https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-language-of-transhumanists-and-religion-so-similar
'Orthogenesis assumes that variation is not random but is directed towards fixed goals.' [Peter Bowles, Evolution: the history of an Idea, 1983] So evolution isn't something that happens to us; rather it is what we make of it, and how we make our selves. Taken a step further, orthogenesis can be read to imply that intention is what brings about change.
This view of human history has a distinctively modern flavour. It stands in contrast to an older, more cyclical model of time, in which 'history waxes and wanes like the moon', as the historian Keith Thoams puts it in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). Because everything moves in cycles, Thomas argues, 'the highest aesthetic and ethical virtue lay in imitation, or rather emulation'. Here an inventor becomes someone who finds what has been lost, not omeone who comes up with something new. But there was a growing grasp of change in Europe from the 16th century onwards, Thomas argues; people developed a fresh awareness of the differences between their world and that of their ancestors, based on data-points as simple as the dates of publication in books, fresh off brand-new printing presses. Such shifts led to the belief that knowledge was cumulative, not cyclical - which is the mindset of the scientist and of the ultra-rationalist. If time marchs on, then of course religion becomes old, vestigial, to be replaced.
Religious worldviews often retain something of the cyclical view of history, where old books are not relics but the foundation stones of knowledge.
A god-like being of infinite knowing (the singularity); an escape of the flesh and this limited world (uploading our minds); a moment of transfiguration or 'end of days' (the singularity as a moment of rapture); prophets (even if they work for Google); demons and hell (even if it's an eternal computer simulation of suffering), and evangelists who wear smart suits (just like the religious ones do). Consciously and unconsciously, religious ideas are at work in the narratives of those discussing, planning, and hoping for a future shaped by AI.
