ABSTRACT
Science fiction descriptions of the future can also describe what has been abandoned as human civilisation races towards a particular goal. In some imaginaries of the digital rapture of the artificial intelligence ‘Singularity’, humanity is presented as transcending the messy outcomes of millions of years of evolution and purifying itself: becoming free of bodies, irrationalities, prejudices, and superstitions. Religion, represented as one such vestigial ‘organ’ of humankind's newly purified self, remains in some science fictions in parody form to warn the contemporary reader of the dangers that they still face now. This chapter will use the example of the treatment of religion in Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross’ The Rapture of the Nerds (2013) as an introduction to the moral commentary inherent in the religion vs science tensions in such AI Singularity literature. Further, this chapter will discuss how the AI Singularity itself is an object of belief, as supported by the author's wider ethnographic research.
