Wikipedia says: """ […] one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the "bailey") […] """
The claim "the article is mischaracterising transhumanism" is saying the article's definition of transhumanism is a bailey, surrounded by the motte of "huh, these ideas sound a bit like Christianity and Revelations…"
I don't know the actual distribution of transhumanists who believe in any specific outcome of the singularity, but I would at least point at the simultaneous existence of e/acc (who think it will be good) and LessWrong (who mostly think it's going to be misaligned, meaning it goes off and does its own thing even when we don't want it to).
But even the most extreme ideas of what might be possible are still couched in terms of atoms, not magic.
People get hung up on the Pascal's Basilisk stuff, but "hard-takeoff singularity" is also semiotically indistinguishable from the Christian eschaton. Someone who shapes their life around the belief this is possible definitionally participates in what we need not also recognize as a Christian heresy - though a well-catechized Christian would - to recognize for the new religious movement (itself a term of art) which it is.
That's the bailey. The motte - where one such as my prior interlocutor seeks resort when challenged on the obvious and barely disguised roots of a faith no longer stabilized by the tradition from which it was severed - is "atoms, not magic" and "transhumanists don't actually believe the singularity is real." No actual defense of the concept, on which enough enthusiastically favorable not to say Marinettiesque ink has been spent over the last quarter century to exhaust an entire universe of squid. Just a Gish gallop of excuses, in the hope this will serve the role of the squid's own obscurantist jet - not yet, I'm sorry to say.
Back when I was at school, I actually read the Book of Revelation[0]. I don't see anything that matches it to hard-takeoff — when AI folks talks of gates, it's the logical kind, not what existed when Revelation was written; nothing about seals, final battles, falling stars, imprisoning of seven-headed dragons in bottomless pits, etc. — while I wouldn't be surprised to see some connections (given how little imagination most people show), I just don't see any meaningful connection with any singularity stuff to the eschaton I was raised with.
So, I assume you mean something of a non-Catholic eschaton? And specifically, you have in mind something from a denomination that, regardless of what it says about biblical literalism, doesn't actually pay much attention to what's written in Revelation?
Hard-takeoff only differs from soft-takeoff in the speed of events; given how slow Revelations is ("thousand years" of peace, which I assume was written to mean "a really long time" and not even intended literally), I think that if anything, slow-takeoff is a closer fit than hard-takeoff.
Also, and this is kinda important, the Christian eschaton seems to assume the "good guys" will win[1]. AI-driven singularities just says that some AI — possibly plural, possibly singular — will win, but doesn't tell you anything about the morality of the AI, or if it's a replicated single mind, or a pantheon of different minds. The default assumption from many is more like the Cthulhu Mythos than like anything recognised as a real religion. There's no ten commandments for humans to follow to get into the AI's good books. Even if there was, digital copies of minds and a complete control over matter are much closer to the Hindu and Buddhist ideas of reincarnation than to the various Christian heaven/hell/purgatory combinations.
Even just upvotes and downvotes get me "karma", after all.
[0] I was raised Catholic to get me into a Catholic school, but that's not directly why I read it. My mum thought I wasn't reading enough, so paid me more pocket money for reading more books, and it just happened to be available.
[1] Christ/Yahweh and 12,000 from each of the 12 tribes of Israel, the latter of which makes a lot more sense when considering that the thing was at that point still an offshoot of Judaism, and had not yet developed a long-running antisemitic streak
The Revelation of St. John the Divine is taken as a true eschatology by a smallish and very novel heretical splinter sect, arising in a land known for its tendency to produce such wild-eyed, footless new religious movements, and which has had a lately outsized profile. Don't mistake that for the doctrine of any of the Eastern or Western orthodoxies, or indeed even any of the mainline Protestant denominations. And "divine," in this usage, is a countable synonym for "mystic."
You said yourself you weren't catechized in that stuff. Neither was I, and I was also raised by Catholics. Your catechists should have warned you off this crap when they noticed you getting into it, the way mine did, and told you not to presume to know the mind of God. Not that that helped me a few years later, but at least I knew enough then to take the happy-clappy foot-washing Southern Baptist stuff as cynically as it deserved.
It's hard to argue much else in direct response here, since that confusion seems so pervasive - not precisely a criticism, only I would rather we start from a true axiom. I guess I would say I also see the cosmic horror aspect of it - something Land knows he's doing and Bostrom doesn't, though for the latter this is only one case of his pervasive confusion of genres - but I don't really see much cause to credit with similar insight most people who actually cherish the belief.
(Note specially also the phrase 'semiotically indistinguishable,' which is unusual. One example might be that stories based intentionally closely on Campbell's 'monomyth' structure tend rarely to be very semiotically distinct from one another. Here of course we discuss not a thousand-faced hero but a Tausendjährige kingdom of God, but in both cases we see the same superficial variation in expression of a consistent animating myth.)
Wikipedia says: """ […] one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the "bailey") […] """
The claim "the article is mischaracterising transhumanism" is saying the article's definition of transhumanism is a bailey, surrounded by the motte of "huh, these ideas sound a bit like Christianity and Revelations…"
I don't know the actual distribution of transhumanists who believe in any specific outcome of the singularity, but I would at least point at the simultaneous existence of e/acc (who think it will be good) and LessWrong (who mostly think it's going to be misaligned, meaning it goes off and does its own thing even when we don't want it to).
But even the most extreme ideas of what might be possible are still couched in terms of atoms, not magic.