Hold a service at the TED Talk, etc. . . .
It might not be the same literal thing as a religion but transhumanist culture sure seems to be serving the same basic human needs.
Religion developed to cope with the unavoidable misery of human existence through a coordinated belief in an imaginary afterlife free of that misery.
Enlightenment, science and technology showed us that most of this misery could be alleviated by advancing our technologies and social structures, while also revealing the imaginary nature of ideas of an afterlife.
The tragic thing is that we might live in the worst time of all: religion is obsolete, yet the transformative changes possible through technology might very well stay out of reach during our lifetimes.
Maybe. Gobekli Tepe is turning out to be very surprising, and it's only 10% uncovered. There may be even more paradigm shifting things in that rubble. I'd treat your thesis as theory for now and wait to see what we'll dig up. Not saying you are wrong at all, but big things are afoot in religo-paleontology
The book went away in one of my periodic purges, or I'd check to see if he changed his dates.
2009 "Artificial voices sound fully human" seems a bit optimistic.
as does 2019 "Household robots are ubiquitous and reliable."
2009 "Though desktop PCs are still common for data storage, individuals primarily use portable devices for their computer-related tasks." sounds pretty realistic now.
So does 2019 "People experience 3-D virtual reality through glasses and contact lenses that beam images directly to their retinas (retinal display). Coupled with an auditory source (headphones), users can remotely communicate with other people and access the Internet." with the current progress of AR and VR (although it might be a few years late).
My point is, you've nitpicked this in a series of predictions which may or may not be true. Kurzweil's betting a lot on 2045 and AGI, and hoping that 2029 will help him reach that age. The rest is a mix of possibly true predictions that seem absurd, like the two I've pointed out.
I've been trying for years (and will continue trying) to switch my parents hope for an afterlife with a hope that cryo will work. There is definitely no afterlife, but cryo might eventually work. That's how I see most of these "living forever" positions. It's just a more intellectual hope to have, where you at least break reality into possible and impossible before choosing something to believe.
For the sake of argument, how do you definitely know this?