Forgiveness is a spiritual, religious concept.
As a child, I used to go to Catholic confession and tell the priest I'd sworn and stepped on a spider. I'd wait for the priest to absolve me and then ask whether I'd been taking sneak peeks at Playboy. (True story, I'm afraid.)
So when I heard that former President Donald Trump had pardoned former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski[1], my thoughts were only religious.
While Levandowski pleaded guilty to stealing Google's self-driving trade secrets[2], I was more interested in another, far more exalted aspect of his mission.
Levandowski was the founder, creator, and high priest of Way Of The Future. Just four years ago, he had explained to Wired[3] how this, the world's first church of artificial intelligence[4], represented "the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software."
It all sounded so exciting[5]: "What is going to be created will effectively be a god. It's not a God in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?"
Generously, this church wasn't just for questionably minded engineers. "I wanted a way for everybody to participate in this, to be able to shape it. If you're not a software engineer, you can still help," said Levandowski at the time.
What could I do, then, on the day of the high priest's return to the Godhead fold, then go to the Way Of The Future's website[6] to kneel, pray and hope for our next president to be a