Gary Kasparov, the Russian-born World Chess Champion and among the most brilliant strategists to ever play the game, would lose to an IBM supercomputer named Deep Blue in 1997. If chess is a game that requires cunning and guile, empathy and elegance, than Deep Blue was able to simply beat Kasparov with nothing but his programming, no soul but algorithm. Losing a chess game is a prosaic affair, except when the person who has lost is the greatest player in the world and the winner isn’t conscious and lacks all interiority. Kasparov wrote in How Life Imitates Chess that the game is a “unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind, and are then refined and improved by experience,” a description of an emphatically human activity, except of course it apparently isn’t. Six games played in a New York City rematch in 1997, a year after Kasparov had roundly defeated Deep Blue, except this time the computer outright won two of the six games, and played the grandmaster to three draws. In that final game of the set, Deep Blue sacrificed a knight, somewhere making the decision in its wiring that the elimination of this piece was justified. Kasparov assumed that it was a mistake, that the computer wasn’t capable of the artful error in service of the greater strategy. He was wrong, the chess master’s defenses would become scrambled; Deep Blue beat the greatest player of the game in only twenty moves. A fable about man vs. machine, with Kasparov as the nebbish John Henry, except the locomotive in this version drives over him. Pundits were equally disturbed and triumphant; the iconic American company IBM had bested a Russian chess master less than a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, and yet it also heralded that mankind’s unique genius was being supplanted by the computers programed by that same corporation. Reflecting on his loss to Deep Blue some twenty years later in his book Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity, and Kasparov notes that by 2017 “you can download any number of free chess apps for your phone that rival any human Grandmaster. You can easily imagine a robot in my place… circling inside the tables and defeating thirty-two of the world’s best human players at the same time.” In just two decades, Deep Blue’s vanquishing of Kasparov had become almost unimpressive. The difference was due to something called Moore’s Law, and for an assortment of Silicon Valley prophets who could variously be called techno-utopians or Transhumanists, it signaled either apocalypse, millennium, or both.
The earliest computer in any modern sense of the world goes back almost two hundred years to 1833, mathematician Charles Babbage’s “Analytical Engine,” a mechanical contraption that calculated by using punch cards, and which set the basic template for such technology well into the twentieth-century. The first analog computer which was powered by electricity was a device used on a U.S. Navy Submarine as early as 1938, and yet throughout the duration of World War II the word “computer” was defined as a person who literally “computes” numbers together (a task that in government laboratories was often given to teams of young women). During the war, the British operated a computer laboratory at Bletchley Park, the site of the famed ENIGMA Machine designed by Alan Turing, father of contemporary computer science, which was instrumental in cracking German military codes. The Cold War necessitated massive government and corporate funding of computer technology which directly led to the cybernetic revolution, and the development of devices as distant from Babbage’s machine as a space ship is from a kite. Many of these contraptions were massive, the U.S. Government’s ENIAC machine, or the Electronic Numeric Integrator and Computer as designed by mathematician John von Neumann in 1945, took up several floors of an office building on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. It’s computational abilities were infinitesimally less than those of an average cellphone today, a testament to the significance of semiconductors, transistors, and integrated circuits, all perfected within a few decades after the war. Gordon Moore, the director of research at Fairchild Semiconductors, wrote about general trends in computing technology for Electronics magazine in 1965, defining his titular law by explaining that “complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year… this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase.”
Moore’s Law is not an inviolate dictate of the universe, it is merely the observation of a trend, and yet its discoverer has yet to be proven wrong. The implications of Moore’s article were that computers would continue to get smaller and more powerful at an increasing rate, as has been born out from that first claim in 1965. The implications have been staggering, not just technologically, but economically, socially, politically, and culturally as well. From the age of ENIAC to that of the iPhone, and the cybernetic revolution has seen the invention of personal computers, the proliferation of the internet and all of its attendant alterations to everyday life, the rise of smart phones, social media, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. Deep Blue is now primitive in comparison to deep fakes and deep machine learning, when programs like Generative Pre-Trained Transformers are able to produce text that reads like it was written by a human, or where the application Dall-E can manufacture in a matter of seconds visual images that look as if they were painted by a person. An exponential improvement in technological advancement that has happened so rapidly that most adults living today can chart these tremendous changes in the course of our own lives, over a mere few years. Following the upward chart graphed by an application of Moore’s Law, and it’s been argued among a minority of computer scientists, though an influential minority, that we’re decades away from a moment in which our computer systems become so advanced that we’re no longer capable of understanding them ourselves; that artificial intelligence will have ascended through its own efforts to a transcendent level of comprehension, at which point humanity itself will be functionally obsolete. For the faithful who believe in this messianic “Technological Singularity,” as it is known, the question becomes whether the new digital gods of silicon will be benevolent to their creators or not. Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, in his book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (blurbed by Bill Gates) asks if the “internet might one day ‘wake up’? Could the internet become something more than just the backbone of a loosely integrated collective superintelligence – something more like a virtual skull housing an emerging unified super-intellect?” Exploring both the benefits and dangers of this computerized deity, and Bostrom predicts that around the year 2040 we will have reached the technological Singularity, forever changing what it means to be human, to be conscious.
For believers in a coming technological Singularity, whether it bodes an apocalyptic overthrow of humanity by our silicon slaves, or the arrival of a millennial moment in which our machines surpass our intelligence and they usher in a new dispensation in consciousness, the Kasparov defeat still stands as a testament to the coming shift. In that that was the first moment that human genius could be shown to be limited, to be potentially obsolete, when compared to the algorithms and programs which structure our machines, Deep Blue announced itself as a prophet for the Singularity. What might the Singularity be like? Proponents have claimed that with its seemingly infinite calculating power, an artificial intelligence that’s virtually omnipotent would be able to simulate realities within its mind, that it could bode a form of digital immortality for all of us, as our consciousness are downloaded as software, perhaps even the simulation and thus resurrection of the dead. Engineer and futurist Ray Kurzweil, one of the most prominent evangelists for the Singularity, writes in Transcendent Man that the coming decades bode an artificial intelligence generated virtual reality that “will have all of the features of real reality plus a lot more that you can choose from millions of virtual environments.” In this brave new world, you can be “someone else, you don’t have to pick the same boring body every time; you can be different people and different situations and over time our biological bodies will become obsolete.” Kurzweil has even claimed to interviewers that he believes the Singularity will not just preserve and expand human consciousness in the form of software, but that it will be able to recreate the dead, such as his own father, whom he told an ABC interviewer in 2011 that this simulation will be “more like my father than my father would be, were he to live.”
Those who adhere to this faith in the Singularity maintain that we are approaching an eschaton that will see the expansion of consciousness, the resurrection of the dead, and the triumph of the living spirit over dead matter (or at least the triumph of our minds as software). Resonances to Christian eschatology couldn’t be clearer, even while the vast majority of such techno-utopians maintain that their metaphysics are strictly materialist and their epistemology totally scientific. Hans Moravec, a computer scientist and researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as another prominent advocate for the existence of the future Singularity, maintains that “we are most likely to find ourselves reconstituted in the minds of superintelligent successors, or perhaps in dreamlike worlds (or AI programs) where psychological rather than physical rules dominate,” as he argued in a 1998 paper entitled “Simulation, Consciousness, Existence” which was uploaded to CMU’s Field Robotics Center’s website. Asked by journalist Ed Regis, who interviewed Moravec for his account Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over the Edge what the difference was between his own beliefs and those of his wife who was a born again Christian, and Moravec confessed the similarities. Regis writes that both Moravec and his wife “were really, at bottom, interested in the same thing, which is to say, true immortality, life everlasting in the form of pure consciousness.” In lieu of the Day of Judgement there would instead be the Singularity, but ironically the result would be strangely indistinguishable. Singularitarianism is strongly related to other attendant movements which believe that the future will see an inevitable super-human emergence, such as the aforementioned transhumanists. That grouping of thinkers, which arguably includes figures like Bostrom, Kurzweil, and Moravec, claim that any number of technologies are just on the horizon, from cryonics to the “downloading” of minds, but the result will be a type of simulated paradise which shall be constructed by our machines themselves. This shift is what Kurzweil in The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence describes as a “spiritual process that will make us more godlike.”
Journalist Meaghen O’Gieblyn, who was raised as an evangelical Christian but has since left the faith, notices the clear parallels, writing in God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning, describing Kurzweil’s writing as being like “all classic works of revelation… unfolded with the kind of elegant simplicity that is easily mistaken for truth.” She compares the diagrams in The Age of Spiritual Machines to the premillennial dispensationalist charts examined by her fellow seminarians when she was the Moody Bible Institute, seeing Kurzweil’s belief that in “Each era we were moving closer and closer to this point of culmination, when intelligence would merge with the universe and we would become divine” as a secularized eschatology. That belief in the Singularity strains scientific credulity, despite the protestations of its enthusiasts, and that it so clearly mirrors Abrahamic beliefs about the end of time, is of no accounting to most of its proponents who claim the utmost rationalism. Arguably such Silicon Valley fervency is its own variety of American Great Awakening, perhaps not so different from those revivals of the past. Singulatarianism would seem a fringe belief, except it’s been promoted by a number of influential figures. Bostrom, Kurzweil, and Moravec are all well-published scholars at respected institutions. Despite its anodyne name, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkely, founded by computer scientist Eliezer Yudkowsky and funded with Silicon Valley endowments, is explicitly tied to work related to the Singularity. Business magnates like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have, to varying degrees and with some predictable inconsistency, have promoted theories that could be broadly considered techno-utopian. Regardless of how bizarre or unlikely the Singularity would seem to most, belief in the Singularity has proven to be hugely influential, at least because of who happens to believe in it.
Longtermism is a particular iteration of techno-utopian faith, ostensibly born from utilitarian social philosophies that go back to the eighteenth-century but smoothed over by the greater knowledge of our own era, but that can’t help but show evidence of its own origins in a variety of religious faith. Associated with the Scottish philosopher William MacAskill, Longtermism emerged from a variety of staid, ethically scrupulous utilitarianism which demanded, among other things, that people donate as much of their surplus income as possible to alleviate the suffering of other people. For thinkers like MacAskill, capitalism could be a useful tool for acquiring surplus profit and using it to improve the greatest possible number of lives, such as by buying mosquito nets for communities in developing countries to help prevent malaria, or funding vaccination efforts in impoverished nations. Followers of MacAskill argued that jobs which promised the largest salaries – careers in finance or technology – could be used to acquire the wealth that would then be distributed to improve the greatest number of lives. MacAskill argues in Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference that “innovators only collect 2 percent of the value they generate; that is, for every dollar an innovative company makes in profit, society has benefitted by fifty dollars. By becoming an innovative entrepreneur, you are, on average, producing benefits to society that far exceed your paycheck,” an assertion that was bound to flatter those who work at Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.
Unsparing, unsentimental, and committed to their own version of a rigorous rationality, and utilitarians like MacAskill understandphilanthropy not as a sentimental exercise, but a logical one. In his 2022 book What We Owe the Future, MacAskill’s utilitarianism is pushed to its final logical conclusion, arguing that the principle that that which is good is anything which increases happiness for the greatest number of people must also be extended to future generations of those not yet born. Combined with Singulatarianism, and Longtermism developed a new logic, whereby the primary good is to ensure the coming of the digital eschaton. Gone are the mosquito nets, in comes the robot millennium. Bostrom has argued that those living in the present day have a moral duty to ensure our survival because trillions of future digital souls depend on us, who are worth infinitely less than these silicon angels. Such rapturous sentiments are expressed by MacAskill in What We Owe the Future, of “ecstasy so great that I would have sacrificed all the rest of my life for a few hours of this joy.” Longtermism, as detailed by Emile P. Torres in Salon, has grown out of the Effective Altruism community which has an endowment of 46 billion dollars, regardless of how marginal their beliefs may be among the wider public.
The theology of Silicon Valley is strongly connected to the politics of Silicon Valley. Religious enthusiasms as mediated through politics – the American sectarianism of today – was inevitably shaped by the spectacular technological success of the second-half of the twentieth-century. Enthusiasts for the life-improving potential of technology during the halcyon days of the early cybernetic revolution often expressed political commitments that were strongly counter-cultural, if not in some sense anarchic. Centered in 1960s California, and absorbing much of the same Aquarian tendencies of other subcultures during that time and place. Stewart Brand, the hippy publisher of the alternative lifestyles magazine The Whole Earth Catalogue, yet he also influenced the early technicians of the personal computer revolution, like Apple founder Steve Jobs. Much of hacker culture, with its “Do It Yourself” politics of self-sufficiency, saw in the potential of technology not the surveillance capitalism which would ultimately grow from it but rather an alternative history which saw in computers the possibility of a type of personal emancipation, a means to assault entrenched status quos that rather became a status quo in and of itself. Brand should be understood as a figure of the ‘60s Left; an associate of the psychedelic advocate and inventor of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Ken Kesey as well as a fellow travel to countercultural groups like the Merry Pranksters, friend to the Grateful Dead and special advisor to California governor Jerry Brown, who believed that computers signaled a “realm of intimate, personal power… power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested,” a utopian description of the World Wide Web’s possibilities written in The Whole Earth Catalogue more than three decades before the internet became omnipresent. In the prologue to the first issue of that publication, Brand enthused “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” and so the same split between democratic and elitist impulses that can be seen as Spiritualism transitioned into Theosophy was already evident in the techno-utopian faith of Silicon Valley. The desire for apotheosis couldn’t help but have an aristocratic tendency, and Brand’s computer enthusiasms, no matter how much they were channeled in the cause of a type of political liberation, inevitably also enshrined a certain cult of the individuality. The result is that the counter-cultural politics of the early computer revolution would be supplanted by a different faith, a type of libertarian neo-liberalism that if no more rational would ultimately prove to be far more destructive.
That wealthy tech-executives would embrace a politics that rejects regulation and eschews governmental intervention isn’t surprising, for that tends to be true of all executives, regardless of industry. Yet the counter-cultural individualism of a Brand also exists in entirely more revanchist permutations as well, none more so than among the partisans of what’s called the Dark Enlightenment. An inchoate philosophical movement associated with the English theorist Nick Land and the American blogger Curtis Yarvin who wrote under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, and the movement promotes what’s sometimes termed “Neo-Reaction,” an anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-feminist, and anti-egalitarian ideology that at best engages in a sentimental monarchism and worse prefigures a type of internet-inflected fascism. True to the name of the movement, those who identify as being among the Dark Enlightenment see the eighteenth-century as a nadir in human thought, and rather preferring to see a society, politics, and culture arise that reinscribes aristocratic hierarchies. Yarvin, in particular, advocates for a “techno-monarchy,” arguing that the computer programmers and their algorithms should be atop a rigid hierarchy rather than what they see is an ill-defined sentiment for “The People.” Having made his own money from computer programing, and Yarvin was attracted to the extreme libertarianism of economists like Moses Rothbard and Ludwig von Mieses, ultimately concluding that the natural superiority of certain exemplary men was hampered by a nexus of influences he gave the notably religious name of “The Cathedral.” This was a union of government, media, and education that Yarvin claims constrains the truly exceptional, and that in throwing off democracy these exhulted men could ascend to their proper place in the hierarchy. On a blog that often countenanced slavery, engaged in abject racism, and denounced democracy, Yarvin writing as Moldbug would eulogize Steve Jobs by writing “And yet – there is a God in this World… In everything…. The real work of a real King… who served God, or right at least, could bend small armies to obey… So near we are to salvation; so infinitely far away.”
In Land there is a similar dark millennial yearning, especially in his embrace of “accelerationism,” the belief that a vanguard must actively work to encourage societal chaos so that they can harness that disorder in the entire rebuilding of culture. Like Yarvin, Land has little regard for the Enlightenment and even less for democracy, advocating rather for a type of technologically-inflected fascism. As with the Singulatarians, Land sees the coming decades as promising the virtual abolishment of the humane in favor of the technological, albeit his gospel is of an entirely darker variety. Accelerationism promises a type of reverse millennialism, the rejection and abolishment of both progress and modernity in favor of a return to the properly hierarchical structure of society that was understood as the de facto means of organization prior to the widespread embrace of democratic ideals. “The current time is a period of transition,” writes Land in Time in Transition, “with a distinctive quality, characterizing the end of an epoch. Something – some age – is coming quite rapidly to an end.” Sharing with Marxists the dogma that the contradictions of the system irrevocably mean its ultimate demise, right-wing accelerationists such as Land think that our current culture is decadent and depraved, and doomed to collapse. Aphoristic, gnomic, and obscure, Land’s philosophy shrieks a certain prophetic nihilism, a reactionary fusion of millennialism and apocalypse which sees the destruction of the political and social order built over the past four centuries swept away by despots and strongmen, monarchs and dictators. Except this is an anti-modernity that will benefit from the advancements of modernity, an aristocracy of artificial intelligence and cyborgs, robots and computers. As Land writes in Meltdown, “Nothing human makes it out of the near future.”
Excerpted from The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse by Ed Simon, published by Fortress Press, ©2025 by Ed Simon. All Rights Reserved.
