cryptography? The Internet? LLMs? Nanotechnology?

Who are these people? Jonas Salk, widely credited as the inventor of the polio vaccine? Sam Altman, fundraiser extraordinaire? Peter Thiel, exalter of The World-Saving Founders? Ray Kurzweil? Technocrats? Other techno-optimists? Perhaps transhumanists? There are many variations, and they differ by quite a lot.

What kind of god? Carl Sagan has a nice interview where he asks a question-asker to define what they mean by “god”. A blind watchmaker? Someone who can hear your prayers? A wrathful smoter of the wicked and (sometimes) the loyal (sorry, Job!)? A very confusing 3-tuple, one element of which birthed another, who died somehow but was resurrected? The essence of nature? The laws of physics? An abstract notion of love? Yeah. These three letters are too vague to be useful unless unpacked or situated in a mutually understood context. It often fosters a flimsy consensus or a shallow disagreement.