Singularitarianism - Controversy

Controversy

Often deriding the Singularity as "the Rapture of the Nerds", some critics argue that Singularitarianism is one of many new religious movements promising salvation in a near-future technological utopia. Science journalist John Horgan wrote:

Let's face it. The singularity is a religious rather than a scientific vision. The science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod has dubbed it ”the rapture for nerds,” an allusion to the end-time, when Jesus whisks the faithful to heaven and leaves us sinners behind. Such yearning for transcendence, whether spiritual or technological, is all too understandable. Both as individuals and as a species, we face deadly serious problems, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, poverty, famine, environmental degradation, climate change, resource depletion, and AIDS. Engineers and scientists should be helping us face the world's problems and find solutions to them, rather than indulging in escapist, pseudoscientific fantasies like the singularity.

Although acknowledging that there are some similarities between the Singularity and the Rapture (i.e., millenarianism, transcendence), Singularitarians counter that the differences are crucial (i.e., rationalism, naturalism, uncertainty of outcome, human-caused event, nature of the event contingent on human action, no insider privilege, no religious trappings, no revenge against non-believers, no anthropomorphism, evidence-based justification for belief).

STS academic David Correia argues that the Singularitarian movement is encouraged and sponsored by a malevolent network of military and corporate interests in search of human enhancement technologies that serve to reinforce social inequality since the Singularity offers the conditions of permanent capitalist social relations and the bioengineering of bourgeois values. Correia concludes that Singularitarianism and the broader transhumanist movement are old-fashioned eugenics with better techniques passing itself off as pragmatic postmodernism.