Ghost in the Cloud

A former Bible-school student discovers, in the depths of losing her faith, that the transhumanist promise — minds uploaded, death defeated, a coming merge with the machine — is Christian eschatology wearing a lab coat. O'Gieblyn traces the genealogy directly: from medieval resurrection theology through Russian cosmism to Kurzweil's Singularity, and through her own correspondence with a transhumanist who turns out to believe he is doing Christian theology by technological means. What begins as cultural criticism becomes a memoir of how the hunger for transcendence survives the loss of the faith that shaped it.

Read it because the AI debate is full of prophecy that does not know it is prophecy. Written years before the current wave, it explains — better than anything since — why talk of digital immortality and machine gods sounds the way it sounds, and it gives anyone from a religious tradition a precise map of what is being borrowed. It is also simply a beautiful essay; of everything in this collection, the one most worth reading slowly.