There is a subset of the pro-Singularity individuals that is acting in an a very religious fashion. See prior discussion here where ata pointed to the Singularity 2045 Facebook group which includes the text:
To raise awareness of the Singularity, which is expected to occur no later than the year 2045, we must reach out to everyone on the 1st day of every month.
At 20:45 hours (8:45pm) or earlier on the 1st day of each month we will send SINGULARITY MESSAGES to friends or strangers.
Example message:
"Nanobot revolution, AI aware, technological utopia: Singularity2045."
Year 2045 is our deadline for the Singularity. Heightened awareness will ensure the Singularity happens sooner rather than later. Our goal is to make the Singularity happen by 2045 at the latest.
This isn't just a small group of random people either. Michael Anissimov and Aubrey de Grey are both administrators.
I would hope this is simply a case of both of these individuals joining any singularity-related FB groups for PR, and the original admin seeing this and granting them admin privileges.
Myself, I am less disturbed by people taking the Singularity as if it were the Rapture than I am by people taking the Singularity as if it were just the excuse they needed to feel happy about slacking off and underachieving.
"The Singularity is my retirement plan", that sort of thing. Ew.
There are different questions here:
In case of Singularity, neither of these senses is trivial. Quite a few Singularity believers are cult material, and there are senses of "Singularity" that are clearly wrong.
Well, it might conceivably be worth asking the question "Does the Singularity hypothesis share enough features with religious hypotheses that organizations dedicated to thinking about it run a significant risk of demonstrating other attributes of religious/theological organizations?"
Along with the related "If so, would that be a bad thing, and what could we do to mitigate that risk?"
That said, my own answers are "Not especially, although some of the same sorts of people who would otherwise be attracted to religious concept-cluster...
Wally Weaver: You see, at the time I was misquoted. I never said 'The Super-man exists and he is American', what I said was 'God exists and he is American'. Now if you begin to feel an intense and crushing feeling of religious terror at the concept, don't be alarmed. That indicates only that you are still sane. (Watchmen)
There is something to it.
There's a rather uncommon theological position - espoused by Paolo Soleri (and perhaps by others) - that God, the rapture, etc. are better regarded as a potential future, as something we have a responsibility to create, than as something pre-existing; in this view, religious texts can be viewed as imperfect but still visionary accounts of what such a thing might look like. The Singularity hypothesis seems to fit better in this model of religion than in more mainstream models. Soleri's theology seems far less pathological than religions tend to be, since it calls for both concrete action and accurate models of reality, so maybe this isn't such a bad thing.
The line I came up with, when asking the question to myself, was this: If the singularity is a religion, it is the only religion with a plausible mechanism of action.
Religion isn't just a set of "hypotheses", though; it's also a set of human social behaviors. Religions entail various sorts of group and individual practices — such as worship ritual, fellowship, prayer or meditation, study of received texts, adherence to charismatic leaders, moral correction of "straying" members, instruction of children, evangelism of adults, rites of passage (including baptisms, weddings, and funerals), financial support of institutions and leaders, and so forth.
Not every "religion" has all of these, and s...