The Language of Transhumanists Is Eerily Religious. Why?

The odd thing about the anti-clericalism in the AI community is that religious language runs wild in its ranks, and in how the media reports on it. There are AI ‘oracles' and technology ‘evangelists' of a future that's yet to come, plus plenty of loose talk about angels, gods and the apocalypse. Ray Kurzweil, an executive at Google, is regularly anointed a ‘prophet' by the media – sometimes as a prophet of a coming wave of ‘superintelligence' (a sapience surpassing any human's capability); sometimes as a ‘prophet of doom' (thanks to his pronouncements about the dire prospects for humanity); and often as a soothsayer of the ‘singularity' (when humans will merge with machines, and as a consequence live forever).