Holy Ghost in the Cloud (review article about christian transhumanism)

Yeah, as if different groups of people couldn't independently have a honest desire to improve their living conditions, even if they have wildly different models of the world, and consequently different strategies to achieve that outcome.

Religious people are irrational, but not evil.

I think there's a rule-of-thumby reading of this that makes a little bit more sense. It's still prejudiced, though.

A lot of religions have a narrative that ends in true believers being saved from death and pain and after that people aren't going to struggle over petty issues like scarcity of goods and things. I run into transhumanists every so often who have bolted these ideas onto their narratives. According to some of these people, the robots are going to try hard to end suffering and poverty, and they're going to make sure most of the humans will live forever. In practice, that goal is dubious from a thermodynamics perspective and if it wasn't, some of our smarter robots are currently doing high-frequency trading and winning ad revenue for Google employees. That alone has probably increased net human suffering -- and they're not even superintelligent

I imagine some transhumanism fans must have good reasons to put these things in the narrative, but I think it's extremely worth pointing out that these are ideas humans love aesthetically. If it's true, great for us, but it's a very pretty version of the truth. Even if I'm wrong, I'm skeptical of people who try to make definite assertions about what superintelligences will do, because if we knew what superintelligences would do then we wouldn't need superintelligences. It would really surprise me if it looked just like one of our salvation narratives.

(obligatory nitpick disclaimer: a superintelligence can be surprising in some domains and predictable in others, but I don't think this defeats my point, because for the conditions of these peoples' narrative to be met, we need the superintelligence to do things we wouldn't have thought of in most of the domains relevant to creating a utopia)

This reminds me how some people notice that superintelligent AI is just another version of Golem... but the same people fail to notice that the ordinary computers around us are already just another version of Golem.

Which further reminds me of Chesterton writing:

Students of popular science [...] are always insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike [...] The reasons were of two kinds: resemblances that meant nothing because they were common to all humanity, and resemblances which were not resemblances at all. The author solemnly explained that the two creeds were alike in things in which all creeds are alike, or else he described them as alike in some point in which they are quite obviously different. [...] it was gravely urged that [Christ and Buddha], by a singular coincidence, both had to do with the washing of feet. You might as well say that it was a remarkable coincidence that they both had feet to wash.

It always annoys me when people try to evaluate ideas from their social context rather than their content.

But are you really evaluating the content of transhumanism from outside your social context? Most transhumanists are humanists, and thus can trace their philosophical lineage back through the Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation, Catholic monks translating Aramaic texts into Latin, Zoroastrians and Muslims translating Greek texts into Aramaic, and Hellenistic post-Socratic philosophers writing their ideas down in reaction to pre-Socratic ideas (and this is just where the paper trail ends). All of that context has helped shaped modern humanism, and through that context humanists have notions of what they consider epistemologically sound and what values they support. These influence how humanists evaluate the content of transhumanism.

At best we might say that because transhumanism was developed by humanists, the humanist interpretation of transhumanism is privileged because it gives perspective on the origins of the ideas, yet that doesn't mean we can't find other contexts in which to make sense of transhumanism. To deny them, or even just be annoyed by them, is to exert pressure against the very process that generated transhumanism in the first place: successive reinterpretation and expansion of ideas that have their origins in pre-Socratic Hellenism.

There is no way to consider transhumanism, or any idea, outside of a context; to do so is to blind oneself to the lens through which one sees the world.

I resent that religious people would try to co-opt all this work and at this late date contemplate the idea of a digital entity with a "soul."

At the risk of being rude, this sounds more like your problems than theirs. I'm not sure religious transhumanists are even that late to the party: we happen to be part of a community that got there very early and has been slowly prepping the party so it'll be ready when folks arrive. Maybe religious folks want to dance to different music than we do and you might find that annoying, but is that better than no one showing up to the party at all? And if we don't like it we can always go hang out in a room upstairs for a while without leaving, because the music will eventually change. It always does.

This is a good point. It's hardly surprising that the utopia we fantasise about is the same as the one we try to create.

Then why the hell is that written in the bronze age book that you claim knowingly predicted this outcome?

The New Testament is not really a bronze age book. Wikipedia states that the bronze age ended in the near east region around 1200 BC.