>But singularity isn't a dream, it's a religious salvation story.

Ok, as long as we're bothering to make this distinction, I don't think that's correct. Most singulatarians I've hung out with place the locus-of-control in their story internally: they believe that, as a group, they will ensure that The Singularity comes to pass, in all its Charles-Strossian-weirdo-glory. As detailed in the article, they have actual groups that are trying to make this happen. They can be incompetent at it, but you can't say they're sitting around waiting for someone else to save them.

They're more like Communists than Christians.

>the difference between this religion and other, older ones is that older religions focused on morality and human nature, while this one is not even about humans at all.

If you followed the article, the whole movement we're talking about has a loud, public component called Effective Altruism who follow Peter Singer's (noticeably Christlike, for all I'm not at all Christian) idea of giving away large portions of their personal income to the highest-impact disease-fighting and antipoverty charities operating in the Third World. Extreme, impersonal charity might be inhuman, in some degree, but I'd be hard-pressed to call it either immoral or disconnected from moral concerns.

>The part about the guy weeping because previous generations didn't have Kahneman was clearly written to reflect Christian sorrow for the generations prior to the coming of Christ

A guy wept because previous generations didn't have Kahneman and Tversky's foundational findings in behavioral economics? Excuse the following several minutes of nonstop giggling.

Sorry, now, you're telling me it's patterned after some Christian thing? I can't really tell yes-or-no here, since I've got no background in Christianity.

>but the latter group is sad about those who didn't hear Jesus's message about kindness and love, while the former was crying about those who couldn't tweak their minds to be more robot-like (not that he can, either, but at least he imagines he can).

Well, this provides a good opportunity to sum up, and to mention a couple of things.

Firstly, I too find it funny that people want to tweak themselves to better operate as fully, calculatively rational utility maximizers. There's a whole literature of bounded rationality showing that throwing out one's information and computation bounds and just trying to approximate unbounded rationality in finite space is a very bad idea ;-)!

But secondly, just saying, if people once got sad about others not hearing Jesus's message of kindness and love, well, what of these people and Peter Singer's message of realizing kindness and love in the here-and-now?

Or, to get one level crazier, what of the people going to Secular Solstice and weeping that mankind has not yet defeated death, and that we will all lose our loved ones, suffer ourselves, and then die ourselves? I rather imagine that the single fundamental fact of the human condition as we know it is an entirely appropriate target for religious yearnings!

The Buddha said, "Existence is suffering." The extropians said, "Let's fix that." Disagree with their cause, or predict that they'll fail, and we can converse sensibly about why they're wrong. Making fun of them for falling into the common psychological modes of religion, and I think you're missing the big human-condition-shaped elephant in the room that simply isn't going to go away.