I should admittedly be a lot more diligent about citing my sources—I held off on doing so in this post bc I thought it would look awkward in what is ultimately just a brief bullet-point summary, but will do so more extensively in later posts!
OttokarHochman
Karma: 4
Ho boy is there ever!. This rabbit hole goes so, so much deeper than most people realize, in a way that tends to get missed because the primary missing link between the two—post-Restoration English Nonconformity—has mostly gone forgotten in popular history.
As just a teaser, for instance—Bayes’ Theorem was co-authored by two Nonconformist clergymen, Thomas Bayes and Richard Price. The latter became interested in it in part because he thought it proved the existence of God, which for him also implied that human progress was the unfolding of divine providence on earth building into the Second Coming. He gave sermons along these lines in favor of the American and French Revolutions, and the latter of those was the specific event that Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France in response to: he is the “Dr. Richard Price” addressed in that essay.
To be clear here I am not trying to suggest that all people who find the singularity a bit silly—I would include myself in this category—share some sort of underlying religious assumption, only that most vocal technology critics like Gebru and Torres who both oppose things like singulatarianism and accuse it of being deeply, intrinsically connected to the entire ideology of “progress” and “technology” as a whole are mostly drawing on previous thought which was based on such religious assumptions, even if they themselves are not aware of it.