The most avid believers in artificial intelligence are aggressively secular – yet their language is eerily religious. Why?

“Both religion and science, he observes, are ways of transcending our inherently fragile condition; they are versions of a ‘rebellion against human existence as it has been given’.

But religious tropes in the AI community are motivated by more than the rejection of vulnerability. They are also grounded in a view of history as an upward, goal-oriented progression.”