the Singularity’s superintelligent, benevolent machines will purportedly reduce the multifarious wicked problems of politics, economics, and sociology to a single matter of sufficiently clever computer programming for a sufficiently powerful computer. This is the real appeal behind the modern idea of the Singularity: the seductive promise of all qu

the ideology of technological salvation, which garbs itself in the raiment of science, understanding the power held by the imprimatur of scientific truth. Science is invoked as justification for the claims made by the ideology on the one hand, while actual scientific concerns about the plausibility of these claims are dismissed by the other hand, j

the ideology of technological salvation, sits at the core of the worldview held by many venture capitalists, executives, and other “thought leaders” within the tech industry. This ideology promises a glorious future: technological progress, unchecked.

perhaps most importantly, these ideas offer transcendence, allowing adherents to feel they can safely ignore all limitations.

Social problems and political problems—like the problems created by tech companies themselves—are dismissed as irrelevant or unimportant when compared to more urgent problems, like avoiding the creation of an improperly aligned AI or the plight of the hypothetical unborn quadrillions of humans that could live on the other side of the cosmos a billi

First, these ideas are reductive, in that they make all problems into problems about technology.

It’s easy to adapt the moral framework of longtermism to fit into the ideology of your choice. Almost anything can be justified in the name of saving the future of civilization.

The credence that tech billionaires give to these specific science-fictional futures validates their pursuit of more—to portray the growth of their businesses as a moral imperative, to reduce the complex problems of the world to simple questions of technology, to justify nearly any action they might want to take—all in the name of saving humanity f

Transhumanism is the belief that we can and should use advanced technology to transform ourselves, transcending humanity and becoming something more. That generally involves finding ways around the limits of the human body—ending illness, aging, and death—as well as increasing intelligence and other mental capacities.