Via Alan Jacobs:

The anti-humanists insist AI is conscious. It is conscious now or will be soon. This is like offering a child a toy dog and telling him, repeatedly, the dog is real. Doesn’t it look like a dog? Can’t it bark if you press the button? The simulacra, for the anti-humanists, is always enough because they have experienced a form of spirit-death. Or they are unconsciously hoping, in time, to arrive there, to that stage. It takes a special kind of human—an unusual segment of the species—to long for the obsolescence of their own, to be so against their own. To resent, fully, flesh and blood and brain matter, the stunning complexities of human consciousness and all, in the past millennia, that has been achieved. To make art, humans have never required more than the basics of the machine world: a paintbrush, a chisel, a word-processor. The hierarchy has always been well understood. The machine is the tool of the human being to enhance the experience of being human. Tools are subordinate. Now, AI asks the human to be subordinate to the machine. Or, more accurately, AI asks nothing because it cannot “ask” anything. It is not alive. The anti-humanists make the ask. They’ve grown rich this way, and they’re rotted from within, like Dorian Gray. Except, unlike Dorian, they aren’t even very beautiful on the outside. They cannot entrance or seduce. They are, as a class, froggish and malformed, their mannerisms glitchy. They can’t willingly march us anywhere. They’ll have to do it by force.

Barkan doesn’t use the term, but he’s describing the essence of transhumanism, which—as the name implies—seeks to transcend the human. To desire that end absolutely requires a loathing of the human as a category, but also of the self: a mortification that believes itself to be entirely secular but, as David Noble noted, is entirely religious in its origins as well as its expressions.

Transhumanism has always been a religion absent a god.

(For newcomers or the forgetful: please don’t make the admittedly common error of conflating transhumanism with posthumanism, which are two entirely different answers to the same urgent question.)