Glenn Reynolds has an odd, but all too typical, defense of the bizarre notion of the technological singularity. Addressing critics of singularity theology, Reynolds writes,
I’ve heard talk about the Singularity dismissed as “the rapture for nerds,” but I think that’s mere dismissal, and not very persuasive. It is, instead, an illustration of Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I wrote a song about that, too, once but it wasn’t a hymn!
There might be some sort of argument in there, but I confess I cannot find it. Fortunately, Reynolds helps debunk the singularity nonsense by linking to a post by Phil Bowermaster. Bowermaster in turn quotes from singularity guru Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity Is Near. Kurzweil nicely illustrates the sort of nonsense that lies just under the surface of most strains of singularity arguments,
Evolution moves towards greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. In every monotheistic tradition God is likewise described as all of these qualities, only without limitation: infinite knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty, infinite creativity, infinite love, and so on. Of course, even the accelerating growth of evolution never achieves an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it certainly moves rapidly in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably towards this conception of God, although never quite reaching this ideal. We can regard, therefore, the freeing of our thinking from the severe limitations of its biological form to be an essentially spiritual undertaking.
This is fiction, not science. Kurzweil’s description of evolution as moving towards “greater levels of subtle attributes such as love” is simply Teilhard de Chardin’s teleological nonsense coated with a high-tech veneer. Instead of de Chardin’s Omega Point, we’re given the “singularity” which will bring transcendence.