Summary of Movement
Technological millenarianism refers to beliefs that technological innovations will bring a new golden age or alternatively the destruction of the human race. The use of ‘millenarianism’ here is in the looser sense of events that bring about a sudden change that is predicted to be either a perfecting of humanity, a millennium, or an apocalypse. Technological millenarianism is a secular framing, based not on beliefs of an imminent Second Coming of Jesus as ushering in the millennium but on the belief that new technology will bring about the same conditions of a perfected world as the Kingdom of Jesus for religious believers. The renewal will be physical and social, but also spiritual. It implies the same critique of current conditions as a more overtly Christian millenarianism, but offers technology as the way of solving these problems. Technology is interpreted as salvific, the answer to all human social and physical problems.
The full text of this article has been moved to CenSAMM's open access Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements.
It is available at: https://www.cdamm.org/articles/artificial-intelligence
